The Internet superhighway has broken another speed limit -- twice in as many days. The Internet2 Consortium announced Tuesday that an international team led by the University of Tokyo transmitted data  at speeds of 7.67 Gbps late last year, and then at 9.08 Gbps the very next day.
The first record-breaking transmission took place on December 30. The 20,000-mile roundtrip path, using standard TCP, began and ended in the NTT building in Tokyo. The second one took place the next day, on New Year's Eve, over the same path but using modified TCP.
The path crossed six international networks, and covered 75 percent of the Earth's circumference. The overall network used IPv6 and three routers. A dual Xeon (Woodcrest) server was used as the sender and receiver in both tests, with the data traveling from Tokyo to Chicago, Amsterdam, and Seattle before returning.
Nearing the End
The previous IPv6 record of 6.96 Gbps was set back in late 2005. Under the earlier addressing system , IPv4, a record of 8.8 Gbps was set in February of 2006. Because that test used the IPv4 addressing system -- which is still used for the vast majority of Internet communications -- it is considered as a separate category.
In addition to researchers from the University of Tokyo, the international team that reached these Internet2 speed records included members from NTT Communications, SURFnet, Pacific Northwest Gigapop, the University of Washington, the University of Amsterdam, and other institutions.
The outer speed limits might be in sight for this particular network, however. "These records are final for the 10 Gbps network era," said team leader Dr. Kei Hikaki in a statement, "because they represent more than 98 percent of the upper limit of network capacity."
The New Network
But that is not the end of the rainbow, however. The Internet2 Consortium is in the process of building a new network with a capacity of 100 Gbps. Among other uses, the new high-capacity network will be able to send a high-definition movie around the world within a few seconds, rather than the sluggish half-minute or so it would take on the current Internet2 or the downright pokey couple of hours that a standard home broadband line would require.
Will these speeds ever be applied to the needs in homes and businesses?
"Never say never," advised Cindy Whelan, an analyst with technology research firm Current Analysis. She noted that, while there are no common applications that need such speeds, applications-yet-to-be-born could drive the need for such bandwidth. Already, she noted, some homes and businesses are asking how they ever survived on 1.5 Mbps.
But today, she said, such huge speeds are needed primarily for massive scientific visualization, medical research, and similar data-intensive applications.
The announcement of the new speed records was made at the Interent2 Consortium's spring meeting.
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