A Radiologist Has the Fastest Home Internet In the US (vice.com) 135
An anonymous reader writes: Jason Koebler via Motherboard has interviewed James Busch -- a radiologist and owner of "the first 10 Gbps residential connection in the United States" -- at a coffee shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Motherboard reports: "For reference, the Federal Communications Commission officially classifies 'broadband' as 25 Mbps. His connection is 400 times faster than that. Busch found a way to make good use of his 1 Gbps connection, and now he's found a use for 10 Gbps, too. 'An X-ray averages around 200 megabytes, then you have PET scans and mammograms -- 3D mammograms are 10 gig files, so they're enormous,' Busch said. 'We go through terabytes a year in storage. We've calculated out that we save about 7 seconds an exam, which might seem like, 'Who cares,' but when you read 20,000 or 30,000 exams every year, it turns out to be something like 10 days of productivity you're saving just from a bandwidth upgrade.' While 10 gig connections sound excessive at the moment, Busch says his family quickly started using all of its 1 gig bandwidth. 'We ballooned into that gig within eight or nine months. With my kids watching Netflix instead of TV, with me working, we did utilize that bandwidth,' he said. 'There were situations where my daughter would be FaceTiming and the others would be streaming on the 4K TVs and they'd start screaming at each other about hogging the bandwidth. We don't see that at 10 gigs.' So why does Busch have a 10 Gbps and the rest of us don't? For one, 10 Gbps offerings are rare and scattered in mostly rural communities that have decided to build their own internet networks. Most companies that have the technology offer gigabit connections (a still cutting-edge technology only available in a handful of cities) at affordable prices and 10 Gbps connections at comparatively exorbitant ones. In Chattanooga, 1 gig connections are $69.99 per month; 10 gig connections are $299. Thus far, 10 Gbps connections are available in Chattanooga; parts of southern Vermont; Salisbury, North Carolina; and parts of Detroit and Minneapolis. But besides Busch, I couldn't find any other people in the United States who have signed up for one. EPB, the Chattanooga government-owned power utility that runs the network, confirmed that Busch is the city's only 10 Gbps residential customer. Rocket Fiber, which recently began offering 10 Gbps in Detroit, told me that it has 'no customers set in stone,' but that it's in talks with prospective ones. Representatives for U.S. Internet in Minneapolis and Fibrant in Salisbury did not respond to my requests for comment. Michel Guite, president of the Vermont Telephone Company, told me his network has no 10 Gbps customers, either."
And...? (Score:1)
I could use one for SDR (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I could use one for SDR (Score:5, Informative)
Well ... if you are too lazy to Google and use Wikipedia, I'll provide you some 'decompression' of GP's Jargon. -Anonymously-, because I'm using modpoints.
SDR - Software Defined Radio. A type of radio equipment that uses an Analog to Digital converter to digitize the radio signal (as close to the antenna as is practical) and use digital processing with software filters instead of hardware ones. Non-techie examples: All WiFi and bluetooth equipment, most TV and radio USB sticks
TDOA - Time Difference of Arrival. Apparently GP wants to locate radio sources by measuring the time difference between signals arriving at a couple of radios. It's for triangulation purposes, I guess. You should then have 3 radios at least to make this work failsafe (only 2 radios leave you with two planar points to guess from, or when also uncertain of height, a circle). All three must be close enough to the source to identifiably pick up the signal and you need synchronized timers with each of them unless your are absolutely certain of your connection lag.
Now for the bandwidth usage. He wants to sample at 200 mega-samples per second (Msps). What does he want to sample? 16 bit complex samples. Complex numbers have two components and are twice as large as real numbers. Analogously, complex samples take twice the space of normal samples.
200 Msps * 16 (bit) * 2 (complex) = 6400Mb/s = 6.4Gb/s raw data rate. When sent uncompressed and package switched over the internet, add some overhead and you'll get even closer to that 10Gb/s. But as I said earlier, he probably wants two remote stations for full triangulation, so 10Gb/s isn't going to cut it unless he can use some compression or compromises a bit on the bandwidth.
