Fast is as fast does
The new particle accelerator in Europe at the Cern laboratory has been in the news quite a bit the last month or so. This massive device is designed to smash subatomic particles together at tremendous speed to try and uncover new information about the nature of matter, including looking for a conjectured particle called the Higgs boson, the only particle predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has never been directly observed. (Ok, sorry about all that. I’m a science nerd, after all.)
I mention it here not to revel in arcane science, but because of an interesting technology backstory to this effort. As the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, was being designed, the researchers realized that the volume of data it would produce was so large that it would potentially overwhelm the Internet when shared with scientists around the world. Their solution was to create a parallel network - that is amazingly fast. In addition to using fiber optics, the researchers designed an entirely new system for managing the transfer of the data. This combination creates a network that is up to 10,000 times faster than the existing Internet.
This technology is currently only available to certain institutions, but it will at some time begin to replace the Internet we currently use. Bandwidth will increase to a level that we literally can’t envision. What will we do with a technology that lets us back up a 120 gigabyte hard drive onto a remote server in five or ten seconds? The article linked above explores some of the conjectures, but the most dependable prediction for what we will do with that much capacity is something we haven’t thought of yet.