How to download a movie in 5 seconds
June 5, 2003 | Source: KurzweilAI
Imagine an internet connection that lets you download a whole movie in just 5 seconds or access TV-quality video servers in real time. That’s the promise from a team at the California Institute of Technology that has developed a system called Fast TCP.
The trick: software and hardware on the sending computer continually measure the time it takes for sent packets to arrive and how long acknowledgements take to come back.
This reveals the delays on the line, giving early warnings of likely packet losses. The Fast TCP software uses this to predict the highest data rate the connection can support without losing data. The system is compatible with the standard Internet TCP/IP protocol.
By ganging 10 Fast TCP systems together, the researchers have achieved transmission speeds of over 8.6 gigabits per second, more than 6000 times the capacity of ordinary broadband links.
Caltech is already in talks with Microsoft and Disney about using it for video on demand.