Gadgetopia

New Internet Speed Record Set by Euro: A year ago or so, a guy tried to prove that the movie industry was paranoid about copyrights by trying to transmit an entire movie across the Internet — 43GB worth, if I remember.

He tried to FTP it, then email it, etc. With each step of the process, he documented how absurd it was (he even called his university help desk to ask why his email with the 43GB attachment was stuck in his outbox). (Does anyone know the link to this? I thought I read it originally on Boing Boing.)

While I thought this was funny, in the back of my head, I was thinking, “Yeah, but transmission speeds are just getting faster.” For instance, it took him something like 75 hours to FTP the file somewhere over a T-1. This is long, but it’s one or two breakthroughs and a few years worth of incremental improvements away from becoming one hour, and that is a genuine threat to Big Media.

Here we have the latest — a DVD movie in seven seconds. I know this is under optimal, controlled conditions, but this proves it’s possible. How long before this kind of speed starts to trickle down to the masses? The bottom line is that insane bandwidth like this is within the realm of possibility, and it will happen, the only question is when. Big Media isn’t paranoid, just thinking ahead.

“Two major scientific research centers said on Wednesday they had set a new world speed record for sending data across the Internet, equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD film in seven seconds.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, said the feat, doubling the previous top speed, was achieved in a nearly 30-minute transmission over 7,000 kms of network between Geneva and a partner body in California.”