Expert question: Why complex samples? A common technique in Software Defined Radio is to sample the signal, straight and 45 degrees phase shifted, also called Quadrature Sampling. This has a long technical explanation why it's advantageous but to cut short, it's so you'll be able to differentiate between signals above and below the mixer frequency of your SDR. Else you wouldn't know if a signal 'Y' Hz away from the mixer frequency 'X', originated at frequency 'X'-'Y' or 'X'+'Y'.
Re:I could use one for SDR (Score:4, Funny)
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Whoa, slow down.
Re:I could use one for SDR (Score:4, Informative)
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But why would you have to do that in realtime? If you've got synchronized clocks at each receiver, why not sample for 100ms and then spend a few seconds to compress and transmit the sample? You could then triangulate the position once every few seconds - which seems like it'd be good enough for just about anything i can think of.
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I would imagine that 10 or 12 bit sampling is way more likely than 16 bit, which then saves you a byte for your two samples, cutting bandwidth required by 25% if you pack the bits.
And.. (Score:2, Funny)
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Clearly we need an expert on ramming sheep to chime in.
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I don't doubt that we have more than our fair share of experts here.
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Sure, but has he found a use for more than 64K of RAM?
Oh hell. I could use almost 10 times that much!
Home internet (Score:4, Interesting)
WTF will it be looking like with consumers torrenting @ 10Gbps?
Meh. Not really thought through this article...
Re:Home internet (Score:4, Interesting)
WTF will it be looking like with consumers torrenting @ 10Gbps? Meh. Not really thought through this article...
Would we download more though, or just faster? A Netflix 4K stream is 25 Mbps, BluRay Video has a max rate of 54 Mbps, UHD BluRay 128 Mbps. I have a 150 Mbps line and apart from occasionally downloading a season and figuring out it's junk after a few episodes I use the bandwidth regardless. The only advantage is that huge game patches and such download quicker so I don't get stuck just because Steam wants to install a 2GB patch right when I want to play. Even a big family streaming half a dozen UHD monsters shouldn't be able to saturate a 1 Gbps link.
His huge downloads are probably hogging the whole bandwidth because of poor QoS, so 10 Gbps solves the problem with brute excess capacity. Either that or he ran into some kind of soft limiter because 30000*10GB = 300TB a year is way, way outside the norm but they let it pass if you pay the 10 Gbps price. And if the software was a little smarter at caching 30000 images / 2000 working hours = average 4 minutes/photo, download takes about 10 seconds so if it would preload he wouldn't be waiting at all. I'm sure he can well afford the extra $3k/year to just make the problem go away though.
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Even a big family streaming half a dozen UHD monsters shouldn't be able to saturate a 1 Gbps link.
His huge downloads are probably hogging the whole bandwidth because of poor QoS, so 10 Gbps solves the problem with brute excess capacity.
Agreed. There is something very, very wrong with this story, and you've pointed out half of it.
The other half which struck me is the oddity of "yada yada residential Internet" followed by this lengthy diatribe about how massive XRays, PET scans, and 3D mammography files are. Well, uh, why is this doctor taking medical records home? It strikes me as odd and disturbing. He's a radiologist, so a lot of what he does is interpretation, but shouldn't medical records be confined to "controlled" networks at a
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It is possible that he has a locked down computer owned, monitored, maintained, and upgraded by the medical facility he works for and uses VPN. If so, it would be more secure than when you request a DVD of a scan and the facility snail mails it to you unencrypted.
1099 independent contractor doctor that just has (Score:2)
1099 independent contractor doctor that just has his office at home vs renting office space?
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As for the speed, he probably writes the whole thing off as a business expense. Given that his marginal tax rate is probably 42.5% (39.6% federal income + 2.9% Medicare) that means that effectively, he gets home 10Gb internet for just over $170/mo.
For tha
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Well, uh, why is this doctor taking medical records home?
Really? You've never heard of people working from home? I think the takeaway of this article is that these giant cable companies, with their regional monopolies, don't need to compete by giving us what is clearly possible. Only those few cities which have decided to operate connectivity as a utility are providing fast internet.
