How is the internet so fast?

Tommy B said:
In our uni rooms, download speeds usually hover between 5000 and 8000kbps!!!

EDIT - Sorry for initial confusion, that is 8000KB/s (how fast is that btw?)

How on earth is their internet connection so fast?
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going past the arguments over whether it's 8mb or 65mb. Either way it's not that fast compared to corporate or ISP networks. Sure it's fast compared to ADSL but thats about it. We have a 10Gbit london core which extends to Reading as well, then 1Gbit to regional sites (manchester, glasgow, leeds etc). I'm writing 3.5TB to data to reading at the moment and the bottleneck is the remote NAS rather than the network which is holding me up.(transfering at 438MB/s right now, or 3.5Gbits/s). It's not hard or actually terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things to build these networks, I suspect they'll eventually filter down to consumer style networks but I don't know how long it'll take, blame BT...
 
8000 kB/s (notice the capital B for bytes :) ) is a 64megabit connection

(8000kB/s x 8 = 64000 kB/s = 64mb)

there is a difference between byte and bit :)
 
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Energize said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET
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They've done some nice upgrades in the last few years, their core cab in reading is right next to ours. Big shiny Juniper T640 in there, something like 800Gbit/s non blocking routing engine (well I'm impressed by it anyway, it's one of the few boxes bigger than our own junipers)

EDIT: actually, on a side note I was surprised JANETs kit in reading is housed in the same place as ours and not at one of the universities computing facilities. Seems a little bizarre, though it could be because the sites owner is also a major carrier and they may be leasing fiber from them, in which case makes sense to use their site.

Also, out of curiosity, does anybody know much about JANET technically, like routing protocols and such, I presume it's BGP obviously but just vaguely interested in how they do it.
 
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"andy" said:
lucky ******* ,

in my halls im lucky to download at more than 30kb/s :/
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Uni's are starting to spend a lot of money on traffic shaping for p2p and suchlike. They're doing some stuff which is more advanced than most ISPs filters (partly because as students they can rope you into a contract that allows them pretty much anything while you're in halls)
 
Most I've seen firewall absolutely everything (dur.ac.uk, cam.ac.uk, ncl.ac.uk and ic.ac.uk). All that was allowed was access to the university proxy (for http and ftp), or SSH (22) to any server.

P2P wasn't really an option.
 
Energize said:
Couldn't you just route p2p traffic through port 8080 or 21 over an encrypted vpn connection?
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Maybe, it depends what kit they use. We're considering traffic policing at work at the moment and we've been speaking with some sales guys from redback, it's really amazing what those boxes can do in terms of traffic policies...
 
I dunno how up to date it is, but Clyde.net's site has some information about how it's built.

You'd need to terminate the VPN on a box with an internet connection that could keep up, or it would become a bottleneck and you'd be wasting your time.
Suspect most admins would have a word if you were pushing any volume of data over a VPN anyway...
 
Energize said:
Couldn't you just route p2p traffic through port 8080 or 21 over an encrypted vpn connection?
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8080 was literally an HTTP/FTP proxy, so you were stuffed on that front.

I did have an SSH tunnel to a server at home so I could access that via RDP. Then you do whatever on there and setup a web server to download back to Uni again.
 
Won't it be great when every body has 100Mb+ connections and every body can run servers without crippling upload.

I'd forgot how fast my uni network was, yeah multiple megabytes a second, and with a decent number of users caching really has benefits too.
 
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