ITCOW [L]

The truth. Your PC will not be able to take 1Gbps even your network is 1Gbps in speed. Oct 16 2007’s Digital Life, 58.3MB per sec attained on a demo Fibre to the Home network, Hong Kong broadband network staff did just that speed while a ADSL 6Mbps did 621KB transferring a full DVD of SDaving Private Ryan.

Why? Theoretically harddisk speed for one. We have in the past ATA100 then ATA133 then there’s SATA then SATA 2.0, 100Mpbs, 133Mbps, (we’ll ignore the buffer to host and buffer to the actual disk where the data is stored) 1Gbps and 3Gbps respectively.

I personally run a BF07288285 with no RAID as the OS disk and here’s what the speed is like:

They run off the Asus P5WDG2-WS PCI-X slot on a LSI 53C1010 like so:

Why bother about the network speed then? Hardware devices is still keeping pace and bottlenecking data transferred to them. I still think static IP address is the key. Back in Sept last year, here I spoke about this and it is still not achieved. Why is it that hard to allow home users to actually have static IPs at reasonable prices? Why the deflections from Singapore’s telcos? It could be:

- Market Demand – Who’s willing to pay and how at how much is price considered reasonable? For one, $300SGD a month is not reasonable.

- Abuse – Subscribers abusing their static IP. It’s a double edged sword. Subscribers know that. Tying them to their static IP address and on top of that, the modem’s mac address to the phone line, depending the technologies used, will actually stop a user from doing stupid or illegal stuffs?

- Upload Speeds – I would love 1Gbps seconds downloads but would love at least have that speeds UPLOAD speeds. It’s no secret people do run home web servers serving their web page, blogs, photos or whatever Web 1.0 or 2.0 apps they may be trying or developing. Being able to serve these files faster will be great. So give my 500Mbit/Sec upload please!

- Industry “Frown” – What will datacenters around Singapore and Asia think? If more and more users can actually host their servers from home with small companies maybe even hosting their servers from home or their companies? Balancing risk and the money involved (or rather, savings involved), having a 24 hour air con space partitioned out from an office space, remote IP Camera monitoring, water leakage, electrical surge monitoring systems (opensource based!) to monitor their say, 3 racks of 42U servers. Effectively cutting away this segment of the market from these datacenters.

- Government Bodies – Think all the 3 letters and the first up will be HDB. Rules about having such equipment (read: Racks) in HDB flats?

What ever it is, 1Gbps but the good stuffs are mostly overseas as of now. Contents contents contents! We hear this all the time and still, no local company has proven a killer app that will make a user surf around in Singapore using his super fast 1Gbps lightning speed connection. If he’s still surfing overseas, bottlenecking and eventually, cancellation of plans or downgrade of speeds, we’re back to square one.