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World's Fastest Broadband Connection — 40 Gbps 416 comments
paulraps writes
"A 75-year-old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been given a scorching 40 Gbps internet connection — the fastest residential connection anywhere in the world. Sigbritt Löthberg is the mother of Swedish internet guru Peter Löthberg, who is using his mother to prove that fiber networks can deliver a cost-effective, ultra-fast connection. Sigbritt, who has never owned a computer before, can now watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously or download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds. Apparently 'the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC.'" An article in Press Esc notes an analyst study of the
increasing demand for fiber-to-the-home in Europe.
First Post ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:First Post ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I really didn't even know this part of the site existed, or at least I didn't know it existed in this state. It is horrible.
Who is the retarded monkey responsible for this crap? Surely this has to be a mistake. It looks like the bastard child of the anything that wants to die and anyone stupid enough to join it. It this concept of "no news" being news and page layout that can't even render the same in different browsers (FF, IE6, and old mozilla)continues, I think a lot of people will simply not come around. I would probably be one of them but I suspect that doesn't matter much.
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seriously.
This tiny sentence fills it.
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Remove the 'idle' (Score:3, Informative)
Euphemism (Score:5, Funny)
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bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never owned a space station, but I imagine if I suddenly came into control of one, I wouldn't get it put to as much use as someone with a clue.
Also (Score:5, Informative)
1) Can she even get that kind of speed? I mean yes, she's got a big ass link. Ok, that's great. Does her ISP have the necessary upstream to support that? It is much easier to have a single connection running at a given speed than it is to have connections at that speed supported by the necessary upstream to the Internet to make them useful.
2) Even if she does, that is way past the point of it mattering. There just isn't enough things out there that need that kind of bandwidth. You discover that at this point, even 10mbit is really damn fast for normal usage like web surfing (including video) e-mail and so on. It is only if you download large things that it becomes much of an issue. 100mbit is really fast for anything. At work I've downloaded a Linux DVD in like 7 minutes. Really, that is to the point where extra speed wouldn't make a ton of difference. In this case, we are talking speed in excess of what a harddrive can handle.
3) There just isn't much, if anything, on the net that is going to have the kind of upstream to make any real use of that. Even if you are doing a ton of things at one, you'll be hard pressed to find enough fat pipes to start to fill up a link that large. There are backbones that aren't that fast.
This whole thing was nothing but a publicity stunt, and this just proves it. Despite his claim that this showed how fast connections can be put in the home for cheap, it does nothing of the sort. It shows how it really isn't that useful at this point, and how the gear is so high end it produces enough heat to use as a dryer.
As Slashdot is fond of saying: Nothing to see here, move along.
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That makes it really useful, actually.
Re:Also (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Also (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft. The next version of Windows will be measured in TB.
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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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Mmm Dry Laundry (Score:4, Funny)
Good move (Score:5, Funny)
In my early programming days (Score:2)
I had an "official warning" for drying out damp trainers on the server!
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Hey! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hey! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hey! (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but with a connection like that, Comcast would only have to compress HD channels to half their normal quality in order to get them all to fit in the tube!
In Sweeden ... (Score:5, Funny)
Brain the size of a planet... (Score:5, Funny)
Damn...All I need now... (Score:2, Funny)
Oh Noes Broadband (Score:2, Insightful)
Lots of people don't want broadband.
Lots of people don't even care about Internet access.
Sure it would be nice to have availability everywhere, but when the measurement is of how many people use broadband, that doesn't say much of anything.
Re:Oh Noes Broadband (Score:4, Insightful)
I had a great idea for exercise equipment (Score:4, Funny)
Never really got off the ground with it, though.
theonion.com predicting the future again... (Score:3, Funny)
(linked to alternate site 'cuz I can't find it on theonion.com...)
Drying clothes with porn! (Score:2, Funny)
The terminal is probably good as a dryer too (Score:5, Interesting)
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..
Re:The terminal is probably good as a dryer too (Score:4, Funny)
OK, Yoda.
Drying Clothes (Score:2)
In a previous job, we used to have to test gas boilers by plumbing the boiler to a test rig with an expansion vessel and a plate-to-plate heat exchanger -- the secondary side of which was fed from the water main via a flow rate meter (I still remember the formula: 1 degree temp rise * 1 lpm flow rate = 70 w
got warm... (Score:2, Interesting)
doing what... nothing?
Not the first time. (Score:3, Funny)
Slasperv (Score:3, Funny)
I wouldn't have thought Swedish nightclubs held all that many attractions for basement dwelling
Classic! (Score:2)
"Then she'll be able to dry all her neighbours' laundry too."
Plot for Simpson's ep? (Score:2)
Frink: Well here 's your trouble, you've got panties and bras all over your Web-o-Max 40Gb/s equipment, glaavin"
of course shes not using it (Score:3, Interesting)
April Fool? (Score:2, Insightful)
Shhhh! (Score:2)
That's nothin' (Score:2)
That's kind of the point though (Score:2)
April Fool's Day came in March this year (Score:3, Insightful)
And she's surfing this on what exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Binary math and disk speeds: (Score:5, Informative)