Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Am I the only one for whom this page's style sheet has comitted suicide ?
I was introduced to the guy whose mother this lady is at IETF in Chicago. Working for a networking hardware vendor kinda gives perks.
Anyway, even if the bandwidth is free I wouldn't call it cheap - the CPE device takes (I think) 3kW of power. So yeah, you can dry clothes on it quite easily..
Who cares about hard drives, when you can outsource them?
"It was a big bit of gear and it got pretty warm."
doing what... nothing?
can you imagine what would happen to the overall internet speed if any of us had a 40gb connection? talk about slashdot effect...
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Obligatory Homer Simpson quote (modified): "7 minutes? But I want it now!"
Though out of all seriousness, I think there'd be a Field of Dreams situation if everyone had a pipe like that. If we all had that speed, someone would make content to fill it. Might not just be an internet data line. Might be digital TV data, phone data, etc, etc. In fact, that's what the summary states, she has the capability for (not necessarily the need for nor is actually using) tons of HD channels with a line that fast.
You can do more with a connection like that than just internet stuff, is what I'm saying.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Having a 40Gbps connection is just dandy, but here's a question that's going completely unanswered:
She's surfing this on what kind of PC?
Last time I checked, your typical PC doesn't come with a 40Gbps NIC in it. It's usually GigE, with 10/100 for the cheap ones. Nevermind that most folks can't afford GigE switches to plug into in the first place, which means most folks are using 10/100 anyway.
40Gbps NIC's can't exactly be cheap since they're only found in the high-end server space. In fact, I couldn't find pricing on a separate 40Gbps NIC in a quick and casual Google search. The only 40Gbps stuff I've run into is either on the switch itself or came with the server. I have a funny feeling that, if you can actually buy one of these things separately, it would cost several times more than any PC this lady is likely to own.
Next, even if you get one of these NIC's, what exactly are you going to plug it into? The craziest PCI-X slot available (2.0, 533MHz) tops out at 4.3GByte/sec, which is 34.4Gbit/sec -- too slow! PCI-E 2.0 32x (not that you'll find this kind of connector on anything common, if you can find it at all) maxes out at 16GByte/sec, which is 128Gbit/sec -- fast enough, but again I don't think anyone makes anything with this kind of a connector yet. Your more-common PCI-E 1.1e 16x connector tops out at 4GByte/sec, or 32GBit/sec -- too slow for 40Gbps feeds.
And then there's the issue of actually saving this wonderful content she's so busily downloading. Saving a full-length DVD-9 (9GB) in two seconds would require a bandwidth of 4.5GByte/sec. Most hard drives today have a max sustained write speed of 20-30MByte/sec. Some SAN's have a hard time with the bandwidth being tossed around here. Does grandma have an EMC array in the basement next to this magical fiber link?
Lastly, exactly who is grandma doing to download stuff from that can actually provide her 40Gbps of bandwidth? Most small companies have DS-1's. Medium-sized folks have multiple DS-1's, fractional DS-3's, or full DS-3's. Your larger organizations have OC-3's and OC-12's, but it starts to get really, really rarefied if you go up above that. Suffice to say, unless grandma is getting stuff from the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, or Akamai, she's not going to be able to actually keep that 40Gbps pipe busy.
Now, a good bit of the above takes a sarcastic tone, but there's a lesson in it: you're only as fast as the slowest part of the chain. There's a helluva lot of work that needs to be done on the entire information interchange infrastructure -- from the server to the PC and everything in between -- before stuff like this even begins to make sense for the average Joe. Data centers? Sure. Home 40Gbps? Not so useful.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But when you can download the whole distro in seven seconds, then you can start seeing a return to dumb terminals in public places, as everyone can boot off their own hard drive over the internet.
This preview window is horribly laid out, and I cannot continue my point.
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