Alt, Envisioning an internet that's 100 times faster: we'll take two
By Laura June 
posted June 29th 2010 12:24PM
posted June 29th 2010 12:24PM
Alt, posted June 29th 2010 12:24PM
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Let's Do This Thing!!!
@ravissimo +1 for the supernet!
@ravissimo
I'm getting 50 down now I can't even imagine what the downloads will be like at 500 down. When we get to those type of speeds there's no telling what we'll be downloading...
@PlatinumSkeet
I'll give you one guess...
@PlatinumSkeet MORE PR0N for SURE! :D
@RampantNinja Surely you mean +1 for compuglobalhypermeganet, given his avatar and all? ;)
@ravissimo I have $3 to my name, and will gladly help pay for this :P If the whole world does the same, maybe we can afford it ?!?!? :P
@PlatinumSkeet 100 * 50=5000 not 500 :P try that speed on intead :D
@ravissimo
This kind of ungodly speed will only benefit one industry on the internet.....
@ravissimo
No proven demand for internet that's that fast ?
Wait, no one cares about ABSOLUTE instant content delivery ?
@kineticdamage
Very true. Internet that fast would truly be the death of Television...
@PlatinumSkeet
by the way, 50 down times 100 isn't 500 down. thats 10x. more like 5000 down. but i'm guessing you just forgot the zero, cuz anything faster than 500 down would be ludicrous speed.
@PlatinumSkeet It would be an instant quality boost, since compression can go bye bye.
@PlatinumSkeet 100 times faster would be 5000. Just to let you know
@kineticdamage i work for the Army in a classified environment,and i can tell you they bitch and bitch about how they need more bandwidth for their projects."Mike,do something to this and make it go faster!you're a badass at computers,you can do it!"so,i'm pretty sure that if the government would throw their weight behind this one,so would many other people.
i can't even imagine what doors this would open to what capabilities...hook it up to a ginormous printer and print off a 30 gigapixel wall paper of some porn.whatelse would you really do with 5000mbps internet?
@Everyone
I understand 5000, sorry I forgot the extra zero, either way you get my point...
@ravissimo
1Gb/s internet would be amazing for us gamers
i dont think comcast should be allowed near it though cause they'll fuck it up like they did with hd , let verizon or frontier handle the goods
@ravissimo
Screw 1Gbps. I want 1Pbps. Completely bypassing Tbps. You ever notice that we seem to be behind the 8 ball when it comes to network bandwidth? Japan offered 100 Mbps from home a number of years ago. By the time WE get to 1Gbps, they will be running 100 Gbps.
@Slappy Wag
wrong, by the time we get the to 1Gbps, Japan will be running at 'realtime' speeds.
There is always demand for a faster internet, just name your price and I'll consider!
@crazypeng1 Exactly..." Chan says there's no proven demand for internet that's that fast, so there's no real money behind the project... "
"... As a result, it could make the Internet 100 or even 1,000 times faster while actually reducing the amount of energy it consumes...."
..."The chief obstacle to its adoption, he says, isn’t technical but economic. Implementing Chan’s scheme would mean replacing existing Internet routers with new ones that don’t have to convert optical signals to electrical signals. But, Gerstel says, it’s not clear that there’s currently enough demand for a faster Internet to warrant that expense. "
OK, so you can improve speed 100-1000x, reduce energy consumption and you're worried that "If you build it, no one will come?" I'm there if this is primarily router based, wireless only I've upgraded from a->b->g->n....it'd be great to have something that wasn't so incremental. I'd totally go to a 50/50 wired wireless house if I could get my wired internets on at a clip of 100x the current, which is way faster and more realizable than wireless anyways.
If this thing can compete on costs then there's no question it'll go into 90% of homes that use broadband now.
I'm waiting for the scandinavians, japanese and korean to laugh at this article. They would tell us, why switch to a new technology when the old one is still in it's baby shoes in most parts of the world.
@crazypeng1
Everyone is thinking this maybe just a little bit more expensive than their current internet service and network related hardware. Do you know how expensive fiber channel stuff is?!?!?
This is probably even more expensive.
Let's say each router is $50,000. I think now Chan's "no proven demand" makes sense.
@crazypeng1 Hey! Maybe they can get Shatner to advertise for this! Name your price for access to the super-ultra-mega-extreme-ultimate-intarwebs-of-awesomeness!
Someone forward this to the FCC. They seem to have a hard on for speed.... Like the rest of us! Watching Multiple netflix videos at once!>! WHILE PLAYING CSS?!! You dont say its not awesome.
No money behind this project? That "lead researcher" should leave the marketing and surveying to the people who specialize in those fields..
I know I would pay for this.
i would be happy with anything above 100mb/s for a couple of years
i now have 4mb/s......
but as promissing as this sounds i'm very sceptical i heard false promisses to often.....
"Chan says there's no proven demand for internet that's that fast, so there's no real money behind the project."
So could someone prove it to him already?
@PuttyKitties
You don't need to prove it to him. He is already developing it. You need to prove it to the investors.
