Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

World's Fastest Internet Transfer Rate? 61

Posted by Cliff from the king-of-the-bandwidth-hill dept.
vrioux asks: "While browsing through available Internet service offerings in my area, I became puzzled by the large amount of different speed records that seem to have been achieved in the past months. Some say that 5.44Gbits was the fastest ever achieved, while others seem to think 923Mbits is still in the race. Is there anybody who really knows who holds the Internet transfer world speed record?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

World's Fastest Internet Transfer Rate? More

World's Fastest Internet Transfer Rate?

Comments Filter:

  • Obvious answer... (Score:4, Funny)

    by i.r.id10t ( 595143 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @10:50PM (#7923879)
    ... a 747/station wagon/fed ex truck or similar full of $mediaofchoice

    • I forgot where i read it but some guy uses messenger pigeons to fly digital pictures of people out doing some outdoorsy type stuff and can send like couple of gigs in like 30 minutes with the birds to the pictures are ready when they get back to base camp
    • This one always comes up and it makes me wonder if anybody measured how long it would take to read that "747/station wagon/fed ex truck" loaded with "$mediaofchoice" back in the system they're carrying it to. Would it still be faster than? How long does it take to read that many CDs anyway? Or do by "$mediaofchoice" they mean one really large harddrive?

      I mean, come on! These are the kinds of questions we want answered!
    • ... a 747/station wagon/fed ex truck or similar full of $mediaofchoice

      Does this measurement take into account the time taken to write to the media, then loading and unloading of media into the vehicle?

  • What distance... (Score:5, Informative)

    by pvt_medic ( 715692 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @10:52PM (#7923892)
    are they measuring. I mean its one thing to have a really fast transfer rate from computer to computer if they are right next to each other, its another thing to go half way around the world.

  • truck (Score:3, Insightful)

    by capoccia ( 312092 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @10:52PM (#7923894) Journal
    last i heard, a truck full of backup tapes was still faster than the internet.

    • Re:truck (Score:2, Informative)

      by kayen_telva ( 676872 )
      no one ever considers the task(time) of loading the data onto the computer when they quote this.
      when you use the internet, the data is already on your computer.

      wow. I need to relax ;)
      • There's nothing preventing you from moving your entire computer, data and all.

        Now that's transfer rate.
        • but doing so will require more cargo space or less data, thus leading to lower transfare rate.
          • If only they made computers that were smaller, lighter, easier for a single person to carry. Maybe a slightly more expensive version of the computers we currently use, with a built in keyboard and a flip-up lid with a screen on it.

            Naw, that would never work.

            -G

            As for the discussion, I was looking at a way to get about 6 CDs worth of data to a friend just this week. I considered how long it would take to upload 3G at about 118K/s sustained (cablemodem is fast downstream, but throttled pretty bad upstream
      • okay then... a truck loaded with a generator powered pc connected to a large high density disk array.
        It's already loaded when you get there. :p
    • rather than funny? wacky mods.


    • > last i heard, a truck full of backup tapes was still faster than the internet.

      How 'bout a wheelbarrow full of the new 1" 4GB drives?

      We could have races, to see which geek was capable of the most bandwidth!

  • Depends (Score:3, Informative)

    by topside420 ( 530370 ) <topside@to[ ]de.org ['psi' in gap]> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @10:54PM (#7923910) Homepage
    Transfer rate "records" can be a little fuzzy, because you have differant types of transmission methods and physical link layers which are designed for differant situations and each may break a record in its respective area (i.e. X GB/s transfered over 200 miles with no amplification/repeaters)

    On a side note, your standard fiber OC-192 is 10-Gbit/s. And your OC-48 is 2.45Gbit/s. While your OC-192s are definitly not common, its not unheard of for service providers with big ONS SONET networks to have them.

    • Tier one providers maybe.

      Microsoft has the most bandwidth in Washington state. They're connected directly to every backbone you have likely heard of or care about. And since they're usually a participant in one way or another...

  • Hrumph (Score:4, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @10:57PM (#7923937) Homepage Journal
    "Is there anybody who really knows who holds the Internet transfer world speed record?"

    No, but I have a compelling essay about who was the best Star Trek captain. I have some time tomorrow night if you'd like me to read it to you. /*I hope the mods are in good humor today*/

  • Who knows... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gtrubetskoy ( 734033 ) *
    This is an ambigous question, and the articles cited aren't very clear either. It seems that both articles transferred data over very long distances, but still, I couldn't figure out from reading them what the main constraints were.

    An OC-192 SONET circuit is (IIRC) 9.6 Gbps and are used in lots of places.

    My guess is that they were referring to serial transmittion (i.e. one bit at a time - a "truck with tapes" wouldn't qualify) specifically across the atlantic, using existing circuits. Otherwise, those n

  • better question (Score:3, Funny)

    by hankaholic ( 32239 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @11:25PM (#7924199)
    Is there anybody who really knows who holds the Internet transfer world speed record?
    How about, "Is there anybody who really cares who holds the Internet transfer world speed record?"

