Did you hear the one about the 75 year old Swedish woman with the world’s fastest internet connection?
Sigbritt Löthberg’s home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed.
You can read more here about how it all came about and how she now has the capability to watch 1,500 simultaneous HD broadcasts at once and download a full HD-DVD in approximately two seconds. Heaven help us if anybody shows her how to use bittorrent.
Now you might think 40 gigabytes is a little excessive. However, it isn’t the speed that is the issue but the technology behind the speed.
The secret behind Sigbritt’s ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.
According to Karlstad Stadsnät the distance is, in theory, unlimited – there is no data loss as long as the fibre is in place.
“I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has,” said Peter Löthberg, who now works at Cisco.
The whole of America is put to shame when you consider its fastest connection in Rhode Island strolls in at a very pedestrian 5.01 megabits. And we won’t go into the ramifications of West Virginia plodding along at a sedentary 1.12 megabits – the national average being 1.97. As far as other national average internet speeds go, Canada is trotting along at 7mb with Japan leading us all at 61mb [source].
The bottom line is capacity.
Granted, I’m not an expert, nor have I delved as deep as I might have done, but do you not think West Virginia, with all its rolling hills and splendid scenery, may benefit from something along the lines of the set-up in Sweden?
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