CNet posted a story by Michael Kanellos called "Blazing a New Data Speed Record" (11/30/2004). The net of it (no pun intended) is that a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology, CERN, Fermilab, England’s University of Manchester, and elsewhere won this year’s Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge by successfully achieving a sustained data transfer rate of 101 billion bits per second (using a setup including Sun Fire V20z servers running Solaris 10). This is equivalent to transmitting the full contents of the Library of Congress — 128 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves — between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles in fifteen minutes. The implications are many and huge and the potential for even faster speeds is real. Combined with Grid Computing projects, such as those being conducted by the World Community Grid, it is quite possible that major breakthroughs will be achieved in finding cures for the world’s most challenging diseases. Stay tuned on this subject — more on the World Community Grid coming up.
While researchers are looking for ways to speed access to the Internet, the telecommunications companies are trying to reduce access to the Internet. Dozens of municipalities, including Philadelphia (see story), are initiating programs to offer free or subsidized WiFi access for all their citizens under the theory that the result will be more literate populations while at the same time increasing the desirability to businesses to operate there. The telecommunications companies see it as an unfair subsidy that will prevent them from recovering their investments. The massive lobbying efforts of the telco industry are winning so far. Pennsylvania Governor Rendell, ironically the former Mayor of Philadelphia, just signed legislation to prevent any municipality from offering telecommunications services without first giving the incumbent provider the opportunity to do it. Although there is a grandfather clause for The City of Brotherly Love, it is obvious that progress toward rolling out more WiFi will be slowed. For the moment. Like the Internet, there is no stopping WiFi. Once the voters figure out what is happening they will likely increase pressure on the politicians. Up until now, the telecommunications industry has been able to control things pretty well. We may have reached the tipping point where consumers and their political leaders will demand less regulation and more open competitiveness.
- Fast
- SC2004 Conference – Bridging Communities
- The SC Conference Series
- Other patrickWeb stories about Internet technology
