For the past decade
internet service can be described as just fast enough and all apps have worked
to that standard. Thus growth has
focused on horizontal improvements which really mean the whole global economy. Those horizontal markets care now maturing
and that leaves open the door for incremental improvements in the vertical
market itself. That needs feaster transfer
rates. Thus this platform and technology
is timely and welcome.
Before this is all
finished, technology will have to support true holographic screens sufficient
to create a holodec room for viewing and game playing. So it is clear that the build out has barely
begun. This is merely the decade in
which technological globalization itself was achieved.
At this point every
child has seen the technology and has seen his future and has adjusted his
expectations accordingly. The base is
launched and will be in full global
flight inside twenty years.
Your future ultra-fast
internet connection just launched into space
By Gideon Lichfield @glichfield September
29, 2013
Elon
Musk’s commercial space company, SpaceX, has just
launched a Falcon 9 rocket into orbit carrying a Canadian Space Agency
satellite, CASSIOPE. Part of the satellite’s payload is Cascade, a prototype
for a super-fast space-borne file-transfer system—a kind of digital courier
service.
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The
idea behind Cascade is that companies, governments and agencies increasingly
need to get very large digital data packages, weighing several tens of
gigabytes, across the world fast—and the internet isn’t up to the task. In the
first quarter of this year, according
to Akamai (pdf, p. 4), the global average internet connection speed
was 3.1 megabits per second (Mbps). At that rate a 100-gigabyte (GB) file would
take nearly 72 hours to transfer. The highest average speed was 14.2 Mbps in
South Korea.
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Average
connection speeds in the first quarter of 2013.Akamai—"State of the
Internet"
Businesses
can of course pay for much higher speeds, and so can some consumers. Google
Fiber, which is piloting in a handful of smaller US cities, claims to offer
upload and download speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps, over a hundred times faster
than the US average, while a service available in Tokyo and a few surrounding
areasclaims
to go even faster. But a fast connection is of no use for
exchanging massive files if whoever you’re exchanging them with doesn’t have it
too.
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Cascade,
built by a Canadian company, MDA, promises upload and download speeds of up to 2,100 Mbps.
The company gives little detail about the data transmission technology, so it’s
impossible to tell how many simultaneous uploads it could handle. But the
theory is that because low-Earth-orbit satellites circle the globe about once
every 90 minutes, customers could send files to the satellite when it’s passing
overhead (via small
dishes on land or at sea) which it would store and then send on to the
recipient when it’s in the right place.
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A
90-minute delivery delay might not be much of a draw, but the service, MDA
suggests, would be especially useful for organizations that need to send a lot
of data to and from remote places, such as oil companies, armies, and
disaster-relief operations. A lot, of course, depends on how soon it can launch
a commercial version of the service, how much faster it can make it—CASSIOPE’s
launch came several years behind schedule, so there may be an upgraded form of
Cascade in the works—and how far ground-based internet connections have caught
up by then.
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