[HN Gopher] Japan breaks world record for fastest internet speed
___________________________________________________________________
Japan breaks world record for fastest internet speed
Author : thunderbong
Score : 102 points
Date : 2021-09-27 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.freethink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.freethink.com)
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| "... it might not be too difficult to integrate the tech into
| existing infrastructure."
|
| Just need to dig up all fiber and replace it with new fiber. Does
| it get any more difficult than that?
| avianlyric wrote:
| Depending on how the fiber was installed, you'll probably be
| able to swap the fiber by just pulling or blowing new fiber
| down the existing conduit.
|
| You can't just drop bare fiber in the ground, and cover it up.
| So pretty much all fiber will probably be inside plastic or
| metal conduit, which also creates an opportunity to replace it
| much easier than laying new fiber.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Do you mean "You can't drop bare fiber"?
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| Drop bare* and not Drop Bear, the infamous Australian
| creature
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > You can just drop bear fiber in the ground, and cover it
| up.
|
| You _can_ do this, but it 's a bad idea, so I think you meant
| "can't" (with a unstated "and expect it to work properly,
| especially long-term").
| avianlyric wrote:
| Yeah, the most frustrating typo I make almost every day.
| asperous wrote:
| It being the same size means they can just push it through the
| existing holes to replace cables which is cheaper then digging
| new holes. But certainly far from cheap or easy
| andi999 wrote:
| Maybe the backend that can deliver such a rate? Typical RAM
| speed is 25GB/s, L3 cache around 400GB/s. So having 30TB/s
| needs 1000 standard RAMs running in parallel.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| It will be hard to splice a fiber with 4 cores or put a connector
| to it.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Are these kind of internet speeds being used anywhere in
| practice? Governments? Telecoms?
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| If they are being used anywhere currently it would be prop
| trading shops.
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| traders would be way more concerned about latency than
| throughput.
| shubb wrote:
| This seems like a technology demonstrator, rather than an
| operational system.
|
| International undersea cables that carry a continents internet
| are scary fast, but in the tens of terabytes.
| bserge wrote:
| Porn archives
| idworks1 wrote:
| In 2003, I was chatting with a schoolmate and I sent him a file.
| It arrived instantly.
|
| Him: Oh my God, that was fast
|
| Me: I know. I have super fast internet.
|
| Him: Ha, what's your internet speed?
|
| Me: 3 MBps.
|
| Him: That's literally not even possible.
|
| I was kidding of course, it must have been a fluke or the stars
| were aligned just right. We were both on Dial up. So yeah, my
| slow 100 Mb/s internet at home today is plenty fast. I wouldn't
| even know what to do with a Tb/s.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Do you hear this, Canada !!!
| CanadaHearsU wrote:
| Yes?
| podiki wrote:
| Japan's internet infrastructure, at least in Tokyo where I lived
| for a bit, is amazing. Most buildings were wired up with fiber
| (this is ~2011) with 100 Mbps up/down pretty standard and cheap
| (~$30/month at the time I think). Pretty sure you had 300+ speeds
| available then too. The fiber is from the national telecom, with
| dozens of ISPs for your actual service, and email etc. if you
| wanted it. My apartment had a switch somewhere too I realized,
| with each room having an ethernet jack. Needless to say, it was
| rough going back to the US after that.
| Longprao wrote:
| Vietnam's internet infrastructure in big cities is quite
| impressive too. If paid in advance for an year, you could get
| 100 Mbps up/down for ~$11/month. There are several ISPs
| competing with each other so the speed goes up, the price goes
| down every few years. High speed fiber internet is commonplace.
| Higher speed is available too.
|
| The only downside is that some websites are blocked, or slowed
| down at some points.
| Koshkin wrote:
| $11 = 250426 d
| cheeze wrote:
| Seems like it depends on the city and state. I have symmetric
| gigabit backed by fiber in a suburb, and most of my friends out
| in the boonies have the same.
|
| I dream of a world where symmetric 100 is $30/mo everywhere
| though!
