German Cable ISP First To Deliver 4700Mbps Internet Connection 121
Mark.JUK writes "It's enough to make grown IT workers cry. German cable operator Kabel Deutschland claims to have become the first provider to successfully achieve a real-world internet connection speed of 4700Mbps (Megabits per second) after they hooked up to a local school's test account in the city of Schwerin. The ISP, which usually delivers more modest speeds of up to 100Mbps to home subscribers, used its upgraded 862MHz network, channel bonding, and the EuroDocsis 3.0 standard to achieve the stated performance. But don't expect to get this kind of speed tomorrow; right now there's no demand for it among home users, and you probably couldn't afford the bandwidth anyway." ("No demand at its current price," at least.)
Wow, I'm amazed... not. (Score:5, Informative)
They used 12 modems and thus 12 seperate channels which means in reality, they only transmitted about 400mbit per "subscriber" (cable).
While this is nifty, Kabel Deutschland subscribers' bandwith is often shared, which means at peak time you don't even get 30 of the promised 100mbit. In addition to that, they slow you down after a 10gb quota/day. And in addition to that, they often throttle certain protocols, namely torrent.
This is one of the worst ISP in Germany who just made a totally useless world record.
Re:On reading the future (Score:4, Informative)
His sig says "Finland".
This doesn't surprise me. Most of the fastest speeds I ever see on torrents are Scandinavian countries. No, I don't know why that is, or how Nokia ended up making most of the world's telephones. Maybe they have an extra Telecommunications chromosome.
Re:I'm so glad (Score:3, Informative)
I will tell you from my time working in a company that designed Ethernet PHYs and MACs, that most high end desktops and consumer gear can only maintain a 1Gpbs link, but can accommodate no where near that much BW. The best PCs can only sustain ~500Mbps throughput. Most on-board LAN and sub $100 PCIe LAN cards fall closer to 200Mbps. This is because they do not support DMA and are using Polled IO and the host OS for the LAN stack, much like the old winmodems did.
-nB
Re:depressing .. (Score:2, Informative)
Which infrastructure?
I'm in the US and we routinely bash our countries' performance on internet infrastructure. But if you look at it as a whole:
We have:
*reliable power service
*reliable road service
*reliable rail service (commercial, not passenger)
*reliable POTS service
*reliable medical transport and care (I didn't say good, just reliable)
*reliable garbage service
*reliable food delivery
*reliable fuel
*reliable government (to a point, and again, not good always, bur reliable, there are no coups every other week)
*reliable water service
*many more things (police, fire, parks, schools, etc.)
Many of these we simply take for granted, but face it they are there for us. In many countries these basics are not there with the reliability that we enjoy. 4G and cellular have excelled in Africa, specifically because of the absence of POTS and power.
-nB
Re:40,960 Mbps has already been done. (Score:4, Informative)
Translation: Since I will lose the argument vis-a-vis USA vs. The Way Everyone Else Provides Internet, I will shut down the conversation preemptively by spouting something meaningless yet somehow jingoistic. Good for you.
Re:I'm so glad (Score:2, Informative)
I will tell you from my time working in a company that designed Ethernet PHYs and MACs, that most high end desktops and consumer gear can only maintain a 1Gpbs link, but can accommodate no where near that much BW. The best PCs can only sustain ~500Mbps throughput. Most on-board LAN and sub $100 PCIe LAN cards fall closer to 200Mbps. This is because they do not support DMA and are using Polled IO and the host OS for the LAN stack, much like the old winmodems did.
-nB
I find your statement about lack of DMA and low throughput very hard to believe. I worked at Marvell Germany until September 2007 as a device driver developer and *all* of the then-current Marvell Gig chips (Yukon-II) *easily* managed 900+ MBits/sec, the Windows driver actually peaking at 980 megabits/sec. This was both for onboard controllers (e.g. Asus Mobos) as well as Ethernet cards, for all operating systems supported (Windows*, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, Aix and HP/UX).
Furthermore, *all* the drivers used DMA; only the Linux and Windows drivers offered the option of polled operation to *increase* throughput (no, not a typo, although it's counter-intuitive).
Note, however, the above numbers apply to proper Ethernet speed testing, using an in-memory data generator for the transmit side and a corresponding receive program on the receive-side, avoiding any reads or writes to a disk. Otherwise you'd just be testing the disk read and write speeds, which was a common mistake made by testers, and could well account for your low cited speeds.
Meaningful throughput tests may be performed by tools such as ttcp.
--Gerald