Topic: 800 Gbps of bandwidth.

So much for dialup. =)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060524/tc_nf/43405

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... called Internet2.

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You'd think that would be enough bandwidth to handle a space.

Do all proper nouns have to be one contiguous word now?

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Wes said:

Do all proper nouns have to be one contiguous word now?

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Did you miss the meeting?

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DL-44 said:

Did you miss the meeting?

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I thought we decided it was best not to tell him after the "incident" last time?

High bandwidth is all cool and so. But bandwidth is becoming less and less of a problem. Running two connections in parallell will double your bandwidth. Running three will tripple it. And so on...

And that's what they are planning to do to get 800 Gbps.

Today, plenty of people in Europe, the USA and SEA sit on high bandwidth connections. That's good, it makes it easier to send large amounts of data fast. Increasingly the problem is becoming the delay between sending that data and recieving it. MMORPGs such as WoW have noticable problems when people have 300 ms latencies or higher. You don't need that very high speed connection to be able to recieve all data that is sent without starting to lag (unless you're just entering Ironforge...) but if you have high latency, you are going to be lagging nonetheless.

Each of those parallell connections will still have the same latency as a single one of them had. The total latency of the network can't be reduced by throwing bandwidth at it. In fact, it will now probably be increased because of the work needed to sync the connections. Ultimately, the speed of light in fibre (or the electricity in copper, amounting to almost the same thing) is the limit on how low latencies can get. Add to that the time for handling and routing needed between each hop, and the conversion speed at the end points.


Once 10 Mbit/s* connections becomes the norm rather than the exception, the problem becomes more and more that of reducing roundtrips, making the end points handling faster (in most connections the greater part of the latency is added by the end points and hops), and reducing the number of hops with the necessary rerouting and handling latency they add.

* to chose an arbitrary limit - this isn't a hard border, it's more like a gigantic gray zone.

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