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World's Fastest Broadband Connection — 40 Gbps
paulraps writes "A 75-year-old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been given a scorching 40 Gbps internet connection — the fastest residential connection anywhere in the world. Sigbritt Löthberg is the mother of Swedish internet guru Peter Löthberg, who is using his mother to prove that fiber networks can deliver a cost-effective, ultra-fast connection. Sigbritt, who has never owned a computer before, can now watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously or download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds. Apparently 'the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC.'" An article in Press Esc notes an analyst study of the increasing demand for fiber-to-the-home in Europe.
Oh, she will, will she? And this content comes from where, exactly?
That's what I thought.
She is able to "enjoy" nothing on her connection except the same internet to which we all have access. Sure, you can argue that as such bandwidth penetration becomes commonplace, services will be built to support it - like HD movie downloads or live HD IPTV. But as of now, this is nothing more than a technology demonstration, even though the article lamely begs to differ ("This is more than just a demonstration," said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson.")
"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson.
Doubtful. (Why even say this? To impress upon people that a high bandwidth connection isn't "hard" to use? Wouldn't the new computer she ostensibly got, since, as the article notes, she's never owned a computer in her life, have come with Windows installed?[1])
The secret behind Sigbritt's ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.
Great, now all we need is fibre going to every home on earth, and the problem is solved!! Why look at wireless when we've got fibre?
...
I understand the point they're trying to make: that a high speed connection that enables the kinds of things such bandwidth allows is technically feasible to a home. But the problem is the same one we've always had - namely, the "last mile" - and this does nothing to solve that in the least.
"I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has," said Peter Löthberg, who now works at Cisco.
Is it any surprise that Cisco is dismissing "radio" as "old fashioned" (nice choice of calling it "radio" instead of "wireless"), when high-bandwidth wireless technologies like WiMAX and UMTS Rev 8 are at least an option worth considering as a solution to the "last mile" problem?
Overall, a great PR stunt.
4.5/5 (points deducted for lying about needing to install Windows on a newly purchased PC[1])
[1] For the real contrarians among us, yes, I'm well aware that systems can be built and purchased without Windows. But if the goal was to get a computer that will ultimately be running Windows, and a corporate giant like Cisco is buying it, it would have been purchased without Windows why, again? Exactly.
Are there any servers that are able to stream 1500 HDTV channels simultaneously?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"RIAA arrests 75 year old woman in sweden for file-sharing over her 40GBPS connection. Damages are estimated in the billions."
Screw the botnets... I think the spammers just found their next zombie target!
Talk about taking a drink from a firehose... How's her NIC keep up with that throughput? How's her hard drive? Her CPU?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It isn't just Shirley Bassey who thinks history is repeating, I do too. When the first canals were built in the 18th century that connected the centre of Manchester with the local coal mines, the price of coal fell by half. It wasn't just coal, suddenly the cotton from the New World could be transported from Liverpool to Manchester in a matter of days - not in the weeks of yester-year.
This lead to a collapse in price of a whole range of minerals and materials. It is not an exaggeration to say that the humble cannal was the back-bone of the Industrial Revolution. It supplied cheap materials, power in the form of water wheels, and allowed production of a product to move far away from sea, yet still have global reach at the same time.
Parallels with the Internet can obviously be drawn. Rather than aiding the movement of physical commodities, the Internet aids the movement of intellectual commodities. It completes what the Industrial Revolution started. Now production of information is not tied to any location. It can be forged anywhere and transported to anywhere in a fraction of a second.
Forget Web 2.0, AJAX or Silverlight. In a century these words will only be known by Internet Historians, who will still have no better clue that us what web 2.0 actually means ;). What will be taught in the class-room about the early Internet is how it allowed the production of value to be independent of the physical location of a business.
Simon
download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds
Assuming she has a massive drive array to record that amount of info in two seconds. I know the statement is just to illustrate the bandwidth but the nerd in me had to point out the infeasibility of it. Preposterous!
