Internet2 races 10 times faster

If you thought your new Verizon Fios service was fast, take a look at what Internet2 is up to.

The research-oriented network has just boosted its network speeds to 100 gigabits per second, the Associated Press and others reported this week. That's a 10-fold increase from the theoretical 10Gpbs network connections offered today to its university, research and commercial members.

Network connections this fast mean that a high-quality version of your favorite movie could be downloaded over the Net in a few seconds instead of the half a minute it takes over the old Internet2. By comparison, the same movie download can take hours over a typical home broadband line.

Of course, it will be years before consumers ever see broadband connections this fast, but the speed boost could have a significant impact on the research community almost immediately. In fact, the AP story said physicists working on the world's largest particle collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva will likely be the first to use the faster network in May.

The boost in capacity was achieved by sending data using 10 different colors, or wavelengths, of light over a single strand of fiber. Increasing the overall capacity on the network is important because it allows researchers and Internet2 members to get high-speed dedicated links on demand.

Specifically, researchers this week demonstrated that they could use a dedicated 10Gbps "on-demand" link for a specific application without degrading the performance of the rest of the network for other applications.

The Internet2 network, which is a parallel network to the commercial Internet, is largely used by universities and some corporations around the world to share enormous amounts of data. Earlier this year, the network combined forces with the research-based nationwide fiber network National LambdaRail.

As for the future, Internet2 officials are already planning for even faster speeds. In about 12 to 18 months, they hope to boost network capacity to 400Gbps, the AP said.

[deecee]

No your hard disk will be the bottle neck

If one can truly get a 100 gigabit connection to the net, the other data interface inside the computer will become bottle neck so your HD movie will still take tens of minutes to download. The pesky PCI bus is only 33MHz at 32 bit wide for a total theoretical maximum data transfer rate of just a bit over 1 gigabite per second, with a 100 gigabit connection, you still wait for the bus inside your computer, or hard disk transfer rate for that matter, a good RAID 0 is maybe 120-130 megabytes per second, that's again barely 1 gigabit per second, so there're more obstacles than a super net connection standing in the way of fast HD video downloads.

[Urza9814]

Only if this was implemented last year.

First of all, we won't have those speeds for US consumers for many, MANY years. I'd guess 20 at the least, the way things are going right now. Aside from which, PCI is already somewhat obsolete, being replaced by PCI-e, and I currently have a single drive in my computer capable of 384MBps (3Gbps). SATA. It's far from new, and quite distant from uncommon. Even for $500 budget PCs like my own. So yes, while these speeds would be useless to the average consumer if they came today, they aren't coming any time soon, and effective speeds would still be quite a bit above your estimates.

[DMAN3k]

Yeah... how will that help us?

So while people in Europe, Japan, and Taiwan get internet at 400Gps, Americans will be stuck with 3Mps for the most part. Maybe 5 or 6Mps!

Use the gas pipes! No digging! Just run fiber optic cables through the gas pipes.

[jwkware]

People Keep Saying...

people keep saying stuff about fast highspeed internet, but i want to know, whats the point, if we go to a site, no matter what speed we have, cant we only access that site at the speed there servers allow us ? anyway if we going to get a faster internet service then someone should pass a bill that places like abobe and cnet and google and all other sites have to increase bandwidth allowed per user.... jwkware "Joe"