Reality in Sweden: download a HD DVD in two seconds

Written on July 6, 2008 – 8:53 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Sweden is often celebrated as THE best wired place in the world. Almost all Swedes can enjoy a super fast broadband connection. But even these people are likely to get jealous when they hear the story about Sigbritt Löthberg, a 75-year old woman from Karlstad. Three years ago, her home was supplied with the world’s fastest Internet connection: a staggering 40 Gigabits per second.

In theory that means she’s able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously, but something tells me she won’t do this. However, she might want to download a full high definition DVD every once and a while. She will only have to wait for two seconds.

Peter Löthberg: “I was sent by God to network the planet”

For the secret behind her connection, we have to consult her son, Swedish Internet legend Peter Löthberg - who now works at Cisco. He developed a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometers apart, with no intermediary transponders. “I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has,” Löthberg told The Local.

With this extreme connection, Löthberg and the local network company Karlstad Stadsnät want to show that ISP’s should invest in better technologies, as it will soon become interesting economically speaking. The network boss said the whole process wasn’t really complicated: “The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt’s PC”.

Although this took daring experiment took place three years ago, we’re still not able to browse drastically faster than we used to. Partly to bandwidth limitations as the hard disk - like Pragma points out in the comment, but also because most people don’t know what they’re missing.

If you’re coming from StumbleUpon, you probably like to see Bill Gates face in this short video!

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HD DVD, ISP, Karlstad Stadsnät, Peter Löthberg, Sigbritt Löthberg, sweden

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

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21 comments/trackbacks to “Reality in Sweden: download a HD DVD in two seconds”

Jul 16, 2008: Reality in Sweden: download a HD DVD in two seconds | mindplunge
[...] This story blew my mind! Especially when our corporate T1 connection feels like a 14.4k modem. [...]
Jul 30, 2008: TheNextWeb.org: Lies, damned lies, and statistics
[...] Reality in Sweden: download a HD DVD in two seconds 2: 3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia 3: Nasza-klasa: Polish example of the copy-cat [...]

By Godless on Jul 7, 2008

This article is like 3 years old. Where the heck have you been ?

[Reply]
By Jason on Jul 8, 2008

But wouldn’t that theoretical download speed only be achievable if the place she is downloading the video from also has a godly internet connection?

I mean, my internet connection in theory downloads anywhere from 600 kb/s to 2 mb/s (I always achieve these speeds when I download from websites hosted by large companies with good internet connections)

However, not everyone has good hosting, and if I am to download from a majority of the sources online I can only get 400 kb/s or so.

So wouldn’t that mean her download speed would be restricted by the speeds of the uploading hosts that she is downloading from?

[Reply]
By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Jul 8, 2008

@Godless and still nothing much has changed!

@Jason, I think you’re right when it comes to downloading from websites. But you don’t have this problem when downloading from P2P.

[Reply]
By leimrod on Jul 8, 2008

Here from stumbleupon. Yeah I heard about this recently as well. I’m sure as soon as we are all forced to give up our net neutrality the ISP’s will roll out excellent fibre networks for us. Don’t believe me? http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html

[Reply]
By faith on Jul 8, 2008

Whoa there.

40 GB/s!?

I’m only going at, like a few hundred kb/s… Lucky her, how’d she do it?

[Reply]
By frans on Jul 8, 2008

Woah. What a blast from the past, this is old. Really, really old.

[Reply]
By Ethan on Jul 8, 2008

Notice how it says HD DVD instead of Blu Ray….Obviously not too recent…

[Reply]
By Sam on Jul 8, 2008

Blu-Ray is still High-Definition.
I guess you could get away with calling a Blu-Ray Disc and HD DVD because of it.

[Reply]
By :pragma on Jul 9, 2008

Don’t forget other bandwidth limitations such as the harddrive …

[Reply]
By Lars on Jul 12, 2008

Nice to have a gigabyte connection.
But the swedes have just passed a law that enables the government to tap into every line in Sweden.
So, no piratebay.org for the old lady.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law

[Reply]
By brunno on Jul 13, 2008

weird. networking the world is a big task shouldn’t be bragging about it. and even more than that looking out for people who rely on the copper and the old fashionate ways to bring us together.

[Reply]
By Tim on Jul 13, 2008

Jason is correct, this connection would barely ever provide a noticeable difference when comparing it to around a 2 gb/s connection. P2P is the only place where she would be able to consistently notice a difference, however it still would not come close to downloading at 40gb/s.

[Reply]
By Zem on Jul 13, 2008

@Jason, Tim & pragma: ever heard the term “proof of concept”? Giving someone a 1 or 2 gb/sec connection for personal use would only be given a shrug in the media, and it wouldn’t really be much of anything new, technology-wise. Give them 40 Gb/s, just because you can, and it’s a news story.

[Reply]
By Al on Jul 13, 2008

You missed the most interesting part. The mother doesn’t know anything about computers so she uses the cable to hang clothes to dry because it’s warm in the server room.

[Reply]
By Maox on Jul 17, 2008

Are you kidding? My ISP delivers 100 mbit/s since last year. That’s standard. How old is this thing?

[Reply]
By Online Advertising on Jul 23, 2008

A whole HD movie in 2 secs….. Thats impressive

[Reply]
By Anonymous on Jul 24, 2008

This is shopped, I can tell by the pixels and by having seen quite a few shops in my time.

[Reply]
By search channel on Jul 24, 2008

Wow that is really fast. by the time she finishes pressing enter every site comes up

[Reply]
By Fernando on Jul 29, 2008

This “internet legend” lives with his mother? Looks like a crossdress between Elton John and Liz Taylor all rolled into one.

[Reply]