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I currently (temporarily) live in the boonies (3 hours north
| of SF in the woods) and Starlink can't be available soon
| enough.
|
| I'm renting office space in town where the best I can get is
| a 40 Mb DSL line because I can't get anything other than
| HughesNet at the house. More than a few days of SSH over
| satellite will make you want to regret the day you decided
| programming would be a fun profession.
|
| Forgetting about the latency for a moment, even though
| HughesNet advertises nice speeds, it's very much the same
| "speeds up to" crap most other ISP do. They're so
| oversubscribed that you can barely browse the internet in the
| evening most of the time.
| fossuser wrote:
| Starlink works well (got it for my in-laws place in
| Placerville). It was a little rocky early on with more
| frequent dropouts, but now the dropouts are rare and the
| speeds are fast: 50mbps to 200mbps and this is with the
| dish being slightly obstructed by a tree.
|
| In SF though I'm in a webpass wired building and have 1gbps
| up and down for ~$700/yr or ~$58/month.
|
| On the Peninsula Comcast had 1gbps down and 35mbps up, but
| they also had a (very expensive) Comcast Gigabit Pro plan
| that was 2gbps down and 2gbps up with a second 1gbps
| down/up line included too and a fancy switch also. Hard to
| order though and the reps don't know about it. Cool that
| it's available though.
|
| I never ended up getting it, but I wrote up some details
| here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6u
| n2/comc...
| selykg wrote:
| I'm sort of in a very rural area. Farm fields across the
| street from me. But I'm also ~5 minutes or so away from
| downtown.
|
| I have available to me gigabit (down) from Comcast. I had it
| for awhile and it was glorious but it was also $80/mo on
| promo and $110 when not. The reason I got it was not for the
| download speeds, it was the faster upload speeds that came
| along with it. Still slow, and not even remotely close to
| speedy. But it was a solid 12mbit up. Compared to the 5mbit
| up I get on my 100down plan.
|
| I would kill for some reliable upload speeds. It's awful
| anymore just sending images to people, never mind you want to
| send a quick minute long video to someone and it takes
| several minutes to send.
| zokier wrote:
| Any network engineers around? What leads comcast to offer
| such lopsided connectivity? I mean having some sort of
| asymmetry is normal and somewhat justified, but usually
| were talking something like 1:10 upstream:downstream. Here
| parent comment has fairly extreme 1:83 instead!? I imagine
| there must be some reasoning behind it, but I just can't
| figure what that would be.
| deepspace wrote:
| Municipal Fiber is the way to make that happen. It allows
| ISPs to offer very cheap rates, since they do not have to
| provide the infrastructure. I live in a building connected to
| a municipal network, and pay $32 Canadian for symmetric
| gigabit.
| usmannk wrote:
| You can't even get symmetric gbit in most of San Francisco :(
| lostmsu wrote:
| I am in rural part of Bellevue (Greater Seattle Area), and
| we have symmetric gbit from Ziply. Works like a charm, but
| lacks IPv6.
| xxpor wrote:
| I'm sorry but there's no such thing as a rural part of
| Bellevue. Regardless of however not-dense your particular
| area is you're still close to a major population center.
| lostmsu wrote:
| _shrug_ everything is relative.
| jnathsf wrote:
| About 50% of SF has above ground wiring and Sonic offers
| 1gig symmetrical in those neighborhoods at a reasonable
| cost.
| mushufasa wrote:
| nyc has fiber with 300/down for $40/mo now....
| ayngg wrote:
| I remember I recently did speed tests on the free wifi that
| they offer throughout Tokyo and it was always around
| 100-150Mbps u/d (I came across this clip when looking to
| verify[1]). It is kind of disheartening that they offer
| comparable internet speeds for free from old telephone booths
| that people in the west can pay over 50$/mo for even in large
| cities.
|
| [1]: https://clips.twitch.tv/SourDreamyButterflyOSsloth
| krzyk wrote:
| For 2011 it was quite something.
