Hope she dont have any brandwodth limit such as BT, 0.001 sec and shes blocked for over using her broadband, or in the case of Virgin, after 0.000002 second her speed will drop to 1Mbps :)

Yes, the grannies of the world need higher bandwidth for their malware-riddled Win98 machines.

Fortunately, she probably has only a 10-half NIC on that ancient clunker, so we're all safe for now.

I won't point out that even at 40 Gbps, Windows filesharing would still be pig-slow (send-ack, send-ack...).

... a guy's pornography collection could really flourish!

I've never truly known the meaning of "green with envy" until now. I hope she also has a good storage setup, she could be burning through HD space like a Baldwin through blow.

There is no residential application that requires that kind of data throughput. Hell, you don't get data transmission that quick from your hard disk.

It'd be like having your water delivered down the Channel Tunnel.

She'll hit her monthly download cap in around 5-minutes, then...

Wow, 2000Km without any signal boosting magic is impressive..

But where the hell can you peer onto the net at 40Gb/s anyway!? *Feels like he's missing out*

But wouldn't it still take several minutes to write all that data to disk? Not that I should be complaining given that I'm living in a country where 3Mbps is considered fast :(

I want it!

Even with the fastest disks, gigabit ethernet and various other things, that would still only be fulfilled to a fraction of its speed.

Assuming you used a RAM-based storage solution for high speed access, 10Gigabit+ ethernet connection and had the necessary throughput within your system (whats the maximum speed data can be moved on a modern motherboard?) you'd still be only using a bit of that speed. Connections that fast are designed for huge (and I mean 10-100,000+ terminal universities, businesses and datafarms) numbers of servers or terminals.

All they did was push the bottleneck back to the servers she's downloading from, or the routers and network links in between.

Wheeeeeeeee!!

Hippster

Does that mean that a single fibre from LAX to SFO could operate at this rate?

Or is that a typo, Austin: S.B. 2km?

Personally, I'd settle for 10Mb WiMAX in my lifetime...

...her connection is approximately 750,000 times faster than 56k dial-up and could download the entire capacity of my win-95 pc 10 times per second.

Man, I want her connection.

What does she need that kinda of speed for, anyway? She's an old bid!

That's a lot of bandwidth! I wish I had that! Only problem is, that's a lot of wasted bandwidth. I don't know how her computer is connected to it, but if uses ethernet, standard ethernet tops out at 1 Gbps. So 39 out of those 40 Gbps are wasted. Even if she uses a faster connection, there's no way her computer can process 40 Gbps from the internet plus all other resources like hard drives, USB, etc. Also, where online would a 75 year old be able to go and get the full bandwidth?

It really is funny how some people want to be all dressed up and nowhere to go. Just imagine, spamming at the speed of light.

Problem hooking Gig-E up?

Lutefisk, the all natural male enhancement.

7ut3fi5k, up to 40% off.

I want to know what tech was involved, specifically.

For reference, 10GB ethernet cards are not too uncommon.

Anything more than that, you need a fibre card in your machine, and you'll need one helluva PC to keep up with it..

It _CAN_ be done with todays desktop/server hardware, but it's unusual..

Seems the son has done this 'because he can'.

He obviously has far too much money, and must be planning to site a server farm there :P

Next we'll hear she's been kidnapped and forced to run the biggest Pirate Bay, Bittorrent and eMule servers known to man or granny...

I believe once they pass the 50Gb per second mark, a black hole will develop and all of mankind will be forever doomed just because he wanted porn and films recorded with camcorders with people getting up to go to the toilet half-way through. Marvellous.

BTW Ethernet doesn't top out at 1Gb. Ethernet is encapsulation, so will work at any speed the physical medium can support - so just standard 4 pair UTP tops out at 1 Gb/sec. ;-)

It says that it's connected to her house via Fiber. Odds are she's hooked directly into that via her computer, or she's hooked into that via another type of fiber optic link from a router of some kind, with other ports for when he drops in and wants to host his Battlefield server. Only way I can see to give any validity to that kind of connection rate.

So some swedish granny gets a a 40gb connection, maybe she would have a word with NTL (oops sorry, Virgin) and give a little bandwidth to me. Maybe then this 4mb cable connection would actually run faster than the 512kb ADSL connection I had with BT...

Just a pipedream I suppose.

"Also, where online would a 75 year old be able to go and get the full bandwidth?"

