We Need Bigger Tubes

voc Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. And we wanted to talk a bit about communication and speed of communication and throughput of information because these are different terms and often we can easily confuse them, mostly because of just the terminology we tend to use when discussing the stuff casually, like, hey, you know, my internet speed is terrible. It's really really slow.

And what we mean by that usually is that the amount of information we are able to get over a given span of time is less than what we would like. That's that's generally speaking, what we mean when we say my internet slow. Yeah, I mean we mean this web page is taking forever to load, like four seconds. It's terrible. Though. It's funny because there are a lot of different reasons web page could be taking forever to load, right, it

should be a problem. It could be that the server is slow, or it could be a problem with the information getting from the server. To you, right, there could be some problems with switches or routers between the server and your computer. It could be problem with your computer. Yeah. The one the one thing that you can rest assured is that those uh, those ones and zeros are traveling as fast as they possibly can through whichever given pathway is available to them. So we really want to kind

of illustrate the difference between speed and through put. And I have kind of a an analogy that I'm going to try and and and clumsily set up to sort of explain this. So let's imagine that the three of us live in three different cities, and they're very far apart, uh,

and we would like to occasionally visit one another. Now, in each of our cities, we have these massive highways that have maybe there are ten lanes across, and they allow thousands of cars on them at any given time, and they can all be traveling at top speed safely because of the way these highways are designed. They're probably

autonomous cars then, right, clearly sure. And then but the problem is that when you start traveling, when you get about, oh, I don't know, maybe a third of the way from my city to Lawrence City, that highway suddenly narrows down to one lane, and so those ten lanes are now compacted into one lane. And it's not that the cars have that any individual car would have to move slower down that lane. Is that you now have to compress all that traffic down into the one lane of traffic.

And you can't have two cars in super position on each other, because physics don't work that way, y'all, and you would end up having a big old smash up on the highway. So that's a bottleneck. That's where we now are going to see traffic slowed down, even though that lead car would still be able to continue moving at the same speed it was on when the highway

had ten lanes wide. And if the same thing is true between Lauren City and Joe City and Joe City and my City, then traveling between the two we would experience some slow down, yea, even though we have these hyper efficient cars. Yeah there, yeah, well yeah, And we

can see that difference in terms of information. And I don't know if you've heard about this thing called fiber to the home, right um, fiber to the home is trying to rectify what's a really common bottleneck in in the communication grid that it may be that the backbone, you know that the public uh wire that if it's optical fiber or something like that. The cable, the cable that's um carrying the information. It has a lot of throughput, but suddenly it needs to branch off and get to

your house. And you've got some dinky little, you know, rolled up piece of tinfoil. It's transmitting from the optical fiber to your home. Someone who gets the message and walks to your front door and knocks on your door, hands you the message. Then you has to wait for

you to send the reply. They walk back, and in that case, it's it's almost like, well, what's the point of the you know, right right, you have this incredibly fast connection to the node, the network node that's in your neighborhood, but then from the node to your home

it's a much slower connection, so it doesn't really matter. Uh. The same thing is true if you have a really fast connection to your home, but one of the big connections on the internet, the backbone, if it hasn't already been outfitted with with fiber, with optic optic fiber or fiber optics. I should say, if I brought a cable. Then, uh, while you could send things and get things really quickly from your node, once it hit that it would start to slow down anyway. So really we're looking at the

Internet as a as an entire unified system. It's kind of interesting to me because one of the things that's been the news a lot over the last couple of years is is that Google in the United States, in Kansas City rolled out the Google Fiber hood. So they were making these these neighborhoods rolling out this Google Fiber that would give you a one gig a bit per second download speed and nearly as fast upload speed. In fact, the download and upload speeds are almost the same, which

is unheard of. I mean, in most networks you get a fraction of the upload speed that you get with download. And part of that is because uh, you know, you're you're trying the networks are trying to save this bandwidth. This this is for some networks a a limited amount of capacity that they have to handle network traffic, and

this helps cut that down. Because most people don't upload that much stuff that if you are a private citizen uploading a lot of data, what are you probably doing well these days you might be uploading just videos that you're taking and you want to put them on Facebook, you know, back in back back then, the earlier, it's the assumption would be more likely and you were feeding on you know, you were here's every metallic album ever made. Yeah, to rival the amount of that people are downloading on

you know, streaming television or something. Sure, yeah, yeah, well ten years ago, I would say that pirating would definitely be one of the concerns if you're uploading a lot of stuff these days, because there's so many options to host media from people legitimately that you could have people stepping it up, and there's so many products out there that allow you to capture video and upload video, and you know, YouTube is allowing you to put up as

much stuff as you like. Then there's really the capacity to actually upload a lot more than you used to. But unfortunately the actual Internet service providers haven't necessarily caught up to that. So still with a lot of I s p s you get a pretty decent download speed, but a kind of weedy upload speed. In comparison, Google Fiber was a little bit different, like this gig a bit down. It was matched by all us to gig a bit up. So one question people have had is

what would you use that for? I mean, what that's so much data in such a short amount of time. Well, well, yeah, right right now, the answer is kind of uh, I don't know, but uh, but you know, it's that's not to say that that's always going to be the case. Just because we can't imagine it now doesn't mean that it's going to be like that forever. But there's when it comes to technology. I mean, if there's a free launch, people are going to find a way to eat it.

Well and right now. There was an article that was on Slate that was written by Farad Manjou who said that, you know, in his experience of using it, he actually went to Kansas City, um and tried it out. By the way, the Kansas Kansas City for those who don't know who people who aren't in the United States aren't familiar with the geography. It's actually in two There are two states that have a Kansas City, and Google has

rolled out fiber to both of them. So so yeah, you're when I say Kansas City, I'm talking about both both Kansas cities. But uh uh Manju went to Kansas City to try this out and said that he didn't have any problem accessing anything like he could he could stream several videos all at the same time. But then when he went home he had a twenty two megabit per second connection, which is far smaller than the one gigabit per second, you know, far less throughput, but was

still not having any trouble with the videos. So he said, well, really, everything I would do, I can kind of do already, So what what's the advantage unless you're trying to test the limits? And and even then again, you are limited not just by the speed that's coming into your home, but the speed that's going across the core of the network. On i triple ease website, there's an article written by Dennis Weller and Bill Woodcock that point out that there

are Internet exchange points. This is like the core of the Internet. This is where the major traffic is switching across that uh that don't have this fiber optic cable yet. That the rollout was going really heavily in the ninety nine indies, but then investments started to peter off towards the end of the nineteen nineties, and so some parts

of the core of the Internet never got upgraded. So if you if you don't have the core of the Internet covered, then uh, you know, again, that's a bottleneck that's going to call if there's some traffic that needs to go through that point, you don't really benefit from that amazing throughput. And in fact, that was one of the points that people have made that it's not that Google Fiber isn't fast enough, it's that the rest of

the Internet isn't fast enough to really take advantage of it. However, it's a good thing to have sort of as a future proofing system. And even then, we know, I mean back in the day, I remember when I had a two fifty six megabyte hard drive and I thought, well, there's no way I would ever fill this. Yeah, I'll be upgrade again. But we learned, you know, we will find ways of meeting that capacity over time. It just

might take a while before that happens. But well, I mean, it's interesting that we will always find ways to to fill capacity. I think because if you think about all the ways that we used to send information that are really sort of slowly getting transferred to the Internet. That we we used to send letters in the mail all the time, we still do that some, but a lot of that email. Now we used to you know, get

our TV from cable or from broadcast. Lots of people still do that, but a lot of people are just watching TV on the internet. Yeah, there's an increasing number of people. Yeah, they hit in a December who plus hit like thirty million subscribers. Yeah, so it's yeah, just quite we're offloading from all these traditional routes of of

information to to the single grid basically. Yeah, no, that's that's a good point, and it's uh, it's interesting to me to see what the difference is between the average download speed and the Google fiber download speed. So remember I talking about the Google fibers one gigabit per second. Now, according to the Slate article, uh, it would say that that the average American download speed is closer to six point seven megabits per second, which, uh is pretty lot.

I mean, that's incredibly low. I mean it's it's tiny little fraction of the one gigabit per second. Other other outlets have estimated a different speed. There was one called net Index that says it's more like seventeen point seven one megabits per second. It all depends on how you measure those speeds. It's usually a sampling kind of like

Nielsen ratings, right, except for Internet speeds. You you take the sample of what these computer speeds are, or the data transmission rates I guess I should say, and then you sort of average that out across the United States. So, um, it's interesting to me because the net Index also ranks countries. Uh and and uh can you guess where what what? Well, they call it a country, but what city? What city has the fastest download connection according to net Index, keeping

in mind that other companies have different links. Wait wait, wait, you said it's a city and they're Now the Pope does not have a direct line to the internet. You know, you have not seen the Pope's chambers. All right, Well that's not the one chamber is totally Texas master control programs of computers everywhere. Yeah. No, this is Hong Kong. I'm taking it, putting out of your misery. It's Hong Kong.

That's what they listed. So Hong Kong at they have an average of forty four point thirty nine megabets per second download speed. The others in the top five include Singapore with thirty eight point seven five megabets per second Lithuania with thirty eight point seven three, Taiwan on with thirty four point eight five, and South Korea brings up the rear and the top five with thirty four point one nine. If you want to round out the sorry

that seems to make sense. I mean, aren't all those places pretty densely populated, Yeah, so that would like it's not like they're having to factor in all the farmers out in the middle of nowhere who are well and they're also smaller than places like the United States, where we have some very dense urban areas, but we also have some very wide spaces between US and some other populations in the United States. So the other the other

top ten included Luxembourg, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden. Sweden had twenty nine point thirty six megabits per second. United States ranked in at thirty one. And uh, then if you look at the United States just trying to figure out which states have the fastest, well, first of all, the state we live in, Georgia ranks twenty second out of the fifty states with eighteen point five one megat's per second, so we're still over the average. The national

average Orange. Yes, yes, yes, we are signed to be proud of. So can you can you take a guess at which state, according to net index, has the the fastest bit rate speed. UH. For if we're going to go for for small and compact, I would say what Rhode Island? Rhode Island, Uh, Tennessee, Tennessee. It was Delaware. You were on the right track there, of ok Obama. But yeah, Delaware with twenty five point to nine. So

that that again is coined to net index. So your mileage may vary depending upon which which oracle you consult when you try to figure out who has the fastest data transmission speeds. Oh no, I said Tennessee, because I have no idea to what extent this is true. But when I go home to my hometown of Chattanooga, the local Electric Power Board has been advertising their UH fiber optic service and and there's some kind of claim. Don't want to misrepresent them, I don't remember exactly, but there's

some kind of superlative claim they make. You know, this is the fastest fiber optic internet access ever UH with asterisk. I don't remember exactly what I mean. That may may not be fair, but it's something that they claim it's really really fast and my parents house really fast internet. I will say, yeah, well, and I mean I've lived in places where the connections weren't so great and and it was a real pain. And then I've the place where I live now the connection tends to be really

really good. Um. So I mean it all depends on where you live, what sort of connections are to your house. And again, like we're talking the difference between speed and through put. When you're talking about speed, depending on depending again upon whom you ask, most will say, oh, it's essentially the speed of light. Yeah, yeah, that that That's one thing I wanted to bring up. So we as we established at the beginning, we keep saying speed, but

we are talking about throughput. Yeah, what is what role is the actual physical speed play? I mean, how fast are these signals going? And does that part even matter? It they're going really really fast, like so fast that on Earth it almost doesn't matter what the actual speed is because it's it's so fast as to to us

to seem close to instantaneous. I've read some different figures and I don't know which one is correct, but I mean some of basically said, I've seen like that, uh, signals in fiber optic cable tend to travel at like sixty percent of the speed of light, And then I've seen others that say it's it's like nineties something percent, which is a huge difference. Yeah, exactly, even at it's still really fast, but no, thirty difference in claims is

pretty amazing. Yeah, So I have no idea who to trust there, and I don't know how fast that blip really goes. Yeah, And again, I think part of that is that there's so many places where that blip could encounter congestion that it makes it problematic to measure that speed. Because if you're talking about just through a fiber optic cable, then you know, you would imagine that it would move

at the speed that light would travel through that medium. Now, keep in mind that, of course, light does not travel through every medium at the same speed. When we say the speed of light, generally, what we're talking about is the speed of light through the vacuum of space. But but light just is not the vacuum of space exactly right, right, So light does travel through different media at different speeds. Right. So,

but here's an interesting question. Why is fiber optic cable so much faster than a traditional cable, because, if I'm not wrong, both signals would technically be traveling at something

like the speed of light. Right that one is sending blips of light through a through a tiny glass wire and it's being reflected down along the axis of that wire, And then the other is sending an electromagnetic pulse along electrons through again and and but wouldn't both of those essentially be traveling at the speed of light or is there a different speed of light in those two media? Well, there's I'm guessing that there is a difference in the

speed of light in those two media. But I think the bigger the bigger issue here is again through put It's not it's not again, it's not the speed of the information traveling along the distance of the cable. It's how much of information can that cable accommodate at one time. So I've also read that I think the fiber optic cable has less interference. That's true. That, uh, it's less susceptible to I don't know what, maybe a magnetic field or something like that messing up the signal and causing

you'd have to send it again. Have you ever have you ever listened to music over speaker and had a phone go off near it and then get that stuttering noise to day to day to day? Did it? Did it? You know? It sounds like a great premise for a sci fi movie, right, You know why are the phones doing that? Yeah? Well, yeah, it's it's because of that electromagnetic it's the electromagnetic field, and it's because your speakers

have really lousy shielding around the cables. Because the electromagnetic field is interfering with the transmission of signals across those cables, and that's why you're picking up this erratic noise that shouldn't be there. So if you shield the cables more thoroughly than that protects against that same sort of thing. You also can get electron leakage through these cables, and

that can cause errors in in uh transmissions. So if I were to send a message over a copper cable and there was a lot of leakage along the line, you could get errors on the other end of it. You know, the file would not would not end up loading correctly unless you had really good error protection on there. Whereas detection and protection and where they could account for the slow it down in anything when you have to send the packet again. Yeah, and then, and the Internet's

designed to allow for that. I mean, that's one of the big advantages of the way the Internet works is that, uh, you know, the files are broken up into packets. Those packets go across the network. They don't all necessarily follow the exact same pathway, and there are duplicates that get across, so that when the receiving computer starts getting these packets together, it just starts putting it together like it's a puzzle. But it's a puzzle where you already know where every

single piece is supposed to go. And once you have packet number twelve, you don't need any of the other packet number twelves and you just grab the packets that you need and put it back together. That's an oversimplification of what's going on with packet switching, but that's the general idea, and it's to make the Internet more robust and to allow for the fact that sometimes you run into these problems with congestion, and that's one way to

get around it. Literally you're going around the congestion to go take a different pathway to get your destination. You can also compress the files uh down in various ways act sure, I mean even you know, not even just just like a ZIP file. But it's a process that many computers will go through while they are sending information, right, And that helps too, because you're actually reducing the amount

of information that needs to be sent across the network. Thus, again you're not making the file move faster, You're just making less information so that you don't have to together on the other side. Yeah, what about what about microwaves? I've heard I've heard that especially on some really really high energy trading companies are starting to look at microwaves as a method of communication. Well, thirty Rock has taught

me anything. Microwaves are really important. There's a whole division at G where it was am I thinking of the right thing I have? Yeah? Microwaves division. Yeah, yeah, No, these these these trading firms that are dealing with with with trades that are going on, you know, by by computers, Jo, you were talking about a little bit earlier. Yeah, they've got these these robots that do trades for him right there.

They're big computer brains and and they're way smarter than us or at least, they're way better at way faster than us at process. Yeah, they're way better at playing this weird game where they make money by just making trade. It's faster than anybody else can UM. And so they might buy and sell a stock like eight times within half a second UM. And the the money they're making

is directly dependent on how fast they can transmit the signal. Right, Like they're responding to market pressures and they have to know when there's like a trend in the market. I think, yeah, they're they're checking the differences between different markets and I think playing off of that. So for them, time really is money. Yeah, well well literally, UM. One company, trade Works is putting together this microwave network and they say that it's going to um shave maybe two point three

milliseconds off of off of the transfer process. And at this two point three milliseconds could save up point oh eight cents per share traded, which could be worth like like over a thousand bucks a day. To anyone who's doing this, this is all crazy to me, like like to the to the to the point that the people are NASDAC and CEM are putting together a network that they're going to be charging like twenty dollars a month

for people to use your money. Witchcraft frightens me. And well, I mean this is a tangent, but it's just it's it's fascinating to me that that all of this, all of this is just because you know, microwaves, You've got these dish networks that are sending signals through the air. They don't have to go through cables, they don't have to go around curves or bends. You don't have any kind of degradation or or or you do have degradation,

but it's a different kind. But it's like a direct line of sight kind of transmission as opposed to whatever pathway would have to take in order. It's amazing to me that that little could make that difference, that big of a difference. Well, it's just cumulative, right, And what I was about to say a second ago, it's just

it's crazy. This is how people are making money. I mean, and I think originally a stock market, I think like you're investing in a business that you expect to succeed, But at this point you're just you're investing in a business that you predict will increase in the you know, the price of the stock at some amount within the next second, right right, Yeah. Micromanaging to that extent does fill me with a sense of dread. Hey, you know we're so good at it now the roots? Yeah yeah, no,

no to me. To me, it feels like you're you're putting together like like a cheat codes that you can press a single button and go how do you can rather than just press see here. To me, what this tells me is that in the future, not only other robots going to get smarter and more capable at destroying us, but they will also have all the money. Weren't we talking about the speed of communication? Yeah, we were. That's that's that's why the robots are the ones who are

really good. Well, how crazy will this get? I mean, so again, if we're not talking about speed, which we pretty much know the upper limit there, but what's the upper limit on throughput? That's a good question. And I well, I was reading about in the research I was doing for the episode that uh, some researchers I think it was a Dutch Japanese partnership. Um, there were some scientists who put together a twelve core optical fiber that could deliver one pet a bit per second. That I understand

that number. That's great. Peat a bit, well, it's a it's what is it goes kill a bit, mega bit, big, a bit, ter a bit, pet a bit then up to xo bit. Yeah, and so this thing could deliver it could carry a pet a bit of information across I think it was something like fifty kilometers uh in one second. Yeah, that's a lot. That's just that, like you could transmit the entire Internet back and forth between

some buildings and I don't know, like five minutes. Essentially you could do the Library of Congress in a couple of seconds. Yeah, like the entire everything in the Library of Congress in a couple of seconds. Yeah, that's that's impressive. I mean and again again yeah, we kind of think like what would you even use that for? And in the future we might we might have answers for that, like holograms, right, well, no, exactly. The point I wanted to make is we'll find a way. I mean, if

there's a free launch, somebody's gonna eat it. Yeah, it'll be it'll be the first person Shooters of the future will be reliant on that. Anyone who does not have that pet a bit per second, So sad my Halo game is only going to get worse. It's great, like by the time, hey, I'm still entering my character's name on the screen and you've already kill me fifteen times. Well, that's a good discussion. And you know what, I think that there's another part of this discussion we need to have,

which is on Earth speed. We we've kind of cracked that nut. I mean, we've got we've got it fast enough where the delays in communication are fairly small. I mean even if you're for most purposes, they're not speed based really like we've been saying they're they're bandwidth based, right, So, but there is there is something to say about speed obstacles, and that's when we start talking about getting off this planet and going somewhere else and then communicating back home.

So in our next episode, I think we're going to focus on that. Uh. In the meantime, guys out there who are listening, I would highly recommend you get in touch with us, let us know what you think. Let's know if you have any topics you think we should tackle in future episodes of Forward Thinking, you can get in touch with us with our email address. That's f w Thinking at Discovery dot com, or you can go to f W thinking dot com and check out all the videos, the blog posts, you can look at the

social media stuff we've got there. Come and join the conversation, be part of it. We really look forward to speaking with you guys, and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places