|
| But I wonder how it looked e.g. in Romania at that time, they
| had pretty nice fiber infrastructure because they didn't a lot
| of the old cables, and in 2015 I read that they had 500 Mbps
| links (not sure if symmetric) affordable.
|
| And in Poland I'm currently paying ~20 USD/month for 1Gbps up /
| 300 Mbps down (I got it 2 years ago). 4 years ago I had 300
| Mbps / 30 Mbps for similar amount.
|
| This is in suburbs of a bigger city (not capital).
| jcelerier wrote:
| .. is that supposed to be amazing ? I had 100mb in a medium-
| sized french city, Montpellier, in 2010 (apparently existed
| since 2006: https://blog.ariase.com/box/actualite/article-833-n
| oosnumeri...) and gigabit fiber since 2012 in Bordeaux.
|
| Right now I'm at my parents in a _small_ 1000-inhabitants
| village (closest "large" city, Carcassonne, 45k inhabitants,
| is 30km away) and they're getting 2gb fiber installed next
| week.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Compared to the US, unfortunately, it is. I have Verizon FiOS
| in a major metropolitan center and only get about 200MB both
| ways. And that's not even the base plan, that's an upgraded
| plan.
|
| As with most things like this in the US, the cause is
| privatization of things that should be public utilities and
| unchecked monopolistic behavior. In most places you have
| exactly one choice in internet service provider, so they give
| you what they give you at the price they ask and you deal
| with it or you don't have home internet.
|
| And in 2011? Forget about it. I had crappy copper-wire DSL in
| 2011 and was glad for it.
| nickvanw wrote:
| Parts of the US are catching up, but it is distributed very
| unequally (and often much more expensive).
|
| Anecdotally, I moved into a newish (~5 year old) apartment
| building in Seattle and had my choice of three ISPs that each
| provided symmetrical gigabit for around $60/month, delivered
| via an Ethernet jack in a low-voltage cabinet in my closet.
|
| Getting it wired up took one phone call, wherein my switch port
| was activated remotely and I could grab an IP address and start
| using the internet. IPv6 via DHCPv6-PD and everything else
| worked without a charm.
|
| On the other hand, where I live in (also Seattle) is served by
| exactly one ISP via DOCSIS, providing 1000/35 but nothing more.
| It can vary block by block here unfortunately.
| cogman10 wrote:
| In my neck of the woods, it's all about competition (or that
| lack there of). I went from 100mbps down for $130 to 300mbps
| down for $60. What changed? A new ISP in town offering 1 gbps
| for $100.
|
| If we wanted what other countries have for internet, then
| what we need is to make the lines public and have ISPs rent
| them from the government. The reason ISPs can create these
| duopolies is because every new company has to invest a LOT of
| money to lay down new data lines. If a company already has
| their cable/phone lines in place then boom, captured market.
|
| Rentable public data lines would make the cost of setting up
| new ISPs a LOT cheaper.
| _Adam wrote:
| I had the same issue ("1000/35" with Xfinity but in reality
| it was barely 10/1) but keep checking because CenturyLink is
| regularly bringing fiber to new areas. For the same price I
| can get 1000/1000 symmetric now.
| nickvanw wrote:
| CenturyLink wired my entire neighborhood a number of years
| ago, but it looks like _before_ my house was built, and
| they haven't come back since.
|
| All of my neighboring blocks have 1g/1g from them, but the
| most they offer at my address is a 40/40 "fiber-based coax"
| internet that I'm probably not even wired for. I would love
| for that to change - my DOCSIS internet has been pretty
| solid, but I miss the gigabit upload.
| zaphoyd wrote:
| can I ask which Seattle area ISP offers IPv6 via DHCPv6-PD
| nickvanw wrote:
| Definitely!
|
| Wave G (NOT Wave's coax-based DOCSIS that they bought years
| ago) offers/offered IPv6 via PD, lots of documentation for
| it around the internet: https://gist.github.com/dmtucker/cf
| 3f241cf002367825633c988ff... (this isn't me).
|
| I haven't been a Wave G customer in a number of years, but
| I don't anticipate it's changed since ~2018
| d--b wrote:
| Geez couldn't they come up with this _before_ eveything got
| fibered?