Swedish torrents of old TV shows, obviously. :p

I hope the nic is at least a 10G PCIe or PCI-X card, if not fiber itself. =p

Hells bells - - that is just NOT fair. I'm 1.5km from my exchange (line of sight) in a 4 year old (so people should have known better) and yet the line length is in excess of 7km. So, I get 512k on a good day (that's the "best" I can get) and when it rains, the signal craps out totally. BT have been to look at the line, lots of head scratching and still no better. It'd be faster to attach packets to carrier pigeon. And it's not like I live in the middle of nowhere - 200,000 people populate this town and I live in one of the newer areas - - so go figure.

I don't believe she's actually peering *anywhere* at 40 Gbit/s. For example, even the largest German universities are currently only peering at 10 Gbit/s (just looked it up), and we're talking about Institutions with tens of thousand of students and employees each, high-speed computing facilities, publicly available open source mirrors and what not.

I think the post itself is a bit misleading, because it kind of emphasizes that this huge pipe was organized by her son, but it it stated only shorty that he happens to work at Cisco, and that this is used to show off this new fibre technology. I really think is is the other way round, and maybe Cisco of Sweden was looking among their employees for someone with a sufficiently computer-innocent relative who can be blessed with the sudden availability of vast amounts of bandwith, courtesy of Cisco of course, to generate the desired press response to make their new technology known.

They likely downlplayed Ciscos role in this a bit, for what makes more heads turn: "Cisco develops new xx Gbit/s technology (third time this year already *yawn*)" or: "Son organizes 40 Gbit/s home internet access for his 75 years old mother (wtf?)"

Anyway, nice marketing ploy, and hey guys at Cisco, if you need a guinea pig for this technology in Germany, give me a call, will you?. I'll even do it for free if you ask nicely. XD

Everyone here seems to be making the same silly assumption: who says she only has one PC?

Good, now all she has to do is to keep healthy and wait for the rest of the world to catch up. Jesus Christ!

Everyone assumes she's getting 40Gb/s because of the router interface rate, she could be running Vista ...

You sure could DDOS someone into next week with that.

With 40Gbps you could do a backwards DDoS against a botnet. Anyone suggested the idea to her?

Does she have a boyfriend? Would she like one?

Yeah, yeah - seen it all before. This is obviously the same data transmission technology that Jeff Goldblum used for his teleportation machine in The Fly back in the 80s. Bet it even has the same blue flashing lights and dry-ice effect.

So if a Scandinavian granny pops out of your wireless router sometime soon you'll know they're having DNS problems in Sweden...

Granted you don't need it at the moment, but didn't someone famous in charge of DEC, once question why anyone would ever need need a home computer, or another famous software "engineer" once ask why on earth anyone would need more than 640k of memory? Never say never!

We all know fibre is blazing fast with unlimited bandwidth for all practical purposes. It seems a bit odd to prove what we all ready know. I don't think it'll ever be economically viable to use fibre instead of copper for home users.

I'm curious to know how big the cupboard under her stairs is (doesn't everyone keep the firewall under the stairs?)... I'm currently testing some 40Gb installations, and the terminal equipment occupies all of both sides of a 19 inch rack, 47u high, and then a couple more racks to turn the bits into something useful (SDI video, ATM feeds, AES audios, oh, and 4Gb of IP).

Neil

Or is it just that her Win98 machine popped up and said it was connected at that speed?

I mean, my 28.8 modem used to frequently connect at 115k according to Windows...

Its like having a 14inch D*** with not many places to use it

She should start her own business as an unmetred ISP. 5Mbit genuinely unlimited to her town; she'd rake it in.

"You don't that kind of speen....yet!"

I don't think I'll EVER need a speen, never mind what sort. Unless it's like a really fantastic version of a spork. In which case I do need one. Maybe two.

"I believe once they pass the 50Gb per second mark, a black hole will develop and all of mankind will be forever doomed just because he wanted porn and films recorded with camcorders with people getting up to go to the toilet half-way through."

um... don't know what sort of porn films you've seen with people getting up half-way through to go to the toilet, but reckon they'd be a shock to any Geek Squader (ref. http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/07/09/geek_squad_sting/). That's not to mention the black hole...

I assume it's a 40 GigaBIT connection and not GigaBYTE? If it's the standard Gb then I guess shifting a theoretical 5 gig in a second ain't too bad. How many servers out there are gonna serve data at a speed anywhere near fast enough to take advantage of that? Alright for peer to peer connections if you can find someone with a lightning upload speed.

