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German Cable ISP First To Deliver 4700Mbps Internet Connection
Mark.JUK writes "It's enough to make grown IT workers cry. German cable operator Kabel Deutschland claims to have become the first provider to successfully achieve a real-world internet connection speed of 4700Mbps (Megabits per second) after they hooked up to a local school's test account in the city of Schwerin. The ISP, which usually delivers more modest speeds of up to 100Mbps to home subscribers, used its upgraded 862MHz network, channel bonding, and the EuroDocsis 3.0 standard to achieve the stated performance. But don't expect to get this kind of speed tomorrow; right now there's no demand for it among home users, and you probably couldn't afford the bandwidth anyway." ("No demand at its current price," at least.)
Not the first:
A 75 year old woman was first.
They used 12 modems and thus 12 seperate channels which means in reality, they only transmitted about 400mbit per "subscriber" (cable).
While this is nifty, Kabel Deutschland subscribers' bandwith is often shared, which means at peak time you don't even get 30 of the promised 100mbit. In addition to that, they slow you down after a 10gb quota/day. And in addition to that, they often throttle certain protocols, namely torrent.
This is one of the worst ISP in Germany who just made a totally useless world record.
It brings a tear to my eye to see the "modest" and "100Mbit" used in the same sentence. Yes, I realize that compared to 4700Mbit it is but I just got upgraded to 5Mbit so I still think you're insensitive clods!
And yeah, I'm sure I could find a use for 4700Mbit.
I have a 200Mbps connection at home, and for now it's fine for, well, everything. But it's really hard to tell what kind of speeds will be useful in the future. Let's imagine a virtual tailor service... Assume that you could go online, image yourself with a high res 3D webcam, and order custom clothes, complete with a virtual mirror to try them on. I'm guessing my 200Mbps connection would fall short at that point.
This is the kind of chicken and egg problem we have with broadband right now. The next generation of online services can't be profitable because the infrastructure isn't there, and at the same time there is "no demand" for really high speed connections, since there are no services that need them.
But at least one can stay positive and hope for cool sci-fi tech, right? ;)
.: Max Romantschuk
What's the point if all they are going to do is cap your usage.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
4700 Mbit/s = 4.7 Gbit/s, how's that a record? The Gathering here in Norway had a 200 Gbit/s Internet Connection, topping Dreamhack in Sweden's 120 Gbit/s. Maybe it's some silly 4.7 Gbit over cable, but that's like the wold's fastest subcompact. And for all of us that have fiber to the home, yeah we know it's just what equipment you put on both ends. The cable itself could probably pull 100 Gbit/s with the right equipment.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
He fixes the cable?
Hell I'd be happy with 100Mbps. I'm in on e of the better connected cities in the US and I can only affordably get 12/6 ADSL. I could get 20/10, DOCIS but the cable company is known to be not good (Comcast).
What I want shouldn't be hard to do:
no BW caps, 20/20, metered usage on bulk BW rates. My Colo ISP provides this to me, and I pay $0.04/TB of BW. For residential I'd happily pay 25% more... Hell I'd be willing to bay several times that more, say $1.00/TB. Now, to be fair I also pay for a peering point at my ISP which would be analogous to a service subscription at a home internet account, I pay $25/mo for that. Why can't residential ISPs catch up with the DCs?
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Well being that most consumer/business workstations only have gigabit network adapters. 4700Mbs is more then we can handle. Unless you have some expensive routers/switches that will give network connection to say 100 system (for normal internet use) (5 high end servers that are taking a huge load)
Most professional networks that take an average business load have a Gigabit router, and they are hosting a heck a lot of data off that router.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Here in the 3rd world (UK) I'm currently getting about 1-2 Mb/s. I live close to Canary Wharf but somehow, the infrastructure is stuck in the past century.
Meanwhile, I can get a much better bandwidth in my house in Zambia. And if I have problems with the ISP in Zambia, I can just switch to 4G, which is publicly available at a humane price.
In contrast, in the UK, they haven't even rolled out 4 G.
I'm stunned by how much a country like the UK lags in infrastructure - truly pathetic.
I'd like to see 10Mbps at my house, to be honest. Charter makes all kinds of claims but we had to give them up due to down-time and horrible network performance. So we're stuck with Verizon DSL, which is at best 3Mbps. 100Mbps, I dunno what I'd DO with that bandwidth. Well, I guess I'd find something.
Meh.
I am currently with Shaw Cable in Canada and have a 250 Mbps connection with 1TB of download cap per month for $110 CAD.