| ksec wrote:
| I was thinking "again"? Turns out this was from July. Last
| discussions [1], [2]. It is basically just pushing the limit of
| WDM and MIMO.
|
| Much more interesting would be Hollow-core Optical Fiber across
| long distance where we could reduce latency by 30%. Unfortunately
| not coming any time soon.
|
| Edit: ( Not sure why the downvote )
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27858067
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818357
| ricardobeat wrote:
| "Just pushing the limit" is quite the understatement. Someone
| correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the _total combined
| bandwidth_ of internet undersea cables today is ~400Tb /s
| ksec wrote:
| >but I believe the total combined bandwidth of the internet
| today is ~400Tb/s
|
| I am not sure how one could even measured _combined_
| bandwidth of the internet. Just measuring Tier 1 network?
|
| For reference The purposed PLCN connection from US to HK has
| 144Tbps alone. The current HKA already has 100Tbps.
| zokier wrote:
| The two major new transatlantic cables, Durant and Amite
| are both 350 Tbps each. I think Googles Grace Hopper cable
| is another 350 Tbps.
|
| https://www.capacitymedia.com/articles/3829012/a-new-era-
| of-...
| fouric wrote:
| > Edit: ( Not sure why the downvote )
|
| "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never
| does any good, and it makes boring reading."[1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dzonga wrote:
| for what it's worth such speeds plus massive consumer affordable
| hard-drives say 100tb then the net might swing back to being peer
| to peer. remember the bittorent days, how torents were slow ?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Are there any theoretical limits to how much data can be encoded
| via fiber optics? If not, what's the current bottleneck for
| putting terabyte fiber in every home? (I'm assuming it's a lack
| of reliable, cheap and precise hardware clocks, but I've been
| wrong many times before)
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Theoretical limit is `freqency * log(energy budget /
| effective[0] noise floor)`, give or take a small multiplicative
| constant depending on how efficient your error correction is.
|
| 0: For low frequencies or (relatively) high noise, this is the
| actual noise floor, but for high frequencies/very low noise,
| the limit is that you can only send a integer number of
| photons, each costing some non-negligible fraction of your
| power budget (so the effective noise floor is (half, I think?)
| the power needed to send one photon per cycle).
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| what's the dimensional analysis on this equation? if we
| assume blue light, that's
|
| 6.66 * 10^14 Hz * log(...? / ...?) = x Tbps
| a1369209993 wrote:
| For the photon quantization regime, I think we have a
| photon energy scaled as `hbar THz`, so a noise floor as
| `hbar THz^2` (1/2 photon / cycle is about 23uW at 666THz
| [450nm], or 19uW at 600THz [500nm]). Your Tbps is then
| `log(power / noise floor) * frequency` aka `log(power/0.5
| hbar frequency^2) * frequency`. The effect of noise floor
| (and consequently quantization-regime frequency) on data
| rate isn't really cooperative with dimensional analysis on
| account of the logarithm.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| There's probably a theoretical limit to fiber optic wavelength
| since it's hard to create really high energy photons. But
| otherwise, I don't think so.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Are there any theoretical limits to how much data can be
| encoded via fiber optics?
|
| Wavelength frequency/2
| Sebb767 wrote:
| We already hit wavelength transfer limits (though in
| transmitter accuracy/viability) and can pretty easily
| circumvent that by transmitting different wave lengths on the
| same fiber. So you need to multiply this by the amount of
| distinct wavelengths we can use.
| [deleted]
| baybal2 wrote:
| > If not, what's the current bottleneck for putting terabyte
| fiber in every home? (I'm assuming it's a lack of reliable,
| cheap and precise hardware clocks,
|
| Even very poor countries these days have ftth at at least 1gbps
| physical interface data rate (1gbase lx/gepon/gpon). What they
| don't have is upstream capacity.
|
| America is unique in having tons of upstream fibre, but
| extremely bad last mile situation.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kazinator wrote:
| That's the fantasy, anyway. Older people in Japan are still being
| taken for a ride with crap Internet service that cuts out when a
| phone call comes in and can barely sustain LINE video calls.
| deadalus wrote:
| The new record is 319 terabits per second (Tb/s).
|
| Ookla Global Internet Speeds Comparison :
| https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
|
| The global average speed of Fixed Broadband is 110 Mbps(download)
| and 60 Mbps(upload).
