...but its only 100,000 users with 10meg/sec connections, the west coast of the usa alone is approx 50 million. even if only half have standard 2meg broadband it is still several orders of magnitude short of what is needed, and that is only internal to the us, nevermind an overseas connection

after thinking of this the internet suddenly feels much more impressive.

I just moved to Seattle..where do I sign up?

I just ordered the most expensive package at $3 a day...

You seem to misunderstand how internet bandwidth functions. Just because a freeway only has 4 lanes does not mean that there can only be 4 cars on it at a time.

Currently, the maximum speed of an internet connection for 'Internet 1' is an OC-768, or about 39 gb/s. This does not mean that your downloads will come in at 39 gb/s.

To use a classic example, this means that it is possible for you to have 39 billion cars coming to or from your office in any one second. In practice, however, you'll probably never have more than about 10 million cars coming or going a second, because a) very few people have that many cars to send to you every second, b) the road/tube three intersections from your office only has space for that many cars every second, and c) there's to damn many trucks full of movies and spam around blocking the really big road/tube that can move 39 billion cars a second.

So, the announcement of being able to get your full 39 billion cars a second point to point is exciting, let alone 1,000 billion cars. It's kind of a big deal.

"after thinking of this the internet suddenly feels much more impressive." ...Yeah, Andy S, but they have to invent some way of Controlling IT without pulling the Plug.

Treat IT as an ARG and make the World a Beta Place. IT is what IT is all about, surely. One man's Zero Day Vulnerability is another Opportunity for Words Scripted across Sites for Domain and Dominion..... AI Beta Control.

What do you Think Drives The Register apart from Live Input in IT Matters? Feed in something ESPecial and IT will Lead with Peer Review ensuring Excellence and added Perspective for Inclusion in the Reality Perceived.

The point is that end users never come even vaguely near to using 100% of their connection, in truth (and the gamble that ISP's play) its a very small percentage of the connection is used (and this is why P2P traffic causes ISPs havoc).

As an ISP our average utilisation is around 1% of the total connectivity we sell and peak usage is around 5%, so putting that in context for every100mbit/s we sell to end users leads to a backhaul usage of just 5mbit/s.

if unicast P2P is such as problem for ISPs the world over then why do they insist on always turning off the the generic multicasting capability found in all industrial strenth kit.

if they just turned it on all the way to the end users and told them, the bedroom coders would thenget to work and solve your unicasting P2P problem for you, and everyones a winner as users got their content and save vast amounts of bandwidth all round.

just turn it on, its powered an available right now.

Big deal, I've got two of those in my bedroom

"if unicast P2P is such as problem for ISPs the world over then why do they insist on always turning off the the generic multicasting capability found in all industrial strenth kit."

Because unicast P2P can't be billed and multicast billing is even harder. The basic idea for an isp is to sell high bandwidth while actually supplying low bandwidth and preferably force all content through their content distribution (billing) system to make the user pay double price.

However when we talk about aggrevated bandwidth at the backbones being to low, we tend to forget that there could be city wide p2p networks tightly connected with cross continent p2p backbone links that connect them to other city wide networks. (connect to highest bandwidth/nearest node rule with only supernodes allowed to go over backbones) This way we could reach 100 percent network utilization on backbones and wans. Of course this is against the intentions of service providers, but it can be done.

"As an ISP our average utilisation is around 1% of the total connectivity we sell and peak usage is around 5%, so putting that in context for every100mbit/s we sell to end users leads to a backhaul usage of just 5mbit/s."

Where do you work??? The last ISP I worked at was at 100% utilisation of it's centrals for 7/8 hours a day!!!

So much for the 'suggested applications' of medical, supercomputing and the like. Tell it like it is. I'll be able to stream my porn with out it pausing and buffering so much.

First off, the ISP oversells its own connection, so that its capacity might actually be only 1% of that which it sells to customers, so both Ben and Jason can be right.

Second, anyone that thinks that Internet2 will serve all 50 Mpeople on the west coast... I2 is for educational institutions only. So it really only serves those in Universities, and even then all of those Universities have non-I2 connections, since only intra-university traffic is routed through I2.

And yeah, that means you can't "Sign Up" unless you happen to have an educational institution on your hands.

