Systemic Summary: Instant Internet

On Greg Laughlin's blog systemic, he discusses the current state of internet latency, and ways that this could potentially be reduced, to allow for near spontaneous data transmission all across the globe.

In order for data transmission to appear spontaneous, it simply needs to beat the human's response-rate processing of ~ \( \frac{1}{30} \) second (30 msec). If data were to travel at the speed of light around the world, the trip from New York to Tokyo would take approximately 1 msec, or \( \frac{1}{30} \) the required amount of time for apparently spontaneous data transmission. Below is a representation of the path this data would have to follow:

http://oklo.org/

Currently, the time that it takes to travel this path is 80 msec along the NTT PC-1 cable. This is 1.44x slower than the speed of light. Although this is the fastest possible transmission speed of the current system, this isn't the standard time required for real-world data to be transmitted. In a study done by Ankit Singla, over 20 million measurements were taken on live data, and the latency was measured. This revealed that actual transmission was in fact 40x slower than the speed of light.

One of the primary causes of this latency is due to a small portion of Internet users that are consuming the vast majority of the Internet band-width. One proposed system to improve latency and narrow in on the apparently spontaneous Internet, is setting up a parallel infrastructure that is limited to standard online users.

A few prototypical networks of this sort have been established between Chicago and New York, aiming to eliminate latency. In testing, these networks can transmit within 2% of the speed of light minimum.

http://oklo.org/

These parallel infrastructure networks follow a Steiner Tree Configuration, which allows for minimizing distances across a sphere. A sample of a Steiner configuration applied to the continental United States is shown below:

http://oklo.org/

By minimizing these transmission distances, and allowing for parallel pathways, major latency improvements can be made. Additionally, incorporating fiber optic pathways could also allow for improvements in global data transmission latency. Initial testing has been conducted by Google, with their project, Google Fiber, to expand availability of fiber optic internet data distribution.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-working-10-gigabit-internet-speeds/

Although laying out fiber optic cables over long distances is a challenge, the results are staggering, with download speeds of 1 Gb per second. This is over 100x faster than current Internet providers speeds. Particularly as Internet dependency, and data transmission requirements grow, this will be a fascinating area and problem to tackle.