Tuesday, March 07, 2006

World's fastest internet in Shoreditch, 2GB per sec



Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online: "A BRITISH-designed internet system promises to break the “four-minute mile” of broadband technology by delivering the fastest web service on the planet to British households.

Residents in Shoreditch, East London, will become the first to test a new advance in broadband technology when they switch on a new set-top box that combines the functions of a television and computer.

Introduced this month, the system will allow 20,000 households to surf the web and download material at speeds up to 2,000 times faster than present services. Users will, for example, be able to download all 32,640 pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in less than seven seconds, managers of the government-funded project said.

Most commercially-available broadband connections operate at a speed of 2 megabits per second (2Mb/s), but the Shoreditch project can access internet images and content at a speed of up to 2 billions of bits per second (2Gb/s).

The key to the speed of the new system is a high-security “powerhouse” located in London’s Docklands. The Telehouse data centre houses 13,000 square metres (140,000 sq ft) of fibre-optic telecommunications and IT infrastructure required to power the most high-speed connections."

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