Hey Jason, so what was it like working for Tiscali? :o)

IPSs do have problems scrambling enough bandwidth to provide end users their content. P2P traffic and spam is clogging up the wire, but what can you do? ISPs should provide what people are paying for, and because people want and can get pirated music and movies, and sell spam sent from botnets, that's not something ISPs can try to prevent.

If a customer pays for something, he will not stand for not having it delivered. The competition will come up and offer the service at a slightly higher price and destroy that company.

The way I see it is providing content legally. The longer big media companies take to realize the internet is the best medium for on-demand media the worse its going to get for them. What did Youtube sell for? 6 billion dollars? And its a pretty crap service in my opinion, people still want it.

Unicast is the only way to deliver media today, in my opinion, since people have discovered it they are hooked, if the only method available to them in getting it is P2P they will do it, and ISPs have nothing they can do about that.

Still, pirates and spammers should all die! Anybody seen the last Heroes episode btw?

If it wasn't for him... you would not be reading this right now...

Thank you Mr. Gore!!

SEED PLZ!!!! ;)

Speed doesn't matter, if the latency isn't any good.

As for ISP's in the UK, from what I gather, they generally do max out their BT central connections, but their actual link to the internet is generally under-capacity... I guess that shows where the cost is!

IMHO the info is not too much about the possibility of downloang inter college pron at high speed. The article is more aout a political will to use some of the dark fiber [1] for academic experiment on high troughput dependent, remote services. It might well be that the line will be partially or totaly reserved to some academic projects and that no college pron will go on it at all, let alone some low quality college party music (I've been there).

Max theoretical throuput of a single fiber with optical amplifiers is 1.6 Tbit/s [2] (160 colors @ 10Gbit/s per color)

There is nothing technically impressive abot this perticular connection if I may, but politically it is a nice investment.

I believe articles

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Fiber

and

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWDM

could be of great interest so some readers around.

Why doesn't someone write a virus that uses the same techniques and exploits as all the other viruses, but instead of installing a spam agent, it gets rid of any crappy trojan thats on there. Then we might have some more free bandwidth because there would be less spam flying everywhere! And i will be able to get excited when i get an email, because it will be for me

If Ben King is being truthful and accurate, things have improved quite a bit in the last 5 years. In 2000, while the DSL vendors were busy dissing the Cable vendors about shared bandwith, the dirty little secret was that _all_ residential ISPs were depending heavily on caching proxies for popular content, and provisioning at more like 5_K_bps per subscriber to "the cloud". Not a typo. That's for connections that were being sold as "256Kbps per home" (DSL) or "1.5Mbps per block" (Cable)

As for multicast, be careful what you wish for. About the time folks really started using multicast, the NIC vendors were dropping the (Layer2) multicast hash filters from new designs, in favor of a single "Show me every multicast frame" bit. So better hope your CPU and OS can handle having a high-bandwidth connection in (effectively) promiscuous mode any time you enabled multicast. (not to mention that many popular core routers fall over pretty badly with "much" mcast traffic)

The Information Super Highway

Is the holy grail of tele. comms., but you can not do it at a cost effective level, try and you will fail. Only the Father of Fiber Optics can do it.

"mike:As for multicast, be careful what you wish for.

About the time folks really started using multicast, the NIC vendors were dropping the (Layer2) multicast hash filters from new designs, in favor of a single "Show me every multicast frame" bit.

So better hope your CPU and OS can handle having a high-bandwidth connection in (effectively) promiscuous mode any time you enabled multicast.

(not to mention that many popular core routers fall over pretty badly with "much" mcast traffic)

that being the case, perhaps its a slight problem then , but given that IPv6 (a layer above your point)is mandated to have Multicast and more to the point its a vital function of operation, there most be a way around any such problems as regards current core routers ?.

until we get multicast switched on all the way, we can never hope to progress past tunneling it over/through the core tear1 and thats a crying shame, the ISP's use it internally inside their networks so their users should also be given the benefits.

its not like the venders cant issue a firmware update to fix any cockup's they have made in costing their top of the line premium cost kit, perhaps the if things are as back as that then the tear1 customers need to take a stand and demand updates etc.

how would ou fix this potential problem you point out mike?, (or any other interested reader?.)