...buying Internet capacity he doesn't need...
He seems to be putting it to good use. And our use always seem to catch up with our capabilities. I can remember getting a 4 GB hard disk, way back when, and thinking, "Man, I'll nev
1 Gbps with home stuff vs 10 Gbps with enterprise (Score:2)
1 Gbps with home stuff vs 10 Gbps with enterprise level switch and routers as well.
But how shared is that fiber? 8:1, 32:1, 64:1? real dia fiber is like 10K for 10G/10G for $1000 /mo you can get 100/100 DIA fiber with a SLA and enterprise gear.
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I would imagine they are using XP-GPON2 since they can overlay that on the same fiber network that they are using for the 1G service.
Unless anyone else in his local neighborhood is on the 10G frequency then he likely has it to himself for the time being.
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I was wondering the same sort of thing.
Does any isp that offers 1 gigabit connections need significantly more backhaul bandwidth than one selling 50 megabit connections? Intuitively you'd expect it to be 20x more but in reality I don't suppose it is.
There are some compulsive torrenters who'll download more than ever, but they are surely in the minority. Some behavioral changes come wtih having fast reliable internet, but not all of them serve to increase bandwidth consumption.
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WTF will it be looking like with consumers torrenting @ 10Gbps? Meh. Not really thought through this article...
Would we download more though, or just faster? A Netflix 4K stream is 25 Mbps, BluRay Video has a max rate of 54 Mbps, UHD BluRay 128 Mbps. I have a 150 Mbps line and apart from occasionally downloading a season and figuring out it's junk after a few episodes I use the bandwidth regardless. The only advantage is that huge game patches and such download quicker so I don't get stuck just because Steam wants to install a 2GB patch right when I want to play. Even a big family streaming half a dozen UHD monsters shouldn't be able to saturate a 1 Gbps link.
His huge downloads are probably hogging the whole bandwidth because of poor QoS, so 10 Gbps solves the problem with brute excess capacity. Either that or he ran into some kind of soft limiter because 30000*10GB = 300TB a year is way, way outside the norm but they let it pass if you pay the 10 Gbps price. And if the software was a little smarter at caching 30000 images / 2000 working hours = average 4 minutes/photo, download takes about 10 seconds so if it would preload he wouldn't be waiting at all. I'm sure he can well afford the extra $3k/year to just make the problem go away though.
I read between the lines and saw that his spoiled kids were bitching about their multiple 4K Netflix streams and Facetime.
You can pretty much ignore all the other bullshit with regards to his alleged business needs. We know damn well what truly drove the justification for bandwidth.
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As a F/OSS ISO torrent seeder on a 1gbps connection, let me tell ya... it doesn't matter. I had planned on setting limits on my seeding server, but it hardly ever breaks 10-20mbps upload. With files in the 1-5GB range mostly (CD and DVD ISO files), those are fairly large, but once people have em, they have em, and the bandwidth stops. This logic doesn't really change much for other types of content either.
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Yep. Pretty much nobody needs 1Gbps for any legitimate purpose, much less 10Gbps. Very specific special cases.... maybe.
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What's the inbound provisioning? (Score:2)
With a combination of 1 Gig and 10 Gig customers, I have to wonder what the inbound provisioning is. For example, if everyone is downloading 1 Gig videos, when will it max out?
I also wonder if this bandwidth is symmetrical. Could he, for example, offer web hosting, for example (maybe paying a little more for a static IP)?
8 seconds to download, an hour to watch (Score:2)
Suppose a bunch of customers download 1GB videos and then watch them. That's 8 Gb, so it'll take a little over 8 seconds to download. Then an hour to watch it. So they're actually using the network 0.2% of time. A 10 Gbps uplink could support roughly 250-500 customers doing that.
If 400 customers share a 10 Gbps uplink to the backbone, they each need to pay about 0.25% of the cost*. On the other hand, if he were hosting xvides.com over that connection, he'd be using it 10% of the time (averaging 1 Gbps).
