The internet is such a slowpoke.
In principle, Internet should nearly operate at the speed of light, which is more than 670 million miles per hour.
Instead, Internet data moves 37 to 100 times slower than that. The term that is technical for this speed gap is “network latency,” the split-second delay in an internet connection as a signal travels from a computer to a server and back again.
Gregory Laughlin, an astronomy professor in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, believes that we can do better.
According to Laughlin, we can make the internet in the United States at least 10 times faster, if not 100 times faster.
In this case the work of leaders of an investigation into what is slowing down the internet and what can do to fix it.
The National Science Foundation-funded project is called “Internet at the Speed of Light“.
A couple said researchers of key factors are holding the internet back. The internet depends upon is highly chaotic for example, the network of underground, fiber optic cable routes.
It zig-zags beneath highways and railroad tracks, detours around difficult terrain such as mountains, and typically sends signals hundreds of miles in the direction that is wrong at some point during transmission.
According to Laughlin and his Colleagues
A network of microwave radio transmission towers across the United States would allow internet signals to travel in a straight line through the air, thereby speeding up the internet.
Furthermore, Laughlin claims that this basic concept has already tested on a small scale with success.
Stock traders built a microwave network between Chicago and New Jersey a decade ago to save valuable microseconds on high-frequency trading transactions, for example.
Laughlin and his colleagues discovered in their final findings, which they presented at the USENIX that 19th Symposium Networked Systems Design and Implementation in April,
The microwave networks are reliably faster than fiber networks — even in inclement weather — and the economic value of microwave networks would make them worth the expense to build.
Laughlin spoke with News recently about the project.
