The Internet at Warp 9
Posted by Johan Cyprich on 25 Apr 2007 | Tagged as: Technology
Two speed records for Internet data transfer were recently broken. On December 30, 2006, the Internet2 team sent data at 7.67 gigabits per second over a 20,000 mile path. The next day the experiment was repeated with a transfer rate of 9.08 GBps. These are the fastest speeds on record for transferring data using standard Internet communication protocols.
The Internet2, or UCAID (University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development) is a non-profit organization which is developing advanced networking technologies for education and high speed data transfer applications. It consists of 208 universities and 60 companies from the private sector.
The purpose of the Internet2 is to provide educational institutions and research organizations access to a private, high speed network. The current Internet technology tends to be to slow when transferring large amounts of data, such as audio recordings or video.
The next goal of the Internet2 organization is to create a network with a speed of 100 GBps. This would allow data to be transfered in 2 seconds what would take 2 days using a modern broadband connection.
These speeds are incredible and I wonder if modern desktop computers even have the capacity to process data at that rate. It’s highly unlikely that the Internet2 will be used just by educational and research organizations. Broadband customers will demand a network like this and will receive it.
Will these high speeds solve all of the problems we’re having with the Internet? Looking back at history shows that it’s unlikely. My first modem operated at 1200 bps. It took about 30-60 minutes to transfer files to my computer from a BBS. When I upgraded to a 14.4 KBps modem, file transfers were faster but the files I was downloading became larger. Then I upgraded to 28.8 KBps modem, followed by a 56.6 KBps modem which was my dial-up access to the Internet. This was an ok speed until file sizes became even larger. Now I have a high speed ADSL connection and it takes me 3 hours to download 1 GB.
The Internet2 running at 100 MBps would seem very fast with today’s file transfers. The problem is that by that time it’s implemented, files will be much larger and you still might spend 3 hours downloading them.
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