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If 400 customers share a 10 Gbps uplink to the backbone, they each need to pay about 0.25% of the cost*. On the other hand, if he were hosting xvides.com over that connection, he'd be using it 10% of the time (averaging 1 Gbps). The 10 Gbps could only handle about 8 such customers, so each would need to pay 12.5% of the cost.
Or use quotas. Quotas are actually okay if they're clearly advertised don't try to trick yon into overage fees. Just set a reasonable quota and just throttle you down to say 10 Mbps afterwards with the option to purchase more at a reasonable cost/TB. I used to do that at my cabin with my cell phone, one or maybe two months a year I'd pay extra and I found that totally fair. Didn't need it all year, never expected unlimited and in proportion to their other subscriptions I got a fair price that was somewhat m
Agreed, though it's AND rather than OR (Score:2)
Agreed, clear quotas that the customer understands can be fine. They pay to use X GBs (which is y% of the capacity) and the cost reflects that. Something similar is used when professionals buy bandwidth for an enterprise. The buyer and seller both understand the terms, so it's good.
Rather than throttling down, it typically marks excess traffic as "discard eligible" - you may use more than your Committed Information Rate, but only if the capacity is available after customers who haven't hit their CIR get t
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Whereas Knoxville has shit connectivity in comparison, despite being on US 11, only a few hours farther from Atlanta, and is also TVA territory.
There are spots in downtown Knoxville where the best you can get is 12 Mb/s
Interesting application (Score:5, Funny)
Who would have guessed that high speed internet in the home would end up being used to transfer images of female anatomy.
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Meanwhile, On The San Francisco Peninsula... (Score:2)
...And I can't get better than 50Mb/sec.
"But Comcast has..." (*SMACK*) I will not let Comcast be my ISP, for reasons which should be obvious by now to every member of this site.
The weird thing is that, about a year ago, a truck from HP Communications [hpcomminc.com] (no relation) strung fiber up around my residential neighborhood, allegedly on behalf of Above
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Atleast you HAVE a alternative to Comshit, its literally my only option beside 1.5 mbps DSL or dial up (yes I can still get dial up weee!)
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Not sure what imager he's using but it sounds like he's storing raw shit for no reason.
If you store it in 16-bit greyscale (or whatever format your software uses to allow decent non-destructive contrast adjustment), you'll get 200 MB from a 10240x10240 image.
That's insane.
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Typically, medical images are stored and transmitted as raw, uncompressed bitmaps. Lossy compression while it is supported has some issues, technical as well as legal. As an example of a techn
3D Mammograms (Score:2)
Yes. I'm sure some of them are.
Fastest that you know of (Score:1)
Actually, there are multiple 40 Gbps ports around campus at places like the UW, so if you lived in one and did research, 10 Gbps is not that fast. We even have three 100 Gbps ports. It's useful for remote telepresence surgery, for example.
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100 Gbps isn't going to help "telepresence" as it doesn't lower latency, and even 100 Mbps is more than enough for live video, audio, control, and whatever else.
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Latency is mostly the speed of light from the location to the surgeon. Which is why modern telepresence surgery robots have a buffer to handle that and complete operations locally with guidance from an assistant. The question is more how much information is presented to the surgeon over the pipe, and at what speed it's resolved for imaging. Imaging files are pretty huge, at least the ones I've seen.
You remember the surgical robot in that SF movie Ender's Game? That was one of the surgical robots here on ca
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You can stuff more resolution than a surgeon can see in about 40 Mbps even using h.264 instead of h.265.
What caught my eye was... (Score:2)
FaceTime at 4K using a TV..
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That was 2 different things. His daughter is using Facetime while one or more other people are streaming 4K video to one or more TVs.
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Yes, you're right. Does FT use that much bandwidth?
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Don't forget that even though he has 10G down, his upload bandwidth might suck, relatively.
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Not sure what he's signed up for, but the NGPON2 technology is capable of 10G up as well.
