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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."

16 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.

    1. Re:I could use one for SDR by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well ... if you are too lazy to Google and use Wikipedia, I'll provide you some 'decompression' of GP's Jargon. -Anonymously-, because I'm using modpoints.

      SDR - Software Defined Radio. A type of radio equipment that uses an Analog to Digital converter to digitize the radio signal (as close to the antenna as is practical) and use digital processing with software filters instead of hardware ones. Non-techie examples: All WiFi and bluetooth equipment, most TV and radio USB sticks

      TDOA - Time Difference of Arrival. Apparently GP wants to locate radio sources by measuring the time difference between signals arriving at a couple of radios. It's for triangulation purposes, I guess. You should then have 3 radios at least to make this work failsafe (only 2 radios leave you with two planar points to guess from, or when also uncertain of height, a circle). All three must be close enough to the source to identifiably pick up the signal and you need synchronized timers with each of them unless your are absolutely certain of your connection lag.

      Now for the bandwidth usage. He wants to sample at 200 mega-samples per second (Msps). What does he want to sample? 16 bit complex samples. Complex numbers have two components and are twice as large as real numbers. Analogously, complex samples take twice the space of normal samples.
      200 Msps * 16 (bit) * 2 (complex) = 6400Mb/s = 6.4Gb/s raw data rate. When sent uncompressed and package switched over the internet, add some overhead and you'll get even closer to that 10Gb/s. But as I said earlier, he probably wants two remote stations for full triangulation, so 10Gb/s isn't going to cut it unless he can use some compression or compromises a bit on the bandwidth.

      Expert question: Why complex samples? A common technique in Software Defined Radio is to sample the signal, straight and 45 degrees phase shifted, also called Quadrature Sampling. This has a long technical explanation why it's advantageous but to cut short, it's so you'll be able to differentiate between signals above and below the mixer frequency of your SDR. Else you wouldn't know if a signal 'Y' Hz away from the mixer frequency 'X', originated at frequency 'X'-'Y' or 'X'+'Y'.

    2. Re:I could use one for SDR by rfengr · · Score: 3, Informative

      The complex samples are quadrature sampling (I+jQ); just a different name. It's actually 90 degrees phase shift, and you do it for the local oscillator, which is where the j comes from. Yeah, I'd want two, so I'd have to decimate to 100 MHz BW. But as you said, now I need two 10G connections. I suppose my point was there are probably many uses for 10G connections; build it and they will come. Hell, maybe within the next year Google fiber will finally get to my house, and at least I can get 20 MHz real-time BW.

    3. Re:I could use one for SDR by rfengr · · Score: 3, Funny

      In...out...in...out..in...

    4. Re:I could use one for SDR by Calydor · · Score: 2

      Whoa, slow down.

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  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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    3. Re:Home internet by uncqual · · Score: 2

      It is possible that he has a locked down computer owned, monitored, maintained, and upgraded by the medical facility he works for and uses VPN. If so, it would be more secure than when you request a DVD of a scan and the facility snail mails it to you unencrypted.

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  3. Interesting application by rasmusbr · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who would have guessed that high speed internet in the home would end up being used to transfer images of female anatomy.

  4. Passed 1GBps the problem is after your modem by GuB-42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Passed 1GBps the problem is after your modem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      not only that, but *most* websites on the internet can't fill that bandwidth, so you'll be browsing, at best, at the max speed the website can go out at....which, in most cases, is FAR less than 10gb

  5. Medical data sent home ? by MarkTina · · Score: 2

    I hope his uber speed connection has some decent security if he has access to peoples medical data from home.

  6. Re:Fantasy by demonlapin · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Doesn't spend much time on those exams, does he by demonlapin · · Score: 2

    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.

  8. Re: 10Gbps != Internet speed by Shatrat · · Score: 2

    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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