Prices here in Norway:
Uncapped 5 Mbps ADSL: Around $50
Uncapped 60/60 fiber: Around $90
Okay quite a bit more than you're paying but Norway is in general an extremely expensive country overall, an average full time salary is $75k so by our standards it's cheap. And I once downloaded a 500GB torrent, it really is uncapped. And this country has a population density of 13/km^2 as opposed to India with 368/km^2, delivering broadband there should be much much cheaper. I honestly wouldn't worry it seems mostly like a US problem, all of Europe is constantly upgrading. For example here's from an article I recently read on Britain:
BT said that 7 million premises are now on its fibre network, and this year that number will grow to 10 million. The ultimate target is two-thirds of the UK by the end of 2014.
Oh and they'll also triple top speed from 100 Mbps to 300 Mbps. Any new apartment block or any new housing field is wired with fiber and it's being retrofitted to a lot of old housing too. It's not a question of whether it's the future, but how long it'll take.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When I first got a 10Mbps connection I couldn't use it to the max because my old computer couldn't handle it
Must have been really old. Not only can I peg my 100Mb internet connection with little effort of Steam/Blizzard/Cloud/etc, but I can easily peg my 1Gb ethernet by grabbing a single file to SMB copy on my 5 y/o computer.
I will tell you from my time working in a company that designed Ethernet PHYs and MACs, that most high end desktops and consumer gear can only maintain a 1Gpbs link, but can accommodate no where near that much BW. The best PCs can only sustain ~500Mbps throughput. Most on-board LAN and sub $100 PCIe LAN cards fall closer to 200Mbps. This is because they do not support DMA and are using Polled IO and the host OS for the LAN stack, much like the old winmodems did.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
With that type of connection, data should go straight to memory without hard disk buffering for may types of hard disk drives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Comparison_to_other_interfaces
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Look at the bright side - the US FCC chief wants to charge users by usage with no throttling and no cap, so if, for instance, your kid downloads 100GB of data, you may be paying a variable rate of, say $1000. Making internet access into something like a 2 dollar a minute 1-900 number terrifies me more than bandwidth caps.
Most sites will throttle data to a single user anyway.
It is useful for torrents and other aggregated downloads, but not from a single site usage.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
My SSD can write at 1400MB/s, so I'm all set. Where do I sign up, and can you bond 3 of these together?
PCIe x1 has the same throughput as PCI32/33, so you're going to see the same issues. I have TWO NICs in my system (three if you count the LOM).
The PCIe x1 NIC gives me 500Mbps, the PCIe x4 one with TCP offload gives me 950Mbps on the same workload (server they are connected to has a TCP Offload NIC as well.
The LOM NIC uses a single PCIe lane, so again it's slow.
Sorry to disagree with you, but with a IEEE compliant 1518 byte frame on a normal NIC you're going to have crap performance. Yes you can use jumbo frames if your app supports it and you will see vast improvements, but a TCP offload engine on the NIC will do even better.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Of course, the average home hard drive can't write that fast, nor can any home wireless connection or a 1 gigabit ethernet. It definitely sounds business only.
I will tell you from my time working in a company that designed Ethernet PHYs and MACs, that most high end desktops and consumer gear can only maintain a 1Gpbs link, but can accommodate no where near that much BW. The best PCs can only sustain ~500Mbps throughput. Most on-board LAN and sub $100 PCIe LAN cards fall closer to 200Mbps. This is because they do not support DMA and are using Polled IO and the host OS for the LAN stack, much like the old winmodems did.
-nB
I find your statement about lack of DMA and low throughput very hard to believe. I worked at Marvell Germany until September 2007 as a device driver developer and *all* of the then-current Marvell Gig chips (Yukon-II) *easily* managed 900+ MBits/sec, the Windows driver actually peaking at 980 megabits/sec. This was both for onboard controllers (e.g. Asus Mobos) as well as Ethernet cards, for all operating systems supported (Windows*, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, Aix and HP/UX).
Furthermore, *all* the drivers used DMA; only the Linux and Windows drivers offered the option of polled operation to *increase* throughput (no, not a typo, although it's counter-intuitive).
Note, however, the above numbers apply to proper Ethernet speed testing, using an in-memory data generator for the transmit side and a corresponding receive program on the receive-side, avoiding any reads or writes to a disk. Otherwise you'd just be testing the disk read and write speeds, which was a common mistake made by testers, and could well account for your low cited speeds.
Meaningful throughput tests may be performed by tools such as ttcp.
--Gerald
If things go wrong with the connection, will they send Karl Hungus to fix it?
That's why they send him. He's an expert.
