Hasta La Gadget!

Just last week we reported on Fujitsu’s plans to get in on the gigabit broadband game, and now Virgin Media is taking things a step further by announcing its intention to test internet speeds up to 1.5Gbps in east London. The trial, which plans to deliver upload speeds of 150Mbps, uses a similar fiber optic setup as the one employed by Fujitsu, and targets multimedia companies near the junction of the city’s Old Street and City Road, also referred to as the Silicon Roundabout. These tests have been made possible by a £13 billion investment from Virgin Media. If this thing pans out, it looks like Google might have some catching up to do. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Virgin Media to test 1.5Gbps broadband on London’s Silicon Roundabout

Virgin Media to test 1.5Gbps broadband on London’s Silicon Roundabout originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s officially the weekend, which means you’ve got two choices: one, mimic iTr3vor and toss up a YouTube video of yourself dancing in an Apple Store, or two, blow your own mind with the magic of HTML5. In between hour-long Pica-Pic sessions, we’d recommend killing time in The World’s Biggest Pac-Man game, which can be “played for fun” or linked to your Facebook account for those who savvy statistics. We’d bother telling you more, but we’re fairly sure you’re already firmly occupied with the source link. You’re welcome. Or, we’re sorry.

The World’s Biggest Pac-Man game takes over the internet, your life originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 02:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ever been to Vanuatu? Neither have the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants — particularly those who simply can’t function off the grid. For ages, the island archipelago has relied on sluggish, unpredictable satellite connections for eBay bids and liveblog following, but it looks as if fares to the blossoming nation are about to head even further north. Around this time next year, the Pacific Island destination will be connected to the real internet, thanks to an undersea optical fiber backbone cable linking it to nearby Fiji. Interchange and Alcatel-Lucent will be working to lay and operate the 1,230 kilometer cable system, which will “link directly into the high capacity Southern Cross Cable between Sydney and Hawaii.” At first, the system will be equipped to handle 20Gbis/sec — a figure that dwarfs the country’s current capacity by 200x. In time, that should creep up to 320Gbit/sec, enabling your future vacation videos to hit YouTube in record time. Total cost? $30 million, or a drop in the bucket compared to the economic boom that’s bound to transpire.

Continue reading South Pacific’s Vanuatu grabbing fiber internet connection, sidesteps ‘remote’ stereotype

South Pacific’s Vanuatu grabbing fiber internet connection, sidesteps ‘remote’ stereotype originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good news for anyone feeling left behind by the broadband revolution just because of their post code: Fujitsu has just announced a joint venture to deliver fiber optic connectivity to neglected rural homes in the UK. Built on hardware provided by Cisco and supported by Virgin Media and TalkTalk, this network will focus on channeling fiber directly to the home, which is said to provide symmetrical 1Gbps bandwidth with up to 10Gbps speeds considered possible down the line. Best news of all, perhaps, is that the cabling will be available on a wholesale basis to all ISPs, not just the ones involved in the project, so the UK may finally get a decent taste of what competition in the internet service space feels like. Alas, there’s a key line in the press release that notes the new venture is dependent on BT providing “access to its underground ducts and telegraph poles on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms,” which it apparently isn’t doing at the moment. Ah well, we’re sure they’ll sort things out like the mature professionals that they are. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Fujitsu to build 1Gbps fiber optic broadband network in the UK, but needs BT to play fair first

Fujitsu to build 1Gbps fiber optic broadband network in the UK, but needs BT to play fair first originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Apr 2011 05:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The internet is a mighty big place that’s only growing larger each day. That makes it a perfectly unwieldy thing to measure, but the traffic it generates has nonetheless been subjected to a rigorous estimation project by a group of UC San Diego academics. Their findings, published online this month, reveal that in 2008 some 9.57 zettabytes made their way in and out of servers across the globe. Some data bits, such as an email passing through multiple servers, might be counted more than once in their accounting, but the overall result is still considered an under-estimation because it doesn’t address privately built servers, such as those Google, Microsoft and others run in their backyards. On a per-worker basis (using a 3.18 billion human workforce number), all this data consumption amounts to 12GB daily or around 3TB per year. So it seems that while we might not have yet reached the bliss of the paperless office, we’re guzzling down data as if we were. Check out the report below for fuller details on the study and its methodology.

Our annual data consumption estimated at 9.57 zettabytes or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 04:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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