I'll go now.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Once she's downloaded every season of "Murder, She Wrote", will she ever use the connection again?
This really doesn't do anything to demonstrate that fast broadband can be cost effective. Even if this single demo shows that the cost of getting it to the consumer is cheap (and it probably is reasonable, Verizion is rolling out fibre to the home) that's only half the problem. Whatever amount of bandwidth you want to offer to end users, you have to have more for your upstream to your office, and more still out to the Internet, at least if you want it to mean anything. If not, you are just putting them on a fast WAN. That's great, but not the same thing as fast broadband.
I mean in a very real way, my computer has a gigabit Internet connection. That's what it is linked at, and there's other devices it can talk to at that speed... But only very few. If it wants anything past its immediate network, it is limited to 10mbits, since that's the speed of the Internet connection. Now while my net connection really has the upstream to support that, imagine if it didn't. Suppose that the provider only had 1mbit of upstream, and it was shared among a bunch of users. Essentially my "10mbit broadband" would be useless unless I happened to be talking to someone else on their system.
In fact I've encountered broadband that is like this. I'll be transferring data to someone that claims to have 10mbit VDSL. I've no doubt they do, but their ISP lacks the bandwidth to back it up. So despite the fact that I'm at work sitting on multiple OC-3c lines and I've verified they aren't slammed, and they allegedly have a "10mbit" connection, we are getting rates more around ISDN because their ISP's upstream is slammed.
That's the "elephant in the closet" so to speak, of Internet access. I see plenty of people who tout fibre to the home and all these great technologies for lots of bandwidth on the last mile run. That's great and all, but really that's half or less of the problem. It doesn't do you any good to get a fast line to your house if there aren't even faster lines at every stage of upstream. That is not cheap, unfortunately. If you wanted to offer 40gbps to the home, I'd imagine you'd need trunks in the multi-terabit capacity going from your concentration point back to the home office and god only knows what as an actual Internet connection, at least if you wanted people to reliably be able to get a good portion of that 40gbps.
is her ISP supplying her with 40 GB of bandwidth?
Proof of concept.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
Anyone have her phone number? I hear she has a wonderful personality and huge "assets". I have no shame when it comes to that kind of bandwidth.
Or maybe I can just live in her basement, a change of scenery would do me good. Besides Mom is always nagging at me to get out of the basement and go see the world.
I only have access to 56k. Tho, that will be changing soon with the fiber coming thru this summer -- 40 bucks a month for 3Mb/s. It's insane that the United States is this far off the ball.
40 Gbps? Wow, sign me up for this!
Meh, on second thought it doesn't sound worth the effort.
is what kind of ethernet card does the system have.
True story: a guy says, "I got a 100MB connection into my office but it's slow." Go to his office test his desktop. Yup slow. (1.5mb or so) Eventually test all the way back to the adapter. Holy smoke! 100MB at the adapter.
Two problems:
1. Turns out he bought the "top of the line" Netgear switch at Best Buy.
2. Win32 NIC is configured to auto, which apparently chose the slowest possible speed.
Today's Lesson: Windows and vanilla hardware are their own impediments to fast networks.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Of course if she's anything like my 71 year-old Mom it would mean she could fall asleep in from of 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously.
Can someone do the math on this? Even if there were 1500 HDTV feeds, is it possible to stream them all to this lady simultaneously with a 40Gbps connection? What about the 36GB HD DVD download? 2 seconds??
When the first canals were built in the 18th century that connected the centre of Manchester with the local coal mines, the price of coal fell by half. It wasn't just coal, suddenly the cotton from the New World could be transported from Liverpool to Manchester in a matter of days - not in the weeks of yester-year.
*Long, typical blogger-eze pie-in-the-sky rant snipped*
I don't see any validity in your comparison; the article is about last-mile connectivity, and you're talking about..end-to-end delivery paths. The internet is nothing like a dedicated canal; it's a public road system.
