75-year-old has world's fastest private internet connection 75-year-old Sibritt Löthberg from Karlstad Sweden just got her first computer, but it didn't take her long to download all the necessary patches. Swedish news site The Local reports that Löthberg's home has been tricked-out with a record-breaking 40 Gb/s connection - the first time a private residence has tapped into the …
Yes, the grannies of the world need higher bandwidth for their malware-riddled Win98 machines.
Fortunately, she probably has only a 10-half NIC on that ancient clunker, so we're all safe for now.
I won't point out that even at 40 Gbps, Windows filesharing would still be pig-slow (send-ack, send-ack...).
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I want it!
Even with the fastest disks, gigabit ethernet and various other things, that would still only be fulfilled to a fraction of its speed.
Assuming you used a RAM-based storage solution for high speed access, 10Gigabit+ ethernet connection and had the necessary throughput within your system (whats the maximum speed data can be moved on a modern motherboard?) you'd still be only using a bit of that speed. Connections that fast are designed for huge (and I mean 10-100,000+ terminal universities, businesses and datafarms) numbers of servers or terminals.
That's a lot of bandwidth! I wish I had that! Only problem is, that's a lot of wasted bandwidth. I don't know how her computer is connected to it, but if uses ethernet, standard ethernet tops out at 1 Gbps. So 39 out of those 40 Gbps are wasted. Even if she uses a faster connection, there's no way her computer can process 40 Gbps from the internet plus all other resources like hard drives, USB, etc. Also, where online would a 75 year old be able to go and get the full bandwidth?
I want to know what tech was involved, specifically.
For reference, 10GB ethernet cards are not too uncommon.
Anything more than that, you need a fibre card in your machine, and you'll need one helluva PC to keep up with it..
It _CAN_ be done with todays desktop/server hardware, but it's unusual..
Seems the son has done this 'because he can'.
He obviously has far too much money, and must be planning to site a server farm there :P
Next we'll hear she's been kidnapped and forced to run the biggest Pirate Bay, Bittorrent and eMule servers known to man or granny...
I believe once they pass the 50Gb per second mark, a black hole will develop and all of mankind will be forever doomed just because he wanted porn and films recorded with camcorders with people getting up to go to the toilet half-way through. Marvellous.
BTW Ethernet doesn't top out at 1Gb. Ethernet is encapsulation, so will work at any speed the physical medium can support - so just standard 4 pair UTP tops out at 1 Gb/sec. ;-)
It says that it's connected to her house via Fiber. Odds are she's hooked directly into that via her computer, or she's hooked into that via another type of fiber optic link from a router of some kind, with other ports for when he drops in and wants to host his Battlefield server. Only way I can see to give any validity to that kind of connection rate.
Hells bells - - that is just NOT fair. I'm 1.5km from my exchange (line of sight) in a 4 year old (so people should have known better) and yet the line length is in excess of 7km. So, I get 512k on a good day (that's the "best" I can get) and when it rains, the signal craps out totally. BT have been to look at the line, lots of head scratching and still no better. It'd be faster to attach packets to carrier pigeon. And it's not like I live in the middle of nowhere - 200,000 people populate this town and I live in one of the newer areas - - so go figure.
I don't believe she's actually peering *anywhere* at 40 Gbit/s. For example, even the largest German universities are currently only peering at 10 Gbit/s (just looked it up), and we're talking about Institutions with tens of thousand of students and employees each, high-speed computing facilities, publicly available open source mirrors and what not.
I think the post itself is a bit misleading, because it kind of emphasizes that this huge pipe was organized by her son, but it it stated only shorty that he happens to work at Cisco, and that this is used to show off this new fibre technology. I really think is is the other way round, and maybe Cisco of Sweden was looking among their employees for someone with a sufficiently computer-innocent relative who can be blessed with the sudden availability of vast amounts of bandwith, courtesy of Cisco of course, to generate the desired press response to make their new technology known.
They likely downlplayed Ciscos role in this a bit, for what makes more heads turn: "Cisco develops new xx Gbit/s technology (third time this year already *yawn*)" or: "Son organizes 40 Gbit/s home internet access for his 75 years old mother (wtf?)"
Anyway, nice marketing ploy, and hey guys at Cisco, if you need a guinea pig for this technology in Germany, give me a call, will you?. I'll even do it for free if you ask nicely. XD
Yeah, yeah - seen it all before. This is obviously the same data transmission technology that Jeff Goldblum used for his teleportation machine in The Fly back in the 80s. Bet it even has the same blue flashing lights and dry-ice effect.
So if a Scandinavian granny pops out of your wireless router sometime soon you'll know they're having DNS problems in Sweden...
Granted you don't need it at the moment, but didn't someone famous in charge of DEC, once question why anyone would ever need need a home computer, or another famous software "engineer" once ask why on earth anyone would need more than 640k of memory? Never say never!