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He was interviewed at a coffee shop. I assume the author of this article didn't have fast enough internet to interview him via facetime.
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as a gamer... (Score:2)
For me beyond the 25Mbps I already have, it becomes all about less latency and maybe more upload bandwidth, not just more download bandwidth. However ISPs never seem to care about those things.
Heck with latency/excessive ping issues, its a good day when their customer support even has a clue what you're talking about.
Passed 1GBps the problem is after your modem (Score:5, Insightful)
Most home networks are 1Gbps ethernet so unless you won't go faster than that on a single port or even your whole network depending on your switch configuration. You need beyond consumer-level network gear to enjoy the full 10Gbps. As for WiFi, it is a joke at these speeds.
Now, even if you have a 10Gbps connection straight to your computer, what will you do with it? Watch movies? That's a few tens of Mbps at best, peanuts. Transfer files... now we are talking, but you better have a SSD or a nice RAID array, because most mechanical hard drives run at about 100MB/s or 1Gbps. Heck, SATA3 only goes 6Gbps, so that's an internet connection faster than most SSDs. Even your computing power can be limiting : 10Gbps is quite fast for all but the most basic kind of processing.
I sincerely don't see a use for a 10Gbps home connection unless you are running servers on it, or host a whole community of bandwidth hogs. The radiologist in the example is the edgiest of the edge cases. He has a remote location that can support more than 1Gbps but he can't work online, he also has a computer and home network that support such a speed and a workflow that makes a 7 second delay matter...
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not only that, but *most* websites on the internet can't fill that bandwidth, so you'll be browsing, at best, at the max speed the website can go out at....which, in most cases, is FAR less than 10gb
Bullshit (Score:2)
There were situations where my daughter would be FaceTiming and the others would be streaming on the 4K TVs and they'd start screaming at each other about hogging the bandwidth
If you had consistent 1000 Mbps service, this wouldn't be true unless there are two dozen people counted in "the others".
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Willing to bet but not willing to read, I guess. It's 10gbps Fiber to the HOME service over NGPON2, which can delivery 10gbps max per customer, 40gbps max per PON. This is actual internet access.
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Competition, most likely. How many ISPs in Chattanooga?
Re:Fantasy (Score:4, Informative)
I've got "gigabit" fiber at my house for about the same price, although it slows down to around 400-500 Mbps once you leave my provider's network. Provided by a private company. Yeah, it's awesome. Zero downtime since it was installed.
First world problems. (Score:1)
"Waaaaah i cant watch 5 4k netflix streams at once!"
Medical data sent home ? (Score:3)
I hope his uber speed connection has some decent security if he has access to peoples medical data from home.
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I hope his uber speed connection has some decent security if he has access to peoples medical data from home.
It's very common these days for radiologists to work from home. A tech onsite does the scan, and the images are sent encrypted to the radiologist.
Much easier for smaller clinics, and much easier when you have an emergency in the middle of the night and need a radiologist to look at something right away.
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He's probably on an encrypted VPN, and the equipment being used supports AES encryption at layer 1 between the residential user and the ISP.
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It's just a matter of pattern recognition. They know what "normal" looks like, they know what to put a little extra attention on, and most of them like to show off a little - they'll mention old rib fractures on a chest X-ray, for example.
But I have a 2400 baud modem init strings anyone? (Score:1)
Gratz (Score:2)
Congratulations! You did it! You just acquired a genuine epeen!!!
Outsource (Score:2)
Residential connection? (Score:2)
If he's working using this connection, he should get a business deal, not residential. Most home connections have strict "no commercial use" clause in ToS.
That's OG Stuff (Score:1)
They don't do that anymore. Nowadays, they have this thing called 'collections'.
Lame justification (Score:2)
"There were situations where my daughter would be FaceTiming and the others would be streaming on the 4K TVs and they'd start screaming at each other about hogging the bandwidth."
Bullshit - that's just his lame attempt at justifying "needing" a connection that fast. How did his poor family function with ONLY a 1 Gig connection or worse, something as pathetically slow as 5-300 Mb/s ?
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