Sprint, SUNET sets new Internet speed record

Sprint and the Swedish National Research and Education Network (SUNET) have reportedly set a new world record for sending large amounts of data speedily across the Internet.

The Sprint/SUNET team sent nearly 840G bytes of data – the equivalent of 140 DVDs – from a PC in San Jose to another PC in Lulea, Sweden in less than 27 minutes. The bulk data traveled 10,157 miles across Sprint and SUNET’s production Internet backbones at 4.23G bit/sec.

The Sprint/SUNET transmission is 12% faster than the previous record held by the California Institute of Technology and CERN using a non-public advanced research network rather than a commercial network.

The Internet2 consortium has verified the Sprint/SUNET accomplishment. Internet2 sponsors an ongoing contest called the Internet Land Speed Record competition to determine the fastest transmission of bulk data across end-to-end networks. The Sprint/SUNET achievement falls under the IPv4 single-stream category of the competition.

Sprint officials say they will submit this accomplishment to the Guinness Book of World Records, which currently lists an Internet speed record that is almost three times slower than the new Sprint/SUNET time in its 2004 edition.

Sprint and SUNET used commercially available hardware, software and services to set this record. The PCs involved were off-the-shelf Dell 2650 servers, with single Intel Xeon 2.0 GHz processors, 512M bytes of RAM and the 2.0 version of the NetBSD operating system. The PCs were connected to routers in San Jose and Lulea using Intel PRO 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters.

The data hopped across 40 Cisco GSR 12000 series routers in its trip from San Jose to Lulea. The record was set using Sprint’s commercial SprintLink service and SUNET’s GigaSunet IP backbone, both of which were shared by other network users.

Sprint officials claim this achievement is a sign of their commitment to Internet innovation. They hope the publicity surrounding this record will help corporate customers realize the high-performance nature of today’s Internet backbones.

“We have very, very high-performing IP networks now. I think business communications buyers can lose sight of that,” says Chase Cotton, director of data systems engineering for Sprint. “They should feel a lot more comfortable running enterprise video conferencing around on the public Internet and less uncomfortable about buying Internet services vs. private line services.”

Indeed, Sprint says this speed record directly applies to such corporate applications as business continuity and data center backup.