I'm sure requiring 10% margin in World Records like the 100 meter dash would go over real well. Imagine, you'd need to run it in 8.86 just to get listed in the books. How lame.

If they did achieve a statistically significant run, they'd know the margin of error, and require a future run to best the low end of the margin instead of requiring a blanket 10%.

Obviously Dr. Hiraki needs to leave the university for a while and to visit some school - he needs few lessons in reading and mathematics:

a. there are many many standards for 10Gbit Ethernet physical layer (OSI L1) but the most popular one does support two bitrates - 9.953 and ... 10.3 Gbit/s;

b. 10% over the achieved 9.08 makes 9.988 Gbit/s which indeed cannot be exceeded on a 9.953 but should not be a big issue for a 10.3 Gbit network.

If one does not trust the biggest team blog on Earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_gigabit_Ethernet#LAN_PHY), just looking at some vendor specifications (http://www.digchip.com/datasheets/parts/datasheet/368/PM5390.php / http://www.pmc-sierra.com/products/details/pm5390/) should prove the existence of the ten-plus-epsilon bitrate.

Obviously Goldie needs to pull his head out of a dark place for a while and to educate himself about how the Internet works.

Dr. Hiraki's team transferred data over a distance of 30,000Km.

Last time I've checked, there's no "Ethernet" standard that allows transmission over such a distance.

The record established is an *Internet* Land Speed Record, not an *Ethernet* Speed Record. In the real world, a 30,000Km data link spanning several continents will have to use OC192 optical channels supplied by a telecom carrier, unless you're willing to lay your own optical fiber spanning several continents as well as the associated signal regenerators / repeaters.

OC192's data rate is 9953.28 Mbit/s (of which 9621.504 Mbit/s is the raw payload and 331.776 Mbit/s is taken up by overhead). From this 9621.504 Mbit/s raw payload, you must then substract the IP and TCP encapsulation overhead to arrive at the data rate that is really available to an application.

The new application-level record of 9.08Gb/s is thus close to a practical maximum.

But, a small point is that the most of the world uses SDH, not SONET - so the channel would be a STM-64. But then I think the rates are the same anyway, making this a rather useless contribution.