I'm intersted in hearing opinions on this;

The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.


http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,347212,00.html

I'm not a computer geek but this sounds logical.

Pipe up people,

Waiting for your words,

Blitz

I just read about this myself.

Unfortunately I'm a bit jaded and think it's going to be a case where the telecoms will make up for having let the regular old internet "slip by them". In other words, I don't think it will be as cheap for everyone to use as the internet, from the every day surfer to someone looking to sell to a wider market.

The Grid is bad news (from my sources). The infrastructure was designed for the establishment. Say goodbye to net neutrality, now the corporations and government will get priority packet delivery. Have money? Have super speed! Peasant? High speed light.

Say goodbye to unanimity too, you must receive a licensed tracking number to even get on. Say goodbye to free speech too, as you can't create your own web pages unless you are given an 'electronic certificate' to put it online. The infrastructure will disallow new pages.

The plan to make you take this new pill is to no longer upgrade the internet backbone servers (and slow them out). They'll run both in parallel for X period and slow the internet down as much as they can (and they CAN do a great job as a good portion of the backbone servers are US military from what I've been told...I haven't bothered to confirm this though). They will also avoid fixing dead servers.

All my IT friends are very unhappy with the deliberate control mechanisms and are working on personal darknet contingency plans (wireless internet alternative). They've said to me that the internet could have its speed match 'the grid' or 'internet 2' if the technology was applied (network upgrade). Of course, this would still mean that the powers that be couldn't control it as easily.

Who knows, I could be a little jaded with current government performance and those strange, lurking, unoccupied prisons.



-NIM

The weak link for any network is going to be the bottleneck at the server, followed closely by the throughput of the transmission medium. DSL wireline services still predominate the main modes of operation, and our infrastructure to support a significant baud rate increase is just not there. We are way behind a lot of other countries, so maybe "The Grid" will work in Japan or Korea or France, but not likely much improvement here for a long time. Wi-Max may be the next big juggernaut, if we can get enough municipalities behind it. We need at least a blanket 1 gigabit backbone if we expect to accomplish anything like the claims they're making with the new protocols.

High speed networks like this have been achievable for years. Laboratories and research centers that deal with very large amounts of data (like at the sites where they do particle colliding or where there are super computers for hire) are usually set up with networks so fast that they can transfer 100 Gigabytes per second to other countries and other centers. I think the record is like 136 or something in that ball park.

I'm not sure how deep the telecom companies have their hooks into these fiber optic links now but if it ever became available to the public, they'd screw us big time using lessons learned trying to screw us with the internet for decades.

If they had their way everybody would pay them for use. You'd pay to have a net (or grid or whatever) connection, then pay for the content, then pay for email service (remember digital postage stamps?), then the people who offer the content you're trying to access will have to pay which would turn every site into a subscription site or an advertising spam center to cover the additional costs...etc, etc, etc.

I worry that the days of Net Neutrality are numbered...if you can call what we have now neutral. I can barely make a VOIP call with Vonage these days because my internet provider also has VOIP service and they intentionally de-prioritize any packets that go through my modem which are VOIP and aren't theirs

Hi Blitz,

Thanks for the link to the article. It made for some interesting reading. Though I doubt we will be seeing the 'Grid' anytime soon. I suspect there is just not going to be enough revenue stream to pay for the fibreoptic infrastructure. Downloading high definition movies in a matter of seconds achieves very little when HD movies can already be streamed using current DSL technology.

At the moment the fastest speed offered by my local ISP here in the north east of Scotland is only 20 Mbits/sec, although in the near future (a year or so) there is another company that is going to be offering 100 Mbits/sec. We are just so far behind other countries such as Japan, South Korea, France, Sweden and even New Zealand over here in the UK in terms of Broadband speeds.

Don't be so sure. In a lot of places the infrastructure is already there.

When I first got cable internet (seems like ages ago) I lived in a small city that got it's cable piped in by microwave tower. The speed was good but packet loss was a big issue any time it rained or snowed. To fix the problem fiber was layed. The cities population at the time was about 23,000 (with several thousand more in the surrounding rural area) but they layed enough cable (fiber I imagine) to bring full cable and 10Mbps service to about 2 million users (or so I was told)...and at the time 1Mbps was damn fast.

+1 truth. The tax payers have already subsidised most of the network and it galls me when the telcoms refer to it as theirs. As far as I'm concerned, they're just renting it from us.

That reminds me of how if you used to own land that had oil on it, it was your oil...now if you have land, anything 'under' your land doesn't also belong to you including oil and gas.

Hi BigDaddyTX,



These speed numbers are just the advertised speeds. Actually the situation is worse that that over here in the UK as a large proportion of DSL subscribers use the asymmetric DSL BT IP network. The 20 Mbits/sec @ $40/month is for a local coaxial cable supplier and I suspect that it is probably very expensive compared to prices in the US. A cheaper low speed 2 Mbits/sec line costs $9/month. The cable company is pretty reliable though to the point where I just use a VOIP phone line without the need for a PSTN line so I guess you get what you pay for.

