Monthly Archives: October 2011

There’s a little old lady in Sweden who can surf the Internet at the astonishing speed of 40 gigabits per second. Thanks to an experimental technique developed by her son Peter, Sigbritt Lothberg has the fastest home Internet connection anywhere on the planet. She could download an entire movie in less than 2 seconds, many thousands of times faster than with most residential connections. But she only uses it to read web-based newspapers. Those who watch movies and TV programs over the Net can only be envious at this point. Someday, incredible broadband speeds like Ms. Lothberg’s may be commonly available, but not any time soon. A consortium of leading research institutions called Internet2 is developing one of the fastest networks around. It blazes along at “only” 10 gigabits along the “Abilene backbone”, a mere quarter of her speed. Like the original Internet, these links are restricted to universities and research labs for crunching vast amounts of data, for applications in fields like particle physics and imaging. However, regional telephone and Internet access providers have not yet announced any plans for increasing home DSL speeds beyond the snail-like-in-comparison 10-20 megabits per second currently offered. For super-fast links between major hubs is just part of the problem. Delivering such speeds down into the home is another matter. Effectively using such speeds is yet another issue. Speed is one of the major hurdles in using the Internet to provide seamless video content, … Continue reading →