DailyTech - Internet Speed Record Broken Twice in Two Days

Submit News

Internet Internet Speed Record Broken Twice in Two Days
Michael Hoffman (Blog) - April 26, 2007 12:49 AM

34 comment(s) - last by Hawkido.. on Apr 30 at 5:13 PM

The new Internet speed record was set on December 30, only to be broken the next day

A team of researchers led by the University of Tokyo was able to break the Internet speed records twice in two days. The operators of the Internet2 network made an announcement that on Dec 30, researchers were able to send data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communication protocols -- on Dec 31, they modified protocols and then sent data at 9.08 Gbps.

The Internet2 network is an experimental network system created and managed by more than 200 universities around the world. Because Internet2 reportedly has a limit of 10Gbps, the recently disclosed record should remain untouched. However, the consortium of universities are now planning Internet 3, which will be able to operate at 100 Gbps.

To help understand the speed of this connection, a high-definition movie currently takes two days to be transferred over the average broadband connection. The Internet2 network would be able to transfer the same film in 30 seconds.

The announcement of the speed record was made during a spring meeting of the Internet2 consortium.

"These records are final for the 10Gbps network era because they represent more than 98% of the upper limit of network capacity, said Dr. Kei Hiraki, University of Tokyo researcher.

The 20,000-mile round trip route crossed six international networks, and was able to cover three-quarters of the Earth's circumference during the test. More specifically, the data went from Tokyo, and passed through Chicago, Seattle, and Amsterdam before returning to the starting point.

Comments

Threshold

Username
Password
remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By kuyaglen on 4/26/2007 4:14:10 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
The Internet2 network would be able to transfer the same film in 30 seconds.

Is this a 25GB BD/HDDVD movie? If so, what kind of hard drive setup will be able to write data at that rate? At GeForce lan 3, Nvidia claimed that their new Dual Net lan would be able to transfer a tv show in 1 second (I'm assuming about a 200mb half hour tv show).

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By Visual on 4/26/2007 5:48:19 AM , Rating: 2

well SATA II is up to 300MB/s so the tv-show-in-one-second is possible. but that's still only around 9GB for 30 seconds...

pci-express raid cards with two or more sas/sata controllers can increase that as much as you like. the PCI-express bus itself might become a limiting factor, with a single lane only having 250MB/s, but such cards will be for x4 and x8 slots.

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By TomZ on 4/26/2007 8:42:53 AM , Rating: 5

The interface may be capable of 300MB/s, but the drives can read or write data that fast.

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By TomZ on 4/26/2007 8:43:15 AM , Rating: 5

sorry, can -> cannot

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By m104 on 4/26/2007 11:32:10 AM , Rating: 2

"the PCI-express bus itself might become a limiting factor, " - dont worry - PCI 2.0 is on the way

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By kamel5547 on 4/26/2007 12:39:26 PM , Rating: 2

Too bad drives average around 90 MB/s. You'd need a serious RAID 0 array to be able to deal with the data coming in.

Maybe if you had an insane amount of RAM it could actually transfer the data to memory and wait for the drives to catch up.... better hope there isn't a power failure though ;)

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By Xerstead on 4/26/2007 3:54:29 PM , Rating: 2

Then you'd have to wait while you downloaded the whole file again... :)

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By tacorly on 4/27/2007 12:23:41 AM , Rating: 2

yes but if the wait was only 30 seconds I wouldn't mind having to redo it in the rare event of power outage or something

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By Rike on 4/27/2007 12:23:02 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
better hope there isn't a power failure though ;)

That's what a good UPS is for!

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By CascadingDarkness on 4/27/2007 6:56:23 PM , Rating: 2

Do you work for Best Buy?

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By spartan014 on 4/26/2007 5:56:58 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah.. I would also like to know what sort of setup they use for storage. Some kind of SCSI RAID ?

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By theapparition on 4/26/2007 7:49:13 AM , Rating: 3

FiberChannel arrays can write up to 10Gbps.
You don't want to know the cost!

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By GazH on 4/26/2007 8:53:23 AM , Rating: 3

One of our systems has a Fibre Array with 2Tb of storage.

It cost somewhere around £20,000 ($38,000)

For some reason my boss wouldnt buy a 2nd one for backup....

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By Souka on 4/26/2007 5:41:43 PM , Rating: 3

I"m sure you have data backed up somewhere.....

You don't need a mirrored setup just for backup...

On the other hand, it would be nice :)

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By Hawkido on 4/30/2007 5:13:35 PM , Rating: 2

I'd like you to try to do random access off a tape library! LOL

Some things have to be able to recover in like 1 day or be ran in tandem all the time. That would be the reason to have another one.

Parent

RE: Blue Ray/HD DVD?

By CollegeTechGuy on 4/28/2007 6:00:26 PM , Rating: 2

I think the reference to transfering a movie was just to give an idea of how much data can be sent at that speed. Think about just the internet, alot of data being sent just hits 1 router then is forwarded onto another router. So even if the data is not the size of a HD movie if it can be sent there at a really fast rate then the internet "Traffic lights" will be less congested and the smaller ammounts of data you are sending will seem like they didn't take any time at all.

However, I would like to see them send that data across Internet 1 with all the traffic headaches with billions of users and servers sending data.

Parent

speed record

By Dweeboid on 4/26/2007 12:16:29 PM , Rating: 2

how old is this article???
The back bone of the intenet in Canada has been running 10Gbps (OC-192)per wavelengh (lambda) for many years. You can even do 40Gbps now on each wavelength.

