Groups Launch $200M Gigabit-per-second Broadband Project 46
alphadogg writes "An Ohio startup company has raised $200 million to fund gigabit-per-second broadband projects in six university communities across the U.S., the company announced Wednesday. Gigabit Squared will work with the University Community Next Generation Innovation Project (Gig.U), a coalition of 30 universities focused on improved broadband, to select six communities in which to build the ultra-fast broadband networks, they said. The two organizations will select winning communities between November and the first quarter of 2013, Mark Ansboury, president of Gigabit Squared, said. The new project comes at an important time, when many commercial broadband providers have stopped deploying next-generation networks, said Blair Levin, executive director of Gig.U and lead author of the FCC's 2010 national broadband plan."
I2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:won't help much (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends a bit on where you download from/what part of the world you're in. I'm in Sweden, with a 100Mbit/s downstream, and I often reach 11.5MiB/s from websites, doing game updates etc even during peak times(Most Swedish ISP's don't work like US ISP's, so forget most of the conceptions you have gotten from using US ISP's). Most torrents fail to reach that speed, due to seeders being, well... bittorrent users...
One big problem, in the nordic countries, is some CDN's being cheapskates. If a file happens to be hosted on both Akamai and LimeLight Networks, the Akamai download will be 3MiB/s at best(which is rarely), while the LLNW download will reach 11.5MiB/s even at peak. You can also tell when Windows Update points you to a LLNW CDN, rather than Akamai, because updates download much faster.
Thus the irony of Akamai's State of the Internet report, when they are one of the speed bumps....