Although the average advertised speeds are 10 Mbits/sec, the reality is probably an average around 4-6 Mbits/sec for broadband over the final PSTN copper twisted pair from the exchange. ADSL2+ will probably double the real average speed to around 8-15 Mbits/sec for the average UK broadband consumer but that again that is a couple of years away.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/6500

This was really interesting to read. I liked the way the FCC regarded anything above 0.2 Mbits/sec as broadband and that if just 1 consumer in the zip code had broadband then everyone was considered to have broadband in that Zipcode area.



That even beats the 'Get your 8 Meg Broadband' only to find out your lucky if you get 5 Meg over here in the UK

A lot of emphasis is placed on the Broadband speeds but the availability of Broadband services to everyone is just as important IMHO.

During the dot-com boom, fiber was being laid as fast as they could dig the trenches. Last I read a while ago, there is still a huge amount of unused "dark fiber" out there.

Actually, even closer to home, you may be surprised. When I bought my first house last year, I thought I'd finally order Verizon's fiber optic Fios broadband. Unfortunately, Verizon doesn't serve my area. Bummer. So I just ordered AT&T DSL and mentioned the Fios thing to the technician that came to my house. To my suprise, he said that AT&T has fiber optic right up to the junction box two blocks away. Unfortunately, it's that "last mile" that is--and probably will remain for a long time--the bottleneck between my house and that fiber optic line.

That's the big headache about replacing the telco/cable circuits. The are all too happy to drop the mains in and set up 1,000 channel duplexors at the corner pedestal on every other block, but then getting them to run a drop to your house you're looking at 5 figures, assuming you don't have to cross the road. With the advent of bandspace opening up due to the conversion of tv from analog to digital, as well as a number of other little coincidental opportunities coming soon, I think the next big push is going to have to be wireless. CDMA and such on the cellphone side is going to have to expand it's functionality, and when it does, I see a real meld with wi-fi, with wi-max portals working like microwave relays to provide a big bandwidth improvement, but resulting in a much noisier spectrum. We deployed a gigabit circuit over much of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, but still it was the local 100 Mb/sec lans and the 54 Mb/sec wireless feeds that governed most of the systems speeds. A few circuits that were able to make use of the backbone directly really beneftitted a lot, but all those office buildings never saw any improvement over the old telco backbones (a kluge of microwave, T1 wire circuits, and a hodge podge of dedicated wire and telemetry junk from the 50s, 60s and 70s when every dept was doing their own thing).

Interesting post. My background is I've been in the IT field over 10 years.. but I've been supporting ADSL in the states for 2 different internet providers (my current position is with a ILEC and I've been withworking for them for 4+ years).

I can tell you that all the grid sounds like to me is nothing more than a big fiber backbone. Which many companies already employ using SONet for countrywide transmission. The devil is in the details though and in order for that transmission medium to reach your house it would 'have to use existing high speed lines'. So in the end, it's still bottlenecked on the front end.

In short, I fail to see how structurally they are achieving anything which is not already being done.

Regarding ADSL in the UK only acheiving 6mbps; the standard of g.dmt/G.lite is only written for 8mbps. Realistically even with a sub 4000 foot loop, you're looking at BEST around 6-7mbps. Frankly, if they're advertising 10mbps on standard ADSL, they are lying to you. Frankly, the standard and technology in no way can support it. I know as part of our infrastructure upgrade we had to upgrade our systems to ADSL2+ to offer a true '10mbps' service here.

Now if they are using 10mbps, they would need a rack of ADSL2+ cards on the DSLAM (yay technical terms) which could support it, along with appropriate bandwidth on the back end to handle the transmission of that data to their regional aggregator.

It's possible they are running ADSL 2+ equipment with insufficient bandwidth. Which means upping their speeds will have no impact until they upgrade their pipes. In fact, it should actually make things worse due to more packet collisions and poorer resource management.

Anyways...

The next big thing for traditional copper is pair bonding. This will increase the speed a bit more (roughly 45+mbps) after this evolution of adsl 2+. There's also the "RIM" chip which I read about somewhere which is supposedly in development to offer 200+mbps over a standard POTS network.

/end geek rant.

Again, it the last leg of the circuit that is the weak link in the chain.

I can only imagine how much noise this has got to be putting on the line. These are not exactly clean signal devices to begin with. Overdriving them and ganging them around can only make ambient that much worse inside the building.

I've seen LANs shut down completely due to spurious noise from digital PBX circuits, intercomms, 2.4 and 5.6 Ghz cordless phones, etc etc etc. The spectrum is just getting trashed out IMHO.