    Surprisingly, at least two people seem to care -- vrioux and Cliff. I'm surprised.

    Slow news day, eh?

  • Did the poser of the question read the dates? (Score:5, Informative)

    by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @11:50PM (#7924381) Homepage
    First, the 5.44 Gbps record --
    New Internet speed record set by Euro-US labs ( 2003-10-16 04:51)
    And now the 923 Mbit/s record --
    Scientists: Internet speed record smashed By Jeordan Legon CNN Friday, March 7, 2003 Posted: 1:50 PM EST (1850 GMT)
    Since the lower rate happened earlier, it would seem logical that one record was set back in March, and it was broken back in October.

    Roughly 100 years ago, the world record for powered airplane speed was probably under 60 mph ... I imagine it's somewhat faster now.

    (Of course, `Internet Speed Record' ... who really cares? I'll care when I can have this transfer rate to my house for $60/month :)

  • Only on the Internet? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rmohr02 ( 208447 ) <mohr.42NO@SPAMosu.edu> on Friday January 09, 2004 @12:29AM (#7924623)
    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives.

  • Tat-14 (Score:2, Informative)

    by J2000_ca ( 677619 )
    Tat-14 [tat-14.com]
    "It has a dual route, transatlantic capacity of 640 Gbits on 2 service fiber pairs backed up by 2 protection fiber pairs. This configuration provides a capability of transporting 4,096 STM-1's or approximately 9,700,000 circuits across the ocean."

    It more depends what is being counted though. Your never going to get all of this fiber at once. If you count from a local isp the speed record or from the backbone or from a rual isp it all depends.

  • Yeah how do you measure this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Friday January 09, 2004 @01:36AM (#7925249) Homepage
    You can put two desktop machines with good frontside busses side by side, and use etherchannel using the new 10gbit ethernet chips by Intel, and you theoretically have 20gbit. I'm pretty sure upper-end Juniper and cisco ATM switches can do it much better using loadbalancing of interfaces.

    So do two systems side by side and connected to the net qualify as 'across the Internet', or is the rule to use only standard consumer ISPs?
    • They are also considering distance.
      20Gb/s x 1 meter = 20Gigabit meters per second.
      Double the distance to two meters and you have 40Gigabit meters per second.
      • That's nothing, my home computer can trasmit 40 jiggaquads worth of data over gold subspace channel, to the nearest starbase.

        If I multiply the speed by distance, that's. Arggh! your puny hu-man Internet2 is like using constupated pigeons!
    • Whoops.

      I did the math. The Internet2 discussed above (record holder) moved 1.1 terabytes across 7,000 meters in less than 30 minutes. This translates to roughly 5.44 gigabits / second sustained across a distance of 7,000m.

      In relation to the 20gigabit meters / second you describe, these guys pumped :
      38,080,000 gigabit meters / second.
      38,080 terabit meters / second.
      38 petabit meters / second.

      That is very cool, but what the article doesn't mention is that the files they used were all MP3's and now the RIA

  • Q: What are they measuring? A: (read on) (Score:3, Informative)

    by Crypto Gnome ( 651401 ) on Friday January 09, 2004 @07:03AM (#7926613) Homepage Journal
    These mystery articles talking up "new internet speed records" are not talking about "mega-fast line capacity". Anyone can engineer a nice fat bundle of lines to up the ante - it just costs Money (specifically, LOTS OF).

    What these people are going on about is the real-world actual measured data-throughput between a single pair of computers across "the internet" (usually across a significant chunk of the world).

    Anyone who's tried to use any TCP based protocol (eg FTP, HTP) to send mind-warpingly large chunks of data understand the throughput limitations imposed on said communication as a direct result of large RTT latency.

    I'm not sure about these two instances specifically (articles give essentially ZERO technical details) but many similar researches are an attempt to derive new (bigger, better, faster, and more eco-friendly) protocols which avoid the limitations of TCP.

  • Bandwidth Challenge (Score:2, Informative)

    by tgpt ( 469607 )
    This year's Supercomputing 2003 Bandwidth Challenge netted some cool results [sc-conference.org] in this area including 23+gbps inside the US, 7.56gbps between the US and Japan, and 8.96gbps throughput to a remote network filesystem using GPFS. There are even some pretty graphs [supercomp.org]. My former co-workers at SDSC [sdsc.edu] were involved in a lot of this work.
  • Most call it the "Internet land-speed record"
    More info at http://lsr.internet2.edu/ [internet2.edu]
    Also, the fastest router from juniper networks, to my knowledge, is the m160, capable of forwarding 160 GB/s. But, that is spread out over several interfaces.
    -n

    • The Records:
      IPv6 Category
      Single Stream Class: 6,947 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 7067 kilometers of network.

      Multiple Stream Class: 6,947 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 7067 kilometers of network.

      IPv4 Category
      Single Stream Class: 38,420.54 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the Californ
  • I have a record setting Terabyte in under an hour with the Pigeon RFC Protocol. RFC 2549

Slashdot Top Deals

BLISS is ignorance.

Close