I'm curious to know how big the cupboard under her stairs is (doesn't everyone keep the firewall under the stairs?)... I'm currently testing some 40Gb installations, and the terminal equipment occupies all of both sides of a 19 inch rack, 47u high, and then a couple more racks to turn the bits into something useful (SDI video, ATM feeds, AES audios, oh, and 4Gb of IP).
Neil
"I believe once they pass the 50Gb per second mark, a black hole will develop and all of mankind will be forever doomed just because he wanted porn and films recorded with camcorders with people getting up to go to the toilet half-way through."
um... don't know what sort of porn films you've seen with people getting up half-way through to go to the toilet, but reckon they'd be a shock to any Geek Squader (ref. http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/07/09/geek_squad_sting/). That's not to mention the black hole...
I assume it's a 40 GigaBIT connection and not GigaBYTE? If it's the standard Gb then I guess shifting a theoretical 5 gig in a second ain't too bad. How many servers out there are gonna serve data at a speed anywhere near fast enough to take advantage of that? Alright for peer to peer connections if you can find someone with a lightning upload speed.
Not sure I see the usefulness of this at the moment for anyone.
" I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very specialized computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built — one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them. "
(quotation from an article by Lord Bowden; American Scientist vol 58 (1970) pp 43–53); cited on Usenet.
Well she might have 40Gb, but as people outlined already:
A) Her PC won't be fast enough to handle 40Gb
B) Even large ISPs in the UK have a max of 10Gb on their backbones
C) What good is 40Gb if the server on the other end of the world is only connected with 64kb (download rate would be around 7kbyte/s regardless of the 40Gb connection)
However for the ISP and networking world this news is not bad at all. Now we wait that ISPs boost their backbones to 40Gb. If we boost DSLAM technology to also deliver that speed per pipe then ISPs can unbundle more users and cover bigger areas with less Hardware. For areas which are to far from the next exchange fibre will certainly be an alternative.
Interesting also the possibility to deliver bandwidth hungry content (HD Movies in full frame rate and resolution to 1080p) over local infrastructure in a hub and spoke setup. Deliver content with 40Gb to hubs/proxies which then deliver the content with lower speeds to the enduser. This would be almost realtime streaming with only a very short latency between request and start of the stream.
But regardless, 40Gb are a backbone speed and not a residential one. Speed isn't everything for the enduser, i rather have a stable connection, a 1:1 contention, several fixed IPs, no 'unfair use policy' that cuts me off or charges me for using my 'unlimited' broadband, no port blocking on the ISP side, no forced proxies and no other games that ISPs like to play with their users to make life hell. Combine this with effective DDoS protection on the core network and you have a bare bone product that users need and want.
Some of the comments above are quite silly.
Bandwidth is not being "wasted" as so many of your are saying.
The fibre wan pipe has a maximum capability of 40Gb/s, just because her computer (you assume she only has one computer, and that cisco havn't stuck a server rack in) is not capable or transfering at that speed, you say its being wasted?
1) How is the bandwidth being wasted? If you dont use bandwidth, then its just not used (and is available for others on the 40G fiber) Its not like leaving a tap running and all the water going down the plug, you just use what you use.
2) As said before the fibre is setup to provide 40Gb/s, so just becasue she can't use it do you think they should make it less efficient? should they introduce impurities into the fibre to really crap the speeds down so they are equal or less than the nic card in her machines(s) NO of course not, you provide a 40G fibre, and you use what you need to.
My webserver is connected to a 40Gb/s fibre, but I only have a 1Gb/s nic card, that doesn't mean I am wasting anything, I am not paying to use that which I am not using.
/me hands out clues to everyone
Obviously, the trick to using it is to set up a supercomputer cluster, several thousand terabyte of storage across a few thousand HDs (at the very least) and have it scour the web autonomously, downloading anything and everything that looks remotely like relevant information.
Might be able to top out the 40gb/s connection that way, if the exchange servers can handle the speed involved. You'll have to virtualize a few dozen OSes on said supercomputer though, as with only 65k ports she'll run out of them in no time at all.
So... Who wanted to host a new MMORPG server over there? Because this kind of setup sounds like a perfect solution for it, provided the backbone has a decent latency and keeps up with the whole thing.
Let's see... Assuming 40gb/s and overheads... About 12 seconds or so to download my 320gb HD. If it's 40gbit/s, about a minute and a half.
We're all assuming that the bus-pass toting woman is sitting there with her 9x PC looking at her grandkids photo's and the occasional youtube video of what it was like in the 40's, but perhaps she's running a multinational server hosting service? Or she could have a secret underground lair and has aspirations of world domination.
.. the fact is that you're all jealous because, if her link supports jumbo frames, then she can just back her entire hard disk up into a handful of ICMP Echo frames and ping them into a multi-second virtual storage loop. Admittedly she may have a TTL issue, but it's a good issue to have ...
Yes, I know Scotty did this in that Dyson Sphere episode .. particularly if those Swede Transporter comments are true ...
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