RE: speed record

By m1ldslide1 on 4/26/2007 12:43:21 PM , Rating: 3

Yeah I don't really understand this. The current internet backbone already has a ton of 10gig links, with many tier 1 ISP's having multiple 10gig links between each other. So the internet2 having 10gigs isn't revolutionary by any means. Seems to me that if you create a 10gig network without the entire world's traffic passing over it and start bragging about how you're able to push nearly 10gigs, it makes you an attention-whoring dumbass.

I bet if you filled up the internet2 with a couple of hundred million people and businesses' web, email, and file traffic they wouldn't be pushing these theoretical limits. Also the reason why it takes the end user so long to download an HD movie is because my ISP sells me 2Mbps downstream to my cable modem. If they have a 4.7x10 to the something googlebit backhaul I still have a 2Mbps downstream link.

Again, this seems completely and utterly intuitive, and I'm not understanding what the 'news' is here?

Parent

RE: speed record

By HrilL on 4/26/2007 3:06:19 PM , Rating: 2

Its not the max speed of a backbone with everyones traffic added up. This is the transfer for 1 host at the max speeds of the backbone. That is why its important.

Parent

RE: speed record

By 91TTZ on 4/26/2007 5:37:14 PM , Rating: 2

But you can do the same thing with the current Internet. If you transferred data from one business to another, both with OC-192 connections, and high end networking equipment in between, you would get awesome bandwidth.

The talk about the Internet 2 being faster than the current Internet is absolute nonsense. There's no standard out there specifying what speed the Internet runs at. Your speed depends on the how good the networking equipment is between your computer and the other computer, and how many people are sharing that connection.

Parent

RE: speed record

By TSS on 4/27/2007 4:11:02 AM , Rating: 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_2

"There have been times when the media have reported on a network called "Internet2." This is misleading since Internet2 is in fact a consortium and not a computer network. "Internet2" is sometimes used, albeit a misnomer, for the Abilene Network.

The Abilene project is supported greatly by Qwest Communications through the use of Qwest's optical fiber networks. Internet2's Abilene transport agreement with Qwest is due to expire somewhere around October 2007. [6]. Internet2 has contracted with Level3 for the fiber required to support the successor to Abilene."

more on the abilene network:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_Network

"The media recently often incorrectly reports about a network called "Internet2", for example about a recent series of lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America against university students attending several of the major participants in Abilene. Some sources even suggest that Internet2 is a network wholly separate from the Internet. This is misleading, since Internet2 is a consortium and not a computer network. It is possible that many news sources adopted the term Internet2 because it seems like a logical name for a next-generation Internet backbone. Articles that reference Internet2 as a network are in fact referring to the Abilene Network.

Abilene forms a high-speed backbone by deploying many of the technologies developed by Internet2. Abilene is a private network used for education and research, but is not entirely isolated, since its members usually provide alternative access to many of their resources through the public Internet. Abilene is not technically part of the Internet since it does not peer with the public Internet networks.

The official website of Qwest, one of many major contributors to the Abilene Network, has a good FAQ section that clarifies the distinction between Internet2 and Abilene.[1]"

so from what i can gather their ENTIRE network speed = over 9 gbits. while that can't be said of the internet seeing as my upload connection is only 6mbits and there are slower out there.

Parent

Old?

By PlasmaBomb on 4/26/2007 3:03:51 AM , Rating: 2

Good to see the continuing progress of the internet, but isn't this kind of an old story?

RE: Old?

By soydeedo on 4/26/2007 3:07:32 AM , Rating: 2

well on the link it says that they didn't announce this until this past tuesday.

Parent

What are they using?

By MADAOO7 on 4/26/2007 3:30:46 AM , Rating: 2

Curious, are they using existing fiber optic lines? And what are they using, some kind of prototype Ethernet card?

RE: What are they using?

By theapparition on 4/26/2007 7:53:23 AM , Rating: 2

Most likely they are using the same fiber optics. Fiber is not the limiting link, its the electronics (transceivers) that convert the electrical signal into light. Not to mention the difficulty of 10Gbps electronics over a PCB.

Parent

LOL

By DonkeyRhubarb on 4/26/2007 8:37:01 AM , Rating: 4

Love the pic!

And i am stil stuck with 256 kbps

By indianpunk on 4/26/2007 3:22:38 PM , Rating: 2

And i am stil stuck with 256 kbps connection which gives me maximum SPEED of 24 Kb/s

God Plz make broad band cheeper here

RE: And i am stil stuck with 256 kbps

By Psychless on 4/26/2007 5:05:56 PM , Rating: 2

My intenet connections is 24Kbps. The cheapest broadband I can get is wireless with a $300 installation fee. Then $40 a month. Yah.

Parent

Canada is faster

By Dfere on 4/27/2007 7:57:35 AM , Rating: 2

Just ask them.

RE: Canada is faster

By DTAllTheBest on 4/27/2007 4:46:46 PM , Rating: 2

Malaysia is the slowest

Parent

Unfair comparison

By JarredWalton on 4/26/2007 3:14:28 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
To help understand the speed of this connection, a high-definition movie currently takes two days to be transferred over the average broadband connection. The Internet2 network would be able to transfer the same film in 30 seconds.

While that may be true, these are by no means records generated using a standard file sharing application on a broadband connection. What's the Internet speed record for transferring data on our current internet? I thought the backbones were already well into the gigabit range.

fast

By xsilver on 4/26/2007 6:42:39 AM , Rating: 2

wow, now it only takes the university of tokyo 2 days to download the entire internet's pr0n content. j/k

100GB Backhaul

By mrteddyears on 4/26/2007 7:32:39 AM , Rating: 2

I believe 40GB lambdas are commonplace for internet backbone routers and muxing them is very simple. I have worked on academia networks that use 10GB SDH and Ethernet services for backhaul.

I would like to know who’s routers they are using?