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| What's preventing the average Joe from enjoying 1+Tb/s
| broadband? Fiber everywhere? A specific kind of fiber?
| Different tech on the ISP end?
| sigstoat wrote:
| > What's preventing the average Joe from enjoying 1+Tb/s
| broadband?
|
| are other responders not seeing the 'T'?
|
| it is the rare home device which can handle 2.5Gbps. 10Gbps
| switches are common enough. the cheapest switch i'm seeing on
| fs.com with a 100Gbps uplink port is $3500.
|
| i don't think we currently have the tech to drive 100Gbps
| through a single port, i think it's done with multiple
| wavelengths being multiplexed onto a single fiber, and then
| split back out.
|
| so... at a minimum, joe is kept from 1 Tbps of bandwidth by
| $35,000, some optical multiplexing hardware, 10+U of rack
| space, and having absolutely no conceivable way to put the
| kind of bandwidth to use.
|
| plus his part of the amortized capital costs to build the
| ISP's end of that.
| iptrans wrote:
| 100G per wavelength has been standard fare for some time
| now.
|
| The confusion is probably due to the fact that you _can_
| also run the 100G using multiple lanes at lower speeds.
|
| It all depends on what optics you use.
|
| You also don't need 10U worth of rack space to switch 1
| Tbps. You can do that with a single 1U switch.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > 100G per wavelength has been standard fare for some
| time now.
|
| fair enough.
|
| > You also don't need 10U worth of rack space to switch 1
| Tbps. You can do that with a single 1U switch.
|
| how much does that cost?
| bradlys wrote:
| You wouldn't even be able to transfer the data out of
| memory at speed. Even if you overclocked your DDR4 ram to
| crazy levels - you'd tap out at 50GB/s - a far cry from
| 1Tbs/s.
|
| There is very little practical use to speeds beyond 10
| gigabit for home use unless you have some insane PCIE
| storage or keep a giant ram drive. (Which again asks the
| practical use category - what are you doing?)
| remus wrote:
| > There is very little practical use to speeds beyond 10
| gigabit for home use
|
| Give it a few years and we'll all be wondering how SPA
| web apps became gigabytes in size and trying to work out
| how to make 1Tbs/s to the home practical.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Monopolies like ComcastNBCUniversal who have pretty much
| every congressman/woman in their pocket.
| chakspak wrote:
| This. I have a friend with 1Gbps up/down at his house. I've
| been waiting for fiber for like 10 years but it's never
| been available at any place I've lived. This is despite the
| fact that we live in the same (relatively small) county.
| This situation could only be possible if they just didn't
| care about making fiber available to everyone.
| fouric wrote:
| Aside from the actual fiber itself: literally your entire
| computer. No part of a modern consumer computing device has
| 1Tb/s bandwidth - RAM, SSDs, networking cards, PCI, the
| front-side bus, and everything else, with the possible
| exception of the L1 cache[1], have maximum bandwidths _well_
| below 1Tb /s (= 125 GiB/s).
|
| [1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/329789/ho
| w-c...
| yuliyp wrote:
| Nothing prevents it, except practicality: running enough
| fibers to support a terabit point to point is already hard
| enough. Add in needing to support millions of people and it
| becomes impossible. As is, internet routers and fiber links
| already use tons of power. Asking for 1000xing that just
| can't happen without a dyson sphere or something.
| t-writescode wrote:
| I don't know if I'd go that far - we can probably get more
| than 1000x throughput without absorbing the whole power of
| the sun - but it would require some meaningful amounts of
| infrastructure improvements and replacements.