As such, the better comparison would be as if said grandmother got a 3-lane driveway from her garage to the local street, and she's got a bicycle in the garage and bad knees. The slowest bottlenecks are the rest of the internet and her home computer; PCI busses can't push data any faster than about 200-300MB/sec, which is what, 2-3GB? Most datacenters offer 10mbit-all-you-can-eat or 100mbit billed-by-the-bit. Sure, there's faster- but it's megabucks, the stuff only major corporations can afford.
This Silicon Snake Oil. Read Cliff Stoll's book by the same title.
Please help metamoderate.
A Windows box with a 40 gps sec connection? Great, so now 1,000 different email worms and other forms of malware on Grandma's PC have a huge pipe. I'm sure this story will end well.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Yeah, but she only gets 20 Gb/s upload speed. Damn ISP's and their fancy marketing lingo.
She's been waiting 75 years for a connection fast enough.
RTFA!
They were testing a new modulation techniques that make it cheaper. SO you won't need money to burn to get it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's some photos on Peter Lothberg's site that might be his mom playing with her new connection.
There are actually some uses of this connection that none of you are considering. Everyone sees the obvious "Watch TV, download movies," BUT does anyone here notice the potential for application developers? Currently a lot of us developers have moved to using the Internet for our applications, because it solves a lot of our deployment problems. However, the downside of Internet applications is that their performance is far inferior to that of desktop applications (both graphically and otherwise). We are currently hamstrung by our inability to quickly send information to a users PC. We end up using almost all our bandwidth to send down data, with a small amount to prettify the page a little, but this sort of bandwidth could allow us to run beautiful, full featured applications remotely, thus avoiding the distribution problems of standalone apps AND avoiding the current throttling problems Internet apps have currently.
Look at it this way... connection speeds like that would be for all intents and purposes just as fast as a hard drive is today, and you could treat them as such. Currently, when a computer runs an app, it pulls data/program off slow hard drive, puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. In the future, computer pulls data/program off network (at speeds as good as a hard drive), puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. The possibilities are amazing!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I returned a consumer-grade Netgear gigabit switch and replaced it with a D-Link switch a few weeks ago because the Netgear switch was showing about 85% packet loss at 100 mbps speeds. Sadly, in my experience, Netgear just doesn't build them like they used to. Oh, and then there was the Netgear ethernet card that wouldn't start talking to the network if you disconnected and reconnected the cable. You had to shut the interface down and bring it back up. After a couple of years like that, it started dropping off the network on its own, and I tossed it and bought a D-Link card.
Considering what a small amount of networking gear I own, after getting burned twice by Netgear's crap, I've pretty much sworn off their products. They're now in my "don't buy" list alongside Linksys (whose switches wouldn't consistently talk to other switches upstream at my previous employer). I'd better stop swearing off networking product manufacturers pretty soon or I'm going to run out. :-)
Don't get me wrong.... D-Link is no picnic, either, but at least their hardware is solid. Had to rewrite the property list file to get their Mac OS X driver to load in 10.4, though. It shipped with an old disk and there wasn't a newer version of the software on their website as far as I could find. I wrote them and asked them to fix it. Not sure if they ever did... *sigh* ...but at least their hardware is solid. *grumbles*
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...she says the Microsoft Internet is down again even with that forty jiggle-bite thingy you installed.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
This reminds me of when napster first came out and college connections weren't swamped with p2p and also weren't restricting anything.
I had friends that didn't keep any music they downloaded. If they wanted to listen to something, they would queue it up, hit play, and when they were done with it, delete the file. Napster downloaded things in-order, so you could start listening before it had finished.
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
I would lobby for 40gbps connections for everyone, and wifi based internet to reach even the remotest parts of the sticks. There would never be another CD, DVD or HD DVD put to press, EVER. You'd come to me for access rights to all music and all movies, and I'd charge by the minute.
I'd be CEO of Planet Earth in 5 years.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!