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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."
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
Once she's downloaded every season of "Murder, She Wrote", will she ever use the connection again?
And he secretly forged a master connection.
One connection to rule them all... and in the darkness bind them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The reason bandwidth is "billed-by-the-bit", as you put it, is because it is scarce.
The reason you think huge bandwidth to the home is unfeasible is because you're stuck in the capitalist mentality, the very monster that spawned the MAFIAA and the current US political environment. Plentiful, cheap anything is bad for business, so business steps in and makes sure that cheap thing never materializes. Bandwidth is no exception to this rule.
The telecoms have already laid thousands of miles of wires to handle phone and cable TV to every urban household. I don't see why they couldn't do it again for fiber. The reason they don't want to is because having a hyperfast digital line would make the old stuff obsolete. Why pay a separate bill for phone and cable when you can run the same data over the lone fiber line ? The telecoms are already fighting consumers over VOIP and IPTV-style streams, because they represent a direct threat to their bottom line.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.