| yuliyp wrote:
| Fair enough. I used a dyson sphere as a shorthand for "a
| power generation technology giving us orders of magnitude
| more power than we are generating now"
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| His (and all of his neighbors') Wi-Fi setup.
| jwineinger wrote:
| Oversubscribed neighborhood trunk lines prevent me from
| enjoying my 80Mbs down somewhat regularly.
| kazinator wrote:
| Congestion?
|
| The fact that the server Joe is pulling from won't feed that
| file to him at that rate going out its own locally attached
| ethernet? (Due to either throttling, or serving stuff
| thousands of others?)
|
| There is a seven lane highway three miles from where Joe
| lives; why can't he drive to his friend across town in 3
| minutes?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| That's insane. I don't think my computer can transfer 319 MB/s.
|
| Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook stored about 1.2 million
| terabytes of data in 2019. With this speed you could download
| all of this data in about 8 hours.
| cheeze wrote:
| Assuming you have a standard gigE port, it can't.
| trulyme wrote:
| To be pedantic: it might be able to transfer 319 MB/s (with
| a gigabit port), but almost certainly not 319 GB/s, let
| alone 319 TB/s.
| wang_li wrote:
| A 1 Gbps ethernet port has a transfer rate of 125 MB/s.
| With protocol overhead you would see peak bandwidth
| measured at around 110 MB/s.
| redm wrote:
| Geez, and I was surprised to see 400Gbps QDR optics hitting the
| mainstream. Even if we double the data rate every few of years
| (as we have been, 10Gbps, 25Gbps, 40Gbps, 100Gbps, 200Gbps,
| 400Gbps, 800Gbps, I expect it will continue), we are at least 10
| full cycles off from realizing those kinds of speeds, or 30-40
| years?
|
| Edit: since they are multiplexing, it almost seems like this is
| DWDM, on 4 optics, and combined into a single datastream. That
| means is probably more attainable sooner. Seems similar to just
| adding more cores (or lanes like in current QDR optics).
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Seems similar to just adding more cores (or lanes like in
| current QDR optics).
|
| The current trend is actually reducing those. 1 lambda 100gbps
| sfp56-dd would be a goldmine for the first chipmaker to ace it.
| nso wrote:
| I am curious what the application would be today.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Carrier aggregation lines, undersea cables and, possibly,
| large data center uplinks. Of course, this is probably not
| financially viable yet.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I hear React is planning a version 3, and you might go from
| zero to a full Jira page in less than 7 seconds (assuming you
| are not logged in).
| randomopining wrote:
| What's even the point for 99% of households and people beyond
| like 100mb down/20m up with sub 10ms ping? That's perfectly good
| for like 3 4k streams at once, HD video chatting, gaming,
| learning, etc. while backing up iCloud stuff.
| iptrans wrote:
| 20M is very little bandwidth for any kind of cloud backups.
| jl6 wrote:
| I wonder if they actually sent an IP packet, which IMHO is what
| would qualify it as an "internet speed".
| bch wrote:
| Agreed - it seems to me they've built a medium that _signals_
| at the described rate, but didn't actually send data? I could
| be misreading. I was looking to find who's TCP /IP stack got
| pressed into service, but I guess that's for a future story.
|
| Edit: this isn't my area of expertise, but
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28674318 and the provided
| link explain why even "Internet" (let alone tcp/ip) might be
| quite orthogonal to what this technology really is.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Undersea cables carry data using their own framing protocol
| [1]. Safe to assume this is what they measured for the test.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_netwo
| rki...
| danellis wrote:
| What do you mean by "their own"? There's nothing about
| SONET/SDH that's specific to undersea cables.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| "Their own" in opposition to TCP/IP and wires. May not
| have been the best choice of words.
| klodolph wrote:
| IP packets are variable size... which is why everyone measures
| the data rate of the underlying system.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I assume they never had any Comcast style data caps to contend
| with.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Assuming you had a ~10ms uplink delay, you could send out ten
| times your data cap before the endpoint even processes the
| first package ;)
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(page generated 2021-09-27 23:02 UTC)