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

Old Lady Gets World's Fastest Broadband

by Terrence O'Brien on July 17, 2007 at 10:31 AM

So you think your cable modem is fast? Maybe you think that those Japanese are lucky with their average broadband speed of 61 megabits per second. Well, one woman has put all those to shame. Sigbritt Löthberg, a resident of Karlstad, Sweden has been set up with the worlds fastest broadband connection -- 40 Gigabits per second. Yes that's right Gigabits. Thats roughly 800 times faster than the speediest FIOS connection available (50 Megabits for $90 a month).

Löthberg can watch 1,500 HD channels ... at the same time. Or maybe download an HD DVD ... in two seconds. At this speed, the aging so-called "Internet backbone" is the primary bottle neck she faces.

This connection was arranged by Sigbritt's son, Peter Löthberg, an internet legend in Sweden who has influenced designs and decisions by Cisco and Sprint. He famously joked (we hope) that he was sent by God to network the Earth.

Peter arranged for the connection with help from Cisco using a new modulation technology that increases the speed and distance a fiber connection can travel. He said that he wanted to show that you can build a cheap and fast connection over a great distance. The hardest part according to him, was installing Windows on his mother's PC.

Our one question, why give the worlds fastest connection to a 75-year-old woman who has never even owned a computer before? We've got a lot of movies we'd like to download ... legally of course.

From The Local

Related Links:

Tags: broadband, fiber, fiber optic, FiberOptic, internet, Löthberg, sweden

Comments

3

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