Make it $50-100 and you'll see some demand :-)
We have a lot of issues with crappy connections to remote offices that would pay mega bucks for this kind of bandwidth. The main office in the big city has a nice fat 100 mbps connection, but their remote offices are stuck on 6 mpbs down and a measly 1.5 up - which means any time the try to transmit data back to the mothership, they're waiting 10 minutes for a single record to update. It sucks.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
yeah - Comcast is OK if you get Cable and internet, and I can get 20/10 DOCIS as well but I had issues with their fees - for instance, if you just want internet they tack on a $10 fee, and I refuse to get their cable service ever again. I had a lot of issues with their network being oversaturated between about 3PM and 9PM at night and getting horrible ping and data rates, as well, but that was before they added a significant fiber upgrade to the area. When I switched they also wanted $10 more for basic TV HD channels as well, which I get for free from DISH. Oh, and everything their marketing says satellite can't do like remote access and on demand programming? I can do every one, so they lie in their advertising too, so I have no respect for them - they're money grubbing, dirty advertising company. I can't say if they've fixed their service reputation since rebranding as XFinity (my parents get it, and they seem happy with it). In contrast, DISH has been nothing but joy to work with for pay TV - can update programming online, got relatively free equipment for HD (had to pay for a $4 service for 6 months to get it installed free, so technically it was $24), - they even threw in a free year of Starz to celebrate their 30th birthday - the best I got from Comcast as a 10 year subscriber was a few free HBO weekends and frequent price hikes as they absorbed more and more cable providers (actually, I went through 3 in the first year I subscribed to cable, with the third being Comcast, and yes it came with a price hike both times).
Incidentally, I would have stuck with Comcast internet because my DSL options were terrible - Qwest literally had no lines in the area so I went with a Rhapsody network provider despite knowing Rhapsody was a sinking ship (I got burned on Northpoint and it was obvious at that point Rhapsody was doomed as well, so I went with a provider that gave a free modem with 2 year subscription). Rhapsody lasted 8 months and the company ditched my contract since the alternate provider they moved to didn't have service in my area, which also happened to be enough time for Qwest to address their saturation problem, so I went with their service next. Qwest was purchased by Century Link, a company with a mediocre reputation (62% favorable on Broadband Reports), but I think Qwest's was worse. I really hope they replace the infernal ActionTec modems because I would switch in a heartbeat if I could (the ActionTec PPPoE modem provides no local loopback, so I can't see any servers on my local network using my domain name or IP, but I can see them from machines outside my network - Qwest said that was intentional, and I told them that was an asinine decision that made no sense and probably made by a PHB). If Clear didn't have such a horrible reputation I may have tried WiMax, but they do, so I haven't.
Anecdote: My PC is 5 years old, cost around $600 from Best Buy, has an integrated Intel NIC, and IPerf can do about 1.5Gb/s(up+down at the same time) for ~10% cpu(almost a full core). You should see SMB2.0 transfer a sustained 116MB/s at 1.5% cpu load from my harddrive.
PCIe x1 has the same throughput as PCI32/33
PCIE 1.0 1x-lane is 250MB/s up and down and is dedicated between the chipset and device. Peak bandwidth ~500MB with very little overhead
PCI32/33 is 133MB/s up or down and has a shared interrupt style TDMA to the chipset. Peak bandwidth ~133MB minus a decent amount of overhead
Go look at my post http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2886193&cid=40168401
The data on my NIC, according to Intel's documentation, is that it takes up about 1mm^2 of the 45nm based chip. I don't know how many transistor you can pack into 1mm^2 on a 45nm process, but I don't expect it to be too complex. The whole-sale value of my NIC was listed about $5. You need to purchase some decent NICs.
12/6? Luxury! I have 10/0.7. The upstream is so anemic that it can barely acknowledge the data coming in. One machine seeding at 50 KB/s cuts everybody else's download speed in half.
Please get off your high horse.
I live in Germany, about ten miles from a major city, and my DSL is incapable of going above a 384/96 connection despite my paying for a 2 mbps connection. Some areas just don't have the population density to make ISPs care.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Saying an off-the-shelf router can handle 1Gb/s is like saying a smart car can handle 180mph because the speedometer goes that high. Just because they have 1Gb interfaces does not mean the low grade cpu can process and route packets that fast.
Well, in the small town in MA I live in, we never had anywhere close to that. Even when it did work, it was around 8Mbps (out of a rated 10). I have hopes for FIOS. Someday. Many towns nearby have it. Just not us.
Meh.
I get 500gig here in Australia, but I am paying 3 times the amount you are.