Future internet speeds – download a DVD in 0.0023 seconds
Researchers at Bell Labs have managed to transfer optical data at the incredible rate of 16.4 Tbps over a 2,550 km distance (1,584 miles).
That is 2.05 terabyte (2,050 gigabyte) per second, which is leaps and bounds ahead of what normal network equipment can currently handle.
What 16.4 Tbps transfer speeds are capable of
To give you some perspective of how blazingly fast such a connection is, here are some examples of how long it would take to transfer some common storage media over it:
- One DVD (4.7 gigabyte) – 2.3 milliseconds
- One Blu-ray Disk (50 gigabyte) – 24.4 milliseconds
- One 500 gigabyte hard drive – 244 milliseconds
Once the internet is capable of these kinds of transfer rates, almost instant backups and synchronization over the internet will be possible.
This is also good news from an uptime perspective, which lies close to our hearts (Pingdom being an uptime monitoring service). Lightning-fast data synchronization between multiple data centers is a Good Thing ™, especially for websites and services that use more than one location to provide redundancy.
Google could stop using FedEx
In a previous post (FedEx still faster than the internet) we explained why sometimes it’s faster to carry data on disks from one location to another (often called sneakernet) than transferring it over the internet.
For example, Google uses FedEx to transfer massive amounts of Hubble space telescope data. It’s actually faster for them to send the 120 terabyte of space telescope data with overnight delivery than transferring it over the internet.
From our previous post:
[Google] sends actual physical disk arrays via regular mail, something they have dubbed, for fun, FedExNet. This allows them to get the data within 24 hours.
To transfer the same amount over the internet in 24 hours, Google would have to be able to achieve transfer rates of more than 11 gigabit/s running constantly maxed out. On a regular 100 megabit connection, transferring 120 terabyte of data would take almost four months (111 days).
However, with the transfer rates that Bell Labs achieved, it would only take one minute to transfer those 120 terabyte of data. Google could probably live with that… 
(Photo courtesy of Wysz.)
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[...] What about the third option: Doing without an optical drive at all? Before this is truly viable, we’ll need two incremental advances in current technology: 1. Much faster Internet speeds.. In one sweep, a significant speed boost could eliminate as much as 90% of the need for an optical drive. When you can transfer gigabytes of data in the time it now takes to move megabytes, it will be practical to use the Web to do just about anything you now do with an optical drive: play music, watch movies, purchase software, or backup your drive. Even at today’s slower speeds, we are already doing much of this. With much faster speeds (which are predicted for a not too distant future), it will not only be possible but preferable. I’ve already discussed this, as it relates to movies, in a previous blog entry. [...]