I definitely believe there is always a need for better anything and apparently if people havnt noticed there are services that wouldnt have if it wasnt for dsl/broadband. Faster internet or bigger and larger pipes can bring new services that we cant imagine today. People thought OnLive was impossible, but currently it launched almost 2 weeks ago and its doing great with a couple of issues that can be easily be solved. Thats all I have to say.
Forward to Obama to make it part of the national broadband plan!
I agree. ANYTHING would be better than the crappy speeds I'm getting. Let's do it to it!
We need this!
@Engadget From the source: 'But, Gerstel says, it’s not clear that there’s currently enough demand for a faster Internet to warrant that expense. “Flow switching works fairly well for fairly large demand — if you have users who need a lot of bandwidth and want low delay through the network,” Gerstel says. “But most customers are not in that niche today.” ' -- Ori Gerstel is an engineer at Cisco
Also this is a means of reducing lag, not increasing through put so while your download may start a little sooner it won't go any faster. Also this would only really work at the backbone level where large amounts of data are guaranteed to be flowing in one direction all the time. Basically this doesn't really give the end user much benefit.
@Quantumman
+1 to you, sir
@Quantumman
THANK YOU. Finally, someone who understands what this is about. I thought this was a tech blog. You'd think there would be more people who understand the difference between latency and throughput.
A better title would be "Envisioning an internet that's 100 times more responsive." We're having a hard enough time getting FFTH rolled out in select markets across the U.S., much less the entire world.
@Quantumman - Good find, but either way I'm still all for doing this just to eliminate lag :D
I can't wait until the servers start getting 100x faster speeds. Until then, it doesn't really matter how fast my connection is because I can rarely take advantage of it. Why don't the youtube servers get Googles 1gbps service before they give it to the public so I can actually have a video completely buffered in 5 seconds rather than having it buffer at a little faster than it plays.
@engadgetcomexcludeengadget: Isn't youtube designed (once you get past a certain speed) to 'buffer a little faster than it plays'? They don't want to send you the whole video instantly, because you might only watch the first ten seconds, so it would waste a huge chunk of bandwidth.
That said I kind of agree in general - a lot of the time I'm trying to download something or watch youtube, in SD, and it's not even keeping up (but for some reason when i go to google maps then it can max out my bandwidth). I don't know if this is my connection or my ISP or what but it's annoying.
The reason there is no funding is because, it's not currently necessary. If you were told you could get a "smoother" picture out of connecting two HDMI cables from the same source to your tv, would you do it? Possibly, but now you have also lost some of the benefits of having an HDMI cable (1 cord instead of many) with, probably, no actual improvement.
Ergo, even if they improve the main lines to the internet, at a huge cost of doubling all fiber optic cables currently in place, there won't be a dramatic change in your service because of the older hard lines that still get switched, multiplexed, and demultiplexed down the line.
while new buildings/constructions should probably use this technology as it appears it can be cheaper due to decreasing router production costs and etc. it is a good point, if your just surfing the web for random sites, not playing games, not streaming everything you possibly need, then there is no need for faster. also, the OC connection limits probably will be reached a lot faster for city wide thresholds. then again i have a fiber line directly to my place, so give me this internet!
If this could lead to a true increase in bandwidth by 100x, then this could be the beginning of the Google Chrome Cloud computing they've been prostilatizing all this time. Of course, if this doesn't actually mean we have more throughput then the cloud computer idea will be relegated to only Microsoft Word and Excel documents.
yes please
Torrent heaven!?
Heh... for one PC it is hard to take advantage of such speedy internet since our hard drive cannot write that fast... and our CPUs are sweating too... but it would come handy if you'd like to have 3 full HD TV's at home, each watching a different channel, and maybe 2 PC's leeching data... and maybe one or 2 full HD cameras streaming LIVE...
without this kind of setup, this fast internet is not (yet) useful ...but in industry (youtube, google, facebook, hulu, twitter, and other high traffic networks... would benefit a lot)....
and the latency, as someone mentioned before, is also the problem... so with this technology, ping could be
@DamirSecki less than 1ms from whenever on the globe... this is HUGE
@DamirSecki
Actually, that is (currently, and for the foreseeable future, impossible) :)
Current physics tells us that no data can move faster than the speed of light:
the speed of light = 299 792 458 m / s
Which means, Speed of light 299,792.458 meters per millisecond
What is the circumference of the earth in meters? about 40,000,000.
So, assuming the maximum distance to the opposite side of the earth is 20,000,000 meters, and assuming a straight line (good luck with that!), it would take data moving at the speed of light about 66.71ms minimum.
:)
@Takamuri : Cammon, where do you get your data? 40,000 km is the circumference... that means if the data goes all the way around and returns to the same place... so if you would ping yourself and go around the world (on the longest way possible) your logic could hold water...
so in theory the system should choose the shortest route... so you would reach the furthest point in half the time you stated...
but the real data exchange would be between europe - america - far west (japan, corea)...so the improvments would be notable!
@DamirSecki
Takamuri already took the circumference of the earth and halved it in the last paragraph.
"So, assuming the maximum distance to the opposite side of the earth is 20,000,000 meters, and assuming a straight line (good luck with that!),"
And FYI, the country is Korea, not corea.
@Takamuri
Science also tells us that the speed of light in vacuum is 299 792 458 m/s, its about 2/3 in a fiber optic cable.