Posted on 07/13/2007 12:29:04 AM PDT by Swordmaker
A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books - with the world's fastest internet connection.
Sigbritt Löthberg's home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed.
But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council's network arm, has arranged the connection.
"This is more than just a demonstration," said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson.
"As a network owner we're trying to persuade internet operators to invest in faster connections. And Peter Löthberg wanted to show how you can build a low price, high capacity line over long distances," he told The Local.
Sigbritt will now be able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously. Or, if there is nothing worth watching there, she will be able to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds.
The secret behind Sigbritt's ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.
According to Karlstad Stadsnät the distance is, in theory, unlimited - there is no data loss as long as the fibre is in place.
"I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has," said Peter Löthberg, who now works at Cisco.
Cisco contributed to the project but the point, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, is that fibre technology makes such high speed connections technically and commercially viable.
"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson.
Once I got that part of the article it made sense why she needed all that speed.
Online Sudoku is a joy with broadband that fast.
I've had a Qwest DSL line since 2000. It was implemented on a Cisco 678 router using CAP modulation. For most of the time I had that modem in service, I had 608 Kbits down / 128 Kbits up. A good download of a Linux DVD distribution could saturate the line at 65 Kbytes/sec. Last month my service was magically downgraded to 256 Kbits up/down. Qwest claimed they couldn't provide faster service on my old CAP modem. They didn't lower my monthly fee when they downgraded the service either.
After hours on the phone, I was convinced that I would need to upgrade to a DMT modem. I went to Radio Shack and purchased the Qwest approved ActionTec GT701R modem. I configured the modem, then called the business office to switch the service to 1.5 Mbits down / 896 Kbits up. That's the limit my ISP can currently service. The service order was processed and I plugged the new modem into the line. It trained to 1.5 Mbits down / 896 Kbits up as requested. I was immediately able to move traffic to the internet. In theory, I should be enjoying download rates that are at least twice as fast as the old CAP modem. In reality, there was still something very wrong. My download rates were 83 Kbits / second. Upload at 190 Kbits / seconds. I called my ISP to complain. They agreed something was wrong.
I just retested my downlink rate against Speakeasy.net using the Seattle, WA server. 1100 Kbits down / 384 Kbits up. That's more like it.
I was writing orders to Western Electric to put D4 channel banks and M1C multiplexers into southern California central offices in 1980. T1 was well entrenched by 1980. I wrote orders for 56 kilobit repeaters to customer sites at that point in time as well. Those were all special orders. I even had to repair a 56 kilobit repeater frame and hand deliver it to my Western Electric installer to meet a customer deadline. They were in short supply and I couldn't wait to have the factory fix their manufacturing error. The edge card was installed on the wrong side of the backplane. It took 20 minutes to tear it down and move the connector to the right spot.
By 1986 I was creating automated service provisioning software for ISDN (2B+D) service to the customer premises. I didn't order that service for myself until 1994. The 64 kilobit symmetrical service required a dedicated pair at that time. By 1996, I was able to order a DSL line that shared my voice line pair. I've been operating in that mode for the last 11 years. My upgrade to a DMT modem from the CAP modem on Wednesday of this week was the first upgrade in service since 2000.
I just did the same thing. Since I get 3M DSL service from the local telco, I thought I'd test it to see if I was getting what I am paying for--3043 kbps down and 513 kbps up.
It seems like I am.
I so sorry... ;^)>
No... bits is the rate... bytes are the data. You have 1 start bit and 1 stop bit for every 8 bit byte... equals 10.
this is what I want for my birthday LOL....
So does that mean I’ll get better than 30FPS on Battlefield 2?
Ya, I get your drift.
I’m an electrical engineer.
I stand by my statement.
It is useless going to a single user anytime in the forseeable future. Now it is useful for backbone communications. That’s where it is likely already in use.
It isn’t some magical breakthrough that is waiting for the future to catch up to. The connection speed is the easy part at those speeds. And yes fiber goes really fast and if your willing to dig up all your neigborhoods you can get fiber too. Not some new fantastic technology, simple economics.
Hardly! Being a network and OS technogeek (I still haven't figured out how to transfer a caller at work... I don't do telecom!), that would have been OC48!
Mark
And you think that high speed communications use the old style asynchronous start bit, stop bit, data link layer communications protocols? Without knowing what sort of high speed protocols they're using at the physical and data link layers, we can only guess (probably based on ATM style cells), but for the link directly to the computer, you've got IEEE 802.3, which gives you between 61 and 1497 bytes of data (don't forget the 802.2 LLC header), and the overhead is 8 bytes for the SOF delimiter, another 4 for the CRC, and another 12 for the MAC address.
Mark
My company has about 150 remote locations (out of just over 600) using Qwest, and those Actiontec GT701s are GEMS! They're terrific little routers, capable of running in "unnumbered mode" which is great for using along with a VPN router. I don't think that in over a year we've had a single problem with any of those GT701s. Sometimes convincing Qwest that the problem's on their end can be hard though (but that's really not too much different from most providers!)
Mark
I wonder what good ole’ Bill used to give his mom as presents before her death (RIP)....
And you think that high speed communications use the old style asynchronous start bit, stop bit, data link layer communications protocols?
Probably not but, as you say, there's transmission overhead involved in any protocol which makes the divide-by-8 for converting bits-per-second to bytes-per-second incorrect in any case.
No, but in most modern high speed communications protocols, the level of overhead is quite small, compared to the amount of data transfered, so that you're actually pretty close, just in dividing by 8. And synchronous communications protocols are even more efficient.
Mark
She's gonna have to step it up to keep up with this baby.
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