World's Fastest Net Link 'Used To Dry Laundry'

praps writes "Last summer a 75-year-old woman from central Sweden became the envy of the IT world with her scorching 40Gbps internet connection. 1,500 simultaneous HDTV channels or a whole high definition DVD downloaded in two seconds were hers for the taking. Now Sigbritt Löthberg could soon be treated to an incredible 100 Gbps link — but it may not be put to great use. According to the head of the ultra-fast fiber connection project, Sigbritt mostly used the gear 'to dry her laundry.'"

Comments

Re:First Post ?

[Shakrai]

They are all like that on idle for some reason -- at least for me in FF

Also

[Sycraft-fu]

It has a couple other problems:

1) Can she even get that kind of speed? I mean yes, she's got a big ass link. Ok, that's great. Does her ISP have the necessary upstream to support that? It is much easier to have a single connection running at a given speed than it is to have connections at that speed supported by the necessary upstream to the Internet to make them useful.

2) Even if she does, that is way past the point of it mattering. There just isn't enough things out there that need that kind of bandwidth. You discover that at this point, even 10mbit is really damn fast for normal usage like web surfing (including video) e-mail and so on. It is only if you download large things that it becomes much of an issue. 100mbit is really fast for anything. At work I've downloaded a Linux DVD in like 7 minutes. Really, that is to the point where extra speed wouldn't make a ton of difference. In this case, we are talking speed in excess of what a harddrive can handle.

3) There just isn't much, if anything, on the net that is going to have the kind of upstream to make any real use of that. Even if you are doing a ton of things at one, you'll be hard pressed to find enough fat pipes to start to fill up a link that large. There are backbones that aren't that fast.

This whole thing was nothing but a publicity stunt, and this just proves it. Despite his claim that this showed how fast connections can be put in the home for cheap, it does nothing of the sort. It shows how it really isn't that useful at this point, and how the gear is so high end it produces enough heat to use as a dryer.

As Slashdot is fond of saying: Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Also

[element-o.p.]

You probably can't d/l from a single source at 40G/s, but you could pull pieces from multiple sources at a combined total of 40G/s (isn't that essentially what torrent does?) or you can d/l multiple items from multiple sources so that, while you aren't getting any one download any faster, you could get a days' worth of downloads in the time it usually takes to download one file.

Remove the 'idle'

[Eevee]

Using plain old //slashdot.org/ for the article got rid of the problem for me.

Binary math and disk speeds:

[Ridirich]

Just so we're clear... This is a Gb connection. Gb is is short for Gigabit, emphasis on the bit. Software and hardware are measured in bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte and honestly I think ISPs put the bit rates in instead of the byte rates to confuse the average customer. Currently we have 4 types of drives: IDE/ATA, SATA, SCSI and Solid State. Their standard transfer rates are as follows: IDE/ATA: 133 MBps SATA: 300 MBps SCSI: 320 MBps SSD: 12.5 MBps Now, this connection was 40 Gbps. The actual speed is 5GBps. With those numbers you can see the transfer speeds are too slow for the hard drives to keep up with the faster internet connection. Max speed (given that a person has a SCSI raid) is 320 MBps or 2.5 Gbps, OC-48 is about as close as it gets.