I came across this story, and it struck me as being somewhat entertaining and pointless at the the same time. While it is great that we can achieve blazing fast speeds over the internet as high as 40 gigabits-per-second, the reason for doing this is beyond me.

As stated in the article, the one person who has this fast of internet only uses it to send email and read the newspaper. This falls in to the same usage pattern as the vast majority of internet users today. Most people generally do not do tasks that require large amounts of internet bandwidth.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the connection between the end user’s computer and the machine it is getting the information from is only going to be as fast as the slowest part. A 40 gigabit connection running through a 256K switch somewhere is only going to transmit data at 256K, and that switch could be anywhere between the server and the end user’s computer.

It would be pretty cool to have that kind of connection speed though if it would reliably transmit data at those speeds to/from all the places that I normally tend to visit.