Reality in Sweden: download a HD DVD in two seconds

Sweden is often celebrated as THE best wired place in the world. Almost all Swedes can enjoy a super fast broadband connection. But even these people are likely to get jealous when they hear the story about Sigbritt Löthberg, a 75-year old woman from Karlstad. Three years ago, her home was supplied with the world’s fastest Internet connection: a staggering 40 Gigabits per second.

In theory that means she’s able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously, but something tells me she won’t do this. However, she might want to download a full high definition DVD every once and a while. She will only have to wait for two seconds.

Peter Löthberg: “I was sent by God to network the planet”

For the secret behind her connection, we have to consult her son, Swedish Internet legend Peter Löthberg – who now works at Cisco. He developed a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometers apart, with no intermediary transponders. “I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has,” Löthberg told The Local.

With this extreme connection, Löthberg and the local network company Karlstad Stadsnät want to show that ISP’s should invest in better technologies, as it will soon become interesting economically speaking. The network boss said the whole process wasn’t really complicated: “The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt’s PC”.

Although this took daring experiment took place three years ago, we’re still not able to browse drastically faster than we used to. Partly to bandwidth limitations as the hard disk – like Pragma points out in the comment, but also because most people don’t know what they’re missing.

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