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A Radiologist Has the Fastest Home Internet In the US (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Jason Koebler via Motherboard has interviewed James Busch -- a radiologist and owner of "the first 10 Gbps residential connection in the United States" -- at a coffee shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Motherboard reports: "For reference, the Federal Communications Commission officially classifies 'broadband' as 25 Mbps. His connection is 400 times faster than that. Busch found a way to make good use of his 1 Gbps connection, and now he's found a use for 10 Gbps, too. 'An X-ray averages around 200 megabytes, then you have PET scans and mammograms -- 3D mammograms are 10 gig files, so they're enormous,' Busch said. 'We go through terabytes a year in storage. We've calculated out that we save about 7 seconds an exam, which might seem like, 'Who cares,' but when you read 20,000 or 30,000 exams every year, it turns out to be something like 10 days of productivity you're saving just from a bandwidth upgrade.' While 10 gig connections sound excessive at the moment, Busch says his family quickly started using all of its 1 gig bandwidth. 'We ballooned into that gig within eight or nine months. With my kids watching Netflix instead of TV, with me working, we did utilize that bandwidth,' he said. 'There were situations where my daughter would be FaceTiming and the others would be streaming on the 4K TVs and they'd start screaming at each other about hogging the bandwidth. We don't see that at 10 gigs.' So why does Busch have a 10 Gbps and the rest of us don't? For one, 10 Gbps offerings are rare and scattered in mostly rural communities that have decided to build their own internet networks. Most companies that have the technology offer gigabit connections (a still cutting-edge technology only available in a handful of cities) at affordable prices and 10 Gbps connections at comparatively exorbitant ones. In Chattanooga, 1 gig connections are $69.99 per month; 10 gig connections are $299. Thus far, 10 Gbps connections are available in Chattanooga; parts of southern Vermont; Salisbury, North Carolina; and parts of Detroit and Minneapolis. But besides Busch, I couldn't find any other people in the United States who have signed up for one. EPB, the Chattanooga government-owned power utility that runs the network, confirmed that Busch is the city's only 10 Gbps residential customer. Rocket Fiber, which recently began offering 10 Gbps in Detroit, told me that it has 'no customers set in stone,' but that it's in talks with prospective ones. Representatives for U.S. Internet in Minneapolis and Fibrant in Salisbury did not respond to my requests for comment. Michel Guite, president of the Vermont Telephone Company, told me his network has no 10 Gbps customers, either."

4 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. I could use one for SDR by rfengr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd like to deploy a remote SDR (software defined radio) for real-time TDOA geo-location. At 200 Msps * 16 bit complex samples, it's close to 10G.

  2. Home internet by Finallyjoined!!! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yes, nice to have 10Gbps connectivity to your home, wouldn't we all like that, think of the amount of pr0n? I work for an ISP, across our core we have 100Gbps x connects, OK there are multiple links, but we're close to max'ing those now.

    WTF will it be looking like with consumers torrenting @ 10Gbps?

    Meh. Not really thought through this article...

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    1. Re:Home internet by Kjella · · Score: 3, Interesting

      WTF will it be looking like with consumers torrenting @ 10Gbps? Meh. Not really thought through this article...

      Would we download more though, or just faster? A Netflix 4K stream is 25 Mbps, BluRay Video has a max rate of 54 Mbps, UHD BluRay 128 Mbps. I have a 150 Mbps line and apart from occasionally downloading a season and figuring out it's junk after a few episodes I use the bandwidth regardless. The only advantage is that huge game patches and such download quicker so I don't get stuck just because Steam wants to install a 2GB patch right when I want to play. Even a big family streaming half a dozen UHD monsters shouldn't be able to saturate a 1 Gbps link.

      His huge downloads are probably hogging the whole bandwidth because of poor QoS, so 10 Gbps solves the problem with brute excess capacity. Either that or he ran into some kind of soft limiter because 30000*10GB = 300TB a year is way, way outside the norm but they let it pass if you pay the 10 Gbps price. And if the software was a little smarter at caching 30000 images / 2000 working hours = average 4 minutes/photo, download takes about 10 seconds so if it would preload he wouldn't be waiting at all. I'm sure he can well afford the extra $3k/year to just make the problem go away though.

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    2. Re:Home internet by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Even a big family streaming half a dozen UHD monsters shouldn't be able to saturate a 1 Gbps link.

      His huge downloads are probably hogging the whole bandwidth because of poor QoS, so 10 Gbps solves the problem with brute excess capacity.

      Agreed. There is something very, very wrong with this story, and you've pointed out half of it.

      The other half which struck me is the oddity of "yada yada residential Internet" followed by this lengthy diatribe about how massive XRays, PET scans, and 3D mammography files are. Well, uh, why is this doctor taking medical records home? It strikes me as odd and disturbing. He's a radiologist, so a lot of what he does is interpretation, but shouldn't medical records be confined to "controlled" networks at a hospital, not permitted to be flung onto a personal, uncontrolled network? See, I gather it's uncontrolled because of the point you brought up... there clearly isn't anything resembling sensible QoS going on if a few kids (how many does he HAVE?) Netflix usage is blocking out yet another kid's FaceTime session on 1Gbps.

      I suspect a} someone's doing something shady but maybe technically legal with medical records and b} someone's got a bigger-dick-than-you syndrome, buying Internet capacity he doesn't need, because he can, and because someone will interview him about it and - more importantly - tell everyone else about the size of his pipe.

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