I read an article on Current.com.au about the new 100 Mbps Telstra broadband that will be rolled out to people in a 100 metre radius of the centre of the Melbourne and Sydney CBDs. Well, okay, it’s fibre optics and it will service about 3 million people in Melbourne and Sydney.
One thing that rang alarm bells was Sol Trujillo claiming that a family could “download a high definition movie in just over a minute”. This didn’t sound right to me, so I got my calculator out and wrote the following letter to Current.com.au:
I don’t think Sol Trujillo has his figures correct.
He claims that his new 100 Megabits Per Second broadband will allow a
family to download a high definition movie in a little over a minute. To
put it nicely, he is off the mark by several orders of magnitude!
100 megabits per second equals 12 megabytes per second. In one minute,
the Telstra broadband connection would download 720 megabytes in
unattainable ideal conditions. The Blu-ray copy of 50 First Dates takes
up 17 gigabytes - it would take over 23 minutes to transfer.
Sure, that’s impressively fast, but it’s twenty-three times slower than
Sol is implying.
Let’s say he means 100 megaBYTES per second (which is 800 megabits per
second). In a minute, you’d download 6 gigabytes, and it would take two
and a half minutes to download your Blu-ray movie. But network transfer
speeds are always measured in megabits per second (Mbps), not megabytes
per second (MB/s).
For a bit of fun, we can calculate how long 50 First Dates on Blu-ray
would transfer on Sigbitt Lothberg’s connection. 40Gbps is 5 gigabytes
per second, meaning she’d have the whole movie in a little over three
seconds in ideal conditions, not taking into account latency (the time
it takes the request to reach the end server and for that server to
start delivering data). However, unless she does her web surfing on a
“big iron” enterprise server, I suspect her actual throughput would be
limited by her computer’s regular Ethernet card - 1 gigabits per second,
or still 10x faster than Telstra’s new broadband.
Take that, Sol!
I hope Telstra doesn’t use “download a high definition movie in just over a minute” in any of its advertising, or they’d be in very big trouble! Actually; I do hope they use it and that they get fined a LOT.
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[...] bigbolshevik placed an observative post today on Sol Trujillo needs a new calculatorHere’s a quick excerptSol Trujillo needs a new calculator I read an article on Current.com.au about the new 100 Mbps Telstra broadband that will be rolled out to people in a 100 metre radius of the centre of the Melbourne and Sydney CBDs. Well, okay, it’s fibre optics and it will service about 3 million people in Melbourne and Sydney. One thing that … Read the full post from A Man and his Penguin Tags: Web/Tech via Blogdigger blog search for accounting. [...]
[...] bigbolshevik created an interesting post today on Sol Trujillo needs a new calculatorHere’s a short outlineSol Trujillo needs a new calculator I read an article on Current.com.au about the new 100 Mbps Telstra broadband that will be rolled out to people in a 100 metre radius of the centre of the Melbourne and Sydney CBDs. Well, okay, it’s fibre optics and it will service about 3 million people in Melbourne and Sydney. One thing that … Read the full post from A Man and his Penguin Tags: Web/Tech via Blogdigger blog search for movies. [...]
[...] bigbolshevik placed an observative post today on Sol Trujillo needs a new calculatorHere’s a quick excerptSol Trujillo needs a new calculator I read an article on Current.com.au about the new 100 Mbps Telstra broadband that will be rolled out to people in a 100 metre radius of the centre of the Melbourne and Sydney CBDs. Well, okay, it’s fibre optics and it will service about 3 million people in Melbourne and Sydney. One thing that … Read the full post from A Man and his Penguin Tags: Web/Tech via Blogdigger blog search for computers. [...]
[...] bigbolshevik put an intriguing blog post on Sol Trujillo needs a new calculatorHere’s a quick excerptSol Trujillo needs a new calculator I read an article on Current.com.au about the new 100 Mbps Telstra broadband that will be rolled out to people in a 100 metre radius of the centre of the Melbourne and Sydney CBDs. Well, okay, it’s fibre optics and it will service about 3 million people in Melbourne and Sydney. One thing that … Read the full post from A Man and his Penguin Tags: Web/Tech via Blogdigger blog search for Enterprise. [...]
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I read an article on Current.com.au about the new 100 Mbps Telstra broadband that will be rolled out [...]…