Remember the good ol’ days when we had to carry around floppy disks to exchange information? Back then I created a website called AntiFloppy that made it easy to upload your data to the website, share a link with your friend, and your friend could download that data anywhere else in the world. Simple. No floppies, no physical movement required, and send as much data as you can. Or until you get booted off of your dial-up connection because your family member picked up the phone and started dialing.
I hated carrying around floppy disks, especially because each one only held 1.44 MB of information. Word processing data was fine, but sharing pictures or music? Fogetaboutit. Those were the days of Napster.
Here is what we had to deal with. Every day. Before we could even open a web browser…
Bear in mind, this was a significant number of years before any other websites came along like Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, or MEGA. Interestingly enough, it’s now cheaper to pay a monthly fee to a cloud provider than it is to purchase the equivalent number of floppy disks you would need to transfer data physically.
Moving along…
How fast is your Internet connection? Depending on where you are in the world and which Internet Service Provider you have, your answer will vary.
For most Americans, the price we pay for Internet access correlates to the speed we sign up for. The average connection speed in my area is around 100 Mbps. It can vary, and if you’re a game, have a large family, or are a business, you most likely have (or should have) a faster connection.
In August of 2020 the world record for the fastest internet speed was just broken by a team of researchers at University College London who were able to achieve a whopping speed of 178 Tbps.
That means they transferred data 1,780,000 times the speed of your connection.
That’s fast enough to download the entire Netflix library in less than a second.
Obviously this kind of speed isn’t practical for home use. But if you’re a major player in the Internet industry, like CloudFlare, Google, and Facebook, you can actually save money and time by using one of these setup.
Here is a real-world solution — Intel Tofino2 Silicon Protonics
