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"And a colossal amount of data is being transmitted over the network - sometimes amounting to over 100 gigabytes each second." What am I missing?

by ponyous 12y ago

vishnugupta 12y ago
Perhaps the article meant the "entire network" and not just a single connection?
- lucb1e 12y ago
  Still, it makes no sense. The Amsterdam Internet Exchange is one of the biggest in the world, and they transfer 0.8tbps (800gbps or 100 gigabytes per second) at night, peaking to about 2.6tbps during daytime[1]. If F1 races added up to 100 gigabytes per second to that, it would be a 100% increase at night or a 30% increase when the sun is up here. The article mentions it also needs to span continents. I'm pretty sure that if you want to reliably transfer 100GB/s, you'd need to roll new cables between a couple of continents. North-America to Europe might have the capacity, but I'm sure (looked into it before[3]) that from South America to Europe can't do it directly even if you exclusively rented the cable that runs between the continents (which is the Atlantis-2). So you'd need to route through North America or maybe Africa, which adds latency. Probably still under 300ms single-trip, but it still seems unfeasibly large to me. Even if the article is mistaken and means 100 gigabits instead of -bytes, I have a hard time believing it. It's possible, but hard to get that much data between continents while keeping the latency low enough, at least without rolling your own underseas cables which even Google doesn't do on their own[2]. [1] https://ams-ix.net/technical/statistics https://ams-ix.net/technical/statistics [2] http://gizmodo.com/google-funds-an-undersea-cable-to-connect-the-us-to-asi-1619974480 http://gizmodo.com/google-funds-an-undersea-cable-to-connect... [3] http://submarinecablemap.com http://submarinecablemap.com
  - disputin 12y ago
    Are they including web traffic? "The Tata Global Network(TGN) has Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific data transfer capacity of one terabit per second." http://www.formula1.com/news/headlines/2012/2/13043.html http://www.formula1.com/news/headlines/2012/2/13043.html (Two years old)
  - kayoone 12y ago
    Absolutely, that figure is insanely exaggerated. I am willing to bet it's more like a low latency 1-10Gbit/s connection per team, depending on the country they are racing in.
kator 12y ago
They're counting the video feeds also.
fla 12y ago
It's BBC'tech reporting. The details are intended to impress the lambda non-techy readers. 100GB/s seems a bit over-exagerated, but whatever, it's a funny article to read anyway.
- lucb1e 12y ago
  Someone downvoted this, but I think s/he's right in that it's exaggerated. I explained why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177618

"And a colossal amount of data is being transmitted over the network - sometimes amounting to over 100 gigabytes each second." What am I missing?

by ponyous 12y ago

"And a colossal amount of data is being transmitted over the network - sometimes amounting to over 100 gigabytes each second." What am I missing?

vishnugupta 12y ago

Perhaps the article meant the "entire network" and not just a single connection?

lucb1e 12y ago
Still, it makes no sense. The Amsterdam Internet Exchange is one of the biggest in the world, and they transfer 0.8tbps (800gbps or 100 gigabytes per second) at night, peaking to about 2.6tbps during daytime[1]. If F1 races added up to 100 gigabytes per second to that, it would be a 100% increase at night or a 30% increase when the sun is up here. The article mentions it also needs to span continents. I'm pretty sure that if you want to reliably transfer 100GB/s, you'd need to roll new cables between a couple of continents. North-America to Europe might have the capacity, but I'm sure (looked into it before[3]) that from South America to Europe can't do it directly even if you exclusively rented the cable that runs between the continents (which is the Atlantis-2). So you'd need to route through North America or maybe Africa, which adds latency. Probably still under 300ms single-trip, but it still seems unfeasibly large to me. Even if the article is mistaken and means 100 gigabits instead of -bytes, I have a hard time believing it. It's possible, but hard to get that much data between continents while keeping the latency low enough, at least without rolling your own underseas cables which even Google doesn't do on their own[2]. [1] https://ams-ix.net/technical/statistics https://ams-ix.net/technical/statistics [2] http://gizmodo.com/google-funds-an-undersea-cable-to-connect-the-us-to-asi-1619974480 http://gizmodo.com/google-funds-an-undersea-cable-to-connect... [3] http://submarinecablemap.com http://submarinecablemap.com
- disputin 12y ago
  Are they including web traffic? "The Tata Global Network(TGN) has Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific data transfer capacity of one terabit per second." http://www.formula1.com/news/headlines/2012/2/13043.html http://www.formula1.com/news/headlines/2012/2/13043.html (Two years old)
- kayoone 12y ago
  Absolutely, that figure is insanely exaggerated. I am willing to bet it's more like a low latency 1-10Gbit/s connection per team, depending on the country they are racing in.

kator 12y ago

They're counting the video feeds also.

fla 12y ago

It's BBC'tech reporting. The details are intended to impress the lambda non-techy readers. 100GB/s seems a bit over-exagerated, but whatever, it's a funny article to read anyway.

lucb1e 12y ago
Someone downvoted this, but I think s/he's right in that it's exaggerated. I explained why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177618