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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."
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.
Sure, but has he found a use for more than 64K of RAM?
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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...
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
With a combination of 1 Gig and 10 Gig customers, I have to wonder what the inbound provisioning is. For example, if everyone is downloading 1 Gig videos, when will it max out?
I also wonder if this bandwidth is symmetrical. Could he, for example, offer web hosting, for example (maybe paying a little more for a static IP)?
Who would have guessed that high speed internet in the home would end up being used to transfer images of female anatomy.
...And I can't get better than 50Mb/sec.
"But Comcast has..." (*SMACK*) I will not let Comcast be my ISP, for reasons which should be obvious by now to every member of this site.
The weird thing is that, about a year ago, a truck from HP Communications (no relation) strung fiber up around my residential neighborhood, allegedly on behalf of AboveNet (now part of Zayo). Since then, however, not a peep out of anyone even hinting at a residential fiber service offering.
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"3D mammograms are 10 gig files, so they're enormous"
Yes. I'm sure some of them are.
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Actually, there are multiple 40 Gbps ports around campus at places like the UW, so if you lived in one and did research, 10 Gbps is not that fast. We even have three 100 Gbps ports. It's useful for remote telepresence surgery, for example.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
FaceTime at 4K using a TV..
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Suppose a bunch of customers download 1GB videos and then watch them. That's 8 Gb, so it'll take a little over 8 seconds to download. Then an hour to watch it. So they're actually using the network 0.2% of time. A 10 Gbps uplink could support roughly 250-500 customers doing that.
If 400 customers share a 10 Gbps uplink to the backbone, they each need to pay about 0.25% of the cost*. On the other hand, if he were hosting xvides.com over that connection, he'd be using it 10% of the time (averaging 1 Gbps). The 10 Gbps could only handle about 8 such customers, so each would need to pay 12.5% of the cost.
* Assumes each 10Gbps AVERAGES 400 subscribers, not if it maxes out at 400 subscribers. Because lines have fixed capacities, the average uplink is only partially utilized and therefore cost is divided amongst the typical number of customers, not the max.
He was interviewed at a coffee shop. I assume the author of this article didn't have fast enough internet to interview him via facetime.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
That is pretty sweet. I wish more new developments would come with at least 1 gig fibre from each house to a junction box/building so faster internet can be brought in easy
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For me beyond the 25Mbps I already have, it becomes all about less latency and maybe more upload bandwidth, not just more download bandwidth. However ISPs never seem to care about those things.
Heck with latency/excessive ping issues, its a good day when their customer support even has a clue what you're talking about.
Most home networks are 1Gbps ethernet so unless you won't go faster than that on a single port or even your whole network depending on your switch configuration. You need beyond consumer-level network gear to enjoy the full 10Gbps. As for WiFi, it is a joke at these speeds.
Now, even if you have a 10Gbps connection straight to your computer, what will you do with it? Watch movies? That's a few tens of Mbps at best, peanuts. Transfer files... now we are talking, but you better have a SSD or a nice RAID array, because most mechanical hard drives run at about 100MB/s or 1Gbps. Heck, SATA3 only goes 6Gbps, so that's an internet connection faster than most SSDs. Even your computing power can be limiting : 10Gbps is quite fast for all but the most basic kind of processing.
I sincerely don't see a use for a 10Gbps home connection unless you are running servers on it, or host a whole community of bandwidth hogs. The radiologist in the example is the edgiest of the edge cases. He has a remote location that can support more than 1Gbps but he can't work online, he also has a computer and home network that support such a speed and a workflow that makes a 7 second delay matter...
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
If you had consistent 1000 Mbps service, this wouldn't be true unless there are two dozen people counted in "the others".
Not sure what imager he's using but it sounds like he's storing raw shit for no reason.
If you store it in 16-bit greyscale (or whatever format your software uses to allow decent non-destructive contrast adjustment), you'll get 200 MB from a 10240x10240 image.
That's insane.
A typical modern X-ray imager is about 20 megapixels at 16 bit (so 40 MB). A typical exam of a chest may use 2 full frames. Other types of examination may use more frames, particularly images of joints (although in that case, you don't need a full field). On that basis, 200 MB per exam seems completely unreasonable.
Typically, medical images are stored and transmitted as raw, uncompressed bitmaps. Lossy compression while it is supported has some issues, technical as well as legal. As an example of a technical issue the classic JPEG algorithm does not support 16-bit depth images. Compression when supported is typically with JPEG 2000, but some implementations may use JPEG LS, and older software lossless JPEG.
