Internet2 Backbone Reaches 100Gbps

By Tim Conneally | Published October 11, 2007, 3:49 PM

The Internet2 consortium has been pushing record data transfer speeds for the last 11 years. Yesterday it was announced to have raised its ceiling tenfold.

Unfortunately, the infrastructure will not be publicly available any time soon, but the speed is enough to make people wonder how they'd use such a resource. DVD-quality video streams with 5.1-channel audio would be just the tip of the iceberg. These speeds make even the most demanding consumer's tasks sound easy.

Consider one of the speculated first uses: to work with the $1.8 billion Large Hadron particle collider at an underground CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire/European Council for Nuclear Research) facility located 100 meters below Geneva. The collider is scheduled to begin experiments in May that will generate data on particle behavior.

Such experiments could use internet2's massive bandwidth to stream data to laboratories. It has been forecasted that the machine would require at least a constant 1.8Gbps to stream effectively.

"It's now possible for a single computer to have a 10 gigabit connection and we needed to have a way of making sure that those kinds of demanding applications could be served at the same time as all the normal uses," said Doug Van Houweling, Internet2's chief executive.

Houweling goes on to say that the connection to the 100Gbps backbone will be established by two 10Gbps connections that "team up" to accommodate especially demanding tasks.

Comments

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How about getting 100mbit broadband across 95% of the population of the U.S. NOW instead of worrying about some experimental "Internet2"???

We're supposed to be leaders and what are we doing? Coming in last in a lot of ways. /sigh

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It's surprising how many times when seeing news about technological advances in core internet(backbone, ISP-to-ISP, hardware, whatever..) users jump wondering when they will get that *for them*.
Is it that difficult to understand that "if I have everything, *nothing* remains for the rest"?

(that, aside the fact that a 100Gbps connection is 99% useless for most people)

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"(that, aside the fact that a 100Gbps connection is 99% useless for most people)"

Easier/Faster to download those P2P items.

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Someone please tell me the way to get it, even if beta!

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Start a major university and get a recent wealthy grad to donate Millions to the technology/Research departments,

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Ok, now I have seen all sanity leaving the board...

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awesome, i want it!

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So with 2 connections it's 1/5 full.

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Downloading porn that fast, better use lots of lube :)

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What's that gonna cost per month?

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Awsome, can't wait till it gets to my house. Verizon surprized me when they ran fiber to my house for there new fios service a while ago. The future looks good.

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Yah, I wish Bellsouth would run fiber for fios. I would be very surprised.

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Not any time soon, unless you happen to live @ a University or government research facility. :)

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I2 was never meant to be accessed by the public, but than again neither was ARPA Net, which the Internet is first based from either.....

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Houweling goes on to say that the connection to the 100Gbps backbone will be established by two 10Gbps connections that "team up" to accommodate especially demanding tasks.

Hard to believe that two connections of 10Gbps will allow a 100Gbps connection...

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Funnily enough, backbone != connection.

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It won't. What he is saying is that in this one instance to make use of the backbone they are going to connect to it using 2x10Gbps. Their experiment needs 1.8 Gbps+. So 20Gbps is more than enough.

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I prefer the =/= more universally understood (as a equals with a line thru)

:-)

or does this show correct "?" U+2260 Not Equal To

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