Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog

Advances in data center technology and Internet usage have pushed enterprises to 10 Gigabit Ethernet (Gbps) links. Services like search engines, carriers, ISPs need even higher speeds. Lacking alternatives to 10-Gbps connections, carriers and enterprises have resorted to using multiple 10 Gbps connection (expensive solution).

Projected Internet traffic growth mandates the need for higher speed Ethernet (HSE) connections sooner or later. The amount of backbone Internet bandwidth maintained by major Internet carriers has been expanding at 75 to125% per year. While 10 Gbps appears to be sufficient for most data centers today, 40 Gbps is expected to meet data center needs through 2014. 100 Gbps rate has been identified as the next high-speed network operator interface.

An IEEE Task Force has been established with the objective of standardizing 40 Gbps within the data center and 100 Gbps between major Internet nodes. Ensuring the success of High Speed Ethernet (HSE) tells you more about those new 100 GbE and 40 GbE Ethernet technologies around the corner.

Starting next July 2010, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection. Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right, YLE, the country’s national broadcasting company, reported on Wednesday.The government had already decided to make a 100 Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. According to the Helsinki Times when it reported the 100Mb target last year, the Finnish government said that no household “would be farther than 2 kilometers from a connection capable of delivering broadband Internet with a capacity of at least 100 megabits of data a second).  Some variation will be allowed, if connectivity to some remote locations can only be arranged through mobile phone networks.

Finland is the world’s first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access. Earlier this year France has made Internet access a human right.

I live and write this blog in Finland. Finland is the home country for me, Nokia and ePanorama.net web site.

I saw this interesting stunt mentioned on several news sites: Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa’s Telkom. According to the article a South African information technology company Unlimited IT proved that it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom , the country’s leading internet service provider poor Internet service. 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) with a 4GB data card strapped to his leg. Whole data transfer took around two hours. Only a small part of the same data was able to be transferred during same time using a Telkom line.

Actually a trained pigeon with a large enough capacity USB stick stuck to it will be faster than the Internet connection available in many countries. It scales great too, just add more pigeons. It’s a pipe. The problem is the latency sucks. The post office has almost unlimited bandwidth, but terrible latency. If you want to send few blue rays’ worth of data, put then to the post. Traditional transfer methods that mode physical storage media can be efficient when large amounts of data is transported. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a jet airplane packed full of magnetic data tapes, hard disks or DVDs. Where latency is not a factor, flying physical storage media rules. In all other cases however we need a good fiber connection.

Even in today’s world there are lost of improvement to be made on telecommunications. Sometimes service is poor and sometimes the service works but the pricing is just not right. I remember the time in the early 1990’s when it was cheaper to save data to disk and transport it to other office with Taxi (offices in same city) than to use the X.400 E-mail service provided by the leading telecom company at that time. With pricing model like this it was no wonder why complicated and expensive X.400 services lost the business quite quickly to simpler and almost free internet e-mail system.