The normal networking protocol for medical image transfer is not very efficient as it does not allow pipelining of data transfers. For studies like a CT scan, which might have 10,000 images of 256 kB each, connection latency can be devastating. As a result, there are a profusion of proprietary proxy server packages, which basically wait for a study to arrive, package it into a tar file, and the ftp it to the other end, which then untars the files and retransmits them. This has the additional advantage that FTP is much better behaved when traversing NAT, dynamic IPs or firewalls than the industry standard data transfer protocol (DICOM).
That said, 10 Gb to the end-user seems excessive. I use a pair of 1 Gb links to the servers on our systems, and 1 Gb to the end-user which serve 20 radiologists. The network backbone is 10 Gb, but that includes all the other traffic. We have 5 Mb uplink from the hospital site, which is perfectly fine to allow multiple radiologists to work from home. It's all about the software finesse - a decent image viewer will seamlessly use lossless image compression, a proprietary transfer protocol using streaming/pipelining, and you supplement this with work queues. You allocate 50 studies to a radiologist, and while the radiologist is reading the first study, the 2nd study is downloading in the background, etc. Not all software is clever enough to do this, and not all supports image compression or techniques to deal with high latency networks.
Competition, most likely. How many ISPs in Chattanooga?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Waaaaah i cant watch 5 4k netflix streams at once!"
I hope his uber speed connection has some decent security if he has access to peoples medical data from home.
All I can say is that is pretty freaking cool. I had 3mbps RoadRunner from Time Warner in 1999 Columbia, SC. I thought I was the king. Just makes you smile knowing that is a residential connection. Could you get 3 or 4 of those connections and bond them? What would the hardware cost at 10gig be to bond connections at that speed and get near the full capacity? Man, cool!
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1 Gbps with home stuff vs 10 Gbps with enterprise level switch and routers as well.
But how shared is that fiber? 8:1, 32:1, 64:1? real dia fiber is like 10K for 10G/10G for $1000 /mo you can get 100/100 DIA fiber with a SLA and enterprise gear.
1099 independent contractor doctor that just has his office at home vs renting office space?
I thought radiologists were supposed to be outsourced to India by now.
Municipally owned. Provided to citizens at, basically, cost.
I've got "gigabit" fiber at my house for about the same price, although it slows down to around 400-500 Mbps once you leave my provider's network. Provided by a private company. Yeah, it's awesome. Zero downtime since it was installed.
It doesn't take an experienced radiologist anything like 5 minutes to read an x-ray and dictate a report. Maybe 30-45 seconds.
It's just a matter of pattern recognition. They know what "normal" looks like, they know what to put a little extra attention on, and most of them like to show off a little - they'll mention old rib fractures on a chest X-ray, for example.
I would imagine they are using XP-GPON2 since they can overlay that on the same fiber network that they are using for the 1G service.
Unless anyone else in his local neighborhood is on the 10G frequency then he likely has it to himself for the time being.
If he's working using this connection, he should get a business deal, not residential. Most home connections have strict "no commercial use" clause in ToS.
:wq
oh wow, you're right!
They don't do that anymore. Nowadays, they have this thing called 'collections'.
Willing to bet but not willing to read, I guess. It's 10gbps Fiber to the HOME service over NGPON2, which can delivery 10gbps max per customer, 40gbps max per PON. This is actual internet access.
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"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."
Bullshit - that's just his lame attempt at justifying "needing" a connection that fast. How did his poor family function with ONLY a 1 Gig connection or worse, something as pathetically slow as 5-300 Mb/s ?
Agreed, clear quotas that the customer understands can be fine. They pay to use X GBs (which is y% of the capacity) and the cost reflects that. Something similar is used when professionals buy bandwidth for an enterprise. The buyer and seller both understand the terms, so it's good.
Rather than throttling down, it typically marks excess traffic as "discard eligible" - you may use more than your Committed Information Rate, but only if the capacity is available after customers who haven't hit their CIR get their packets through. In other words, traffic in excess of your CIR must yield to traffic from someone who hasn't hit their CIR.
Note that this is one way of *implementing* "the average customer must pay their fair share of the cost in proportion to the traffic they generate". It's not "or", it's "and". Customers must pay their share of the cost, and quotas are one way of doing that. If the average customer pays less than their share of the cost, the provider bleeds money and goes out of business.
What's challenging, besides educating customers so they can make informed decisions, is that links don't instantly become used at full capacity when they are installed. Suppose a 1Gbps link can service 400 customers. The ISP has 402 customers. They NEED 1.02 links, but you can't install 2% of a link. You have to install one link (which isn't quite enough) or two links (which costs twice as much). On average, the last link in any discrete required route is only half utilized.