Not sure I see the usefulness of this at the moment for anyone.

" I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very specialized computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built — one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them. "

(quotation from an article by Lord Bowden; American Scientist vol 58 (1970) pp 43–53); cited on Usenet.

Just wondering... Makes a heck of a hosting platform.

Personally I find the discrepancies between upload and download speeds a more informative paradigm re: 'real' breakthroughs...

Well she might have 40Gb, but as people outlined already:

A) Her PC won't be fast enough to handle 40Gb

B) Even large ISPs in the UK have a max of 10Gb on their backbones

C) What good is 40Gb if the server on the other end of the world is only connected with 64kb (download rate would be around 7kbyte/s regardless of the 40Gb connection)

However for the ISP and networking world this news is not bad at all. Now we wait that ISPs boost their backbones to 40Gb. If we boost DSLAM technology to also deliver that speed per pipe then ISPs can unbundle more users and cover bigger areas with less Hardware. For areas which are to far from the next exchange fibre will certainly be an alternative.

Interesting also the possibility to deliver bandwidth hungry content (HD Movies in full frame rate and resolution to 1080p) over local infrastructure in a hub and spoke setup. Deliver content with 40Gb to hubs/proxies which then deliver the content with lower speeds to the enduser. This would be almost realtime streaming with only a very short latency between request and start of the stream.

But regardless, 40Gb are a backbone speed and not a residential one. Speed isn't everything for the enduser, i rather have a stable connection, a 1:1 contention, several fixed IPs, no 'unfair use policy' that cuts me off or charges me for using my 'unlimited' broadband, no port blocking on the ISP side, no forced proxies and no other games that ISPs like to play with their users to make life hell. Combine this with effective DDoS protection on the core network and you have a bare bone product that users need and want.

Some of the comments above are quite silly.

Bandwidth is not being "wasted" as so many of your are saying.

The fibre wan pipe has a maximum capability of 40Gb/s, just because her computer (you assume she only has one computer, and that cisco havn't stuck a server rack in) is not capable or transfering at that speed, you say its being wasted?

1) How is the bandwidth being wasted? If you dont use bandwidth, then its just not used (and is available for others on the 40G fiber) Its not like leaving a tap running and all the water going down the plug, you just use what you use.

2) As said before the fibre is setup to provide 40Gb/s, so just becasue she can't use it do you think they should make it less efficient? should they introduce impurities into the fibre to really crap the speeds down so they are equal or less than the nic card in her machines(s) NO of course not, you provide a 40G fibre, and you use what you need to.

My webserver is connected to a 40Gb/s fibre, but I only have a 1Gb/s nic card, that doesn't mean I am wasting anything, I am not paying to use that which I am not using.

/me hands out clues to everyone

Its all very well having a 40GB connection but most routers used at home only have a max 100Mb NIC so just how could she download a DVD in two seconds exactly?

I'd lay good money that she has dozens of computers, lives in a secret volcano hideout and has a white cat.

Obviously, the trick to using it is to set up a supercomputer cluster, several thousand terabyte of storage across a few thousand HDs (at the very least) and have it scour the web autonomously, downloading anything and everything that looks remotely like relevant information.

Might be able to top out the 40gb/s connection that way, if the exchange servers can handle the speed involved. You'll have to virtualize a few dozen OSes on said supercomputer though, as with only 65k ports she'll run out of them in no time at all.

So... Who wanted to host a new MMORPG server over there? Because this kind of setup sounds like a perfect solution for it, provided the backbone has a decent latency and keeps up with the whole thing.

Let's see... Assuming 40gb/s and overheads... About 12 seconds or so to download my 320gb HD. If it's 40gbit/s, about a minute and a half.

We're all assuming that the bus-pass toting woman is sitting there with her 9x PC looking at her grandkids photo's and the occasional youtube video of what it was like in the 40's, but perhaps she's running a multinational server hosting service? Or she could have a secret underground lair and has aspirations of world domination.

I think the "DEC" quote... was actually IBM, and it was "I only see a need for 10 computer in the world". Something like that

Futher proof, if any was needed: we're running out of bandwith and must end network neutrality for good!

Holy Download Speed Batman!

...do you think she'd host my Counter Strike server?

It's all part of the Lizard Army's plan to take over the world, somewhere to control all their mind control robots and taser fitted robots!