Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Internet Speed Record Broken (Twice)

by Tim Stevens on April 25, 2007 at 11:21 AM

Making the switch from dial-up to broadband feels like a huge increase in speed -- and it is. The fastest you could ever hope to get over a modem is somewhere around 56kbps, or 56,000 bits of data per second. Your average DSL line offers connection speeds somewhere around 200kbps, around four times faster, while cable modem speeds are often upwards of 5,000kbps, which is 90 times faster than dial-up. That's speedy, but not fast enough for some. Are you ready for 9gbps, or 9,000,000 kbps? Researchers at the University of Tokyo are, having reached an astronomical 9.08 gbps transmission rate over a 20,000-mile distance.

To put that into perspective, a DVD movie usually takes up about 4.7 gigabytes of data on the disc, or 5,046,586,572.8 bytes (a byte is 8 bits). Over a 56kbps modem that would take about eight days to download. Over a cable modem you could download the same movie in two hours. At 9gbps, that same movie would download in under 10 seconds. That's some serious speed.

This is all theoretical at this point, as the researchers used customized protocols and hardware to make the transmission. The fastest usable networks today are 1gbps, so it'll be at least another few years before anything close to this is possible at home. By then we'll all be watching High Definition movies anyway, which will be upwards of 50 gigabytes to download.

Related Links:


From USA Today

Tags: breaking+news, Broadband, Cable, DSL, top

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular