Internet Awareness Tool Set:

Internet bandwidth is, in simple terms, the transmission speed or throughput of your connection to the Internet. However, measuring bandwidth can be tricky, since the lowest bandwidth point between your computer and the site you're looking at determines the effective transmission speed at any moment.

Three factors outside of your computer control how quickly you can view Web pages:

1. The Internet bandwidth between your computer and the site you're viewing.

2. The round-trip time between your computer and the site you're viewing.

3. The response time of the site you're viewing.

What's my bandwidth

Trace route:

This is useful to see how your internet traffic is being routed and can identify if your on the commodity internet or the higher level research Internet 2 network.

Traceroute

Visualization of traceroute

Traceroute from UO Campus

Campus network statistics:

Netstats

Internet Land Speed Records

But over shorter haul distances, one can do better:

• 3.28 terabits per seceond over 300 km is current record did 40 gigabits per second split between 83 wavelengths.

• Currently commercial optical networks carry 40 wavelengths per fiber but now that will increase to 80 wavelengths per fiber.

• Experimentation is currently at 1000 wavelengths per fiber (but doesn't work yet)

• Note: right now there are 215 million km of optical fiber laid across the globe. The distance between the earth and the sun is 150 million km.

The astonishing advances in bandwidth will largely be driven by two factors: the speed of lasers used to encode the data, and the number of lasers operating at different wavelengths that can be carried by a single fiber.