STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- She is a latecomer to the information superhighway, but 75-year-old Sigbritt Lothberg is now cruising the Internet with a dizzying speed.
Lothberg's 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection in Karlstad is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world, Karlstad city officials said.
In less than 2 seconds, Lothberg can download a full-length movie on her home computer -- many thousand times faster than most residential connections, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, head of the Karlstad city network unit.
Jonsson and Lothberg's son, Peter, worked together to install the connection.
The speed is reached using a new modulation technique that allows the sending of data between two routers placed up to 1,240 miles apart, without any transponders in between, Jonsson said.
"We wanted to show that that there are no limitations to Internet speed," he said.
Peter Lothberg, who is a networking expert, said he wanted to demonstrate the new technology while providing a computer link for his mother.
"She's a brand-new Internet user," Lothberg said by phone from California, where he lives. "She didn't even have a computer before."
His mother isn't exactly making the most of her high-speed connection. She only uses it to read Web-based newspapers.
Previously, if you wanted a broadband internet connection, you either plugged your computer into a DSL modem from your phone company or into cable modem from your cable TV network. But in the future it's increasingly likely that you'll plug your computer into the receptacle it's already using: the power outlet.
That's right-since a wire already runs into your house to carry power, why not use it to carry data as well? That is what increasing numbers of people are doing, using a technology called broadband over powerline (BPL).
Using transmission protocols designed to co-exist with power on the line, the signal is injected into the distribution wire that runs into a neighborhood. At the transformer where the line connects to a subscriber, the signal is routed around the transformer and onto the feeder line leading to the house. (Passing through the transformer would erase the signal.)
Inside the house, the user plugs an adapter [image] into any power outlet, and then plugs an Ethernet cable into the adapter-and has an internet connection.
Growth expected
While a little more than 100,000 people in the United States use BPL today, that figure should grow to 2.5 million by 2011, predicts Chris Roden, analyst at Parks Associates in Dallas.
"It all comes down to the gap between rural and densely settled areas," Roden told LiveScience. DSL and cable are hard to get in lightly settled areas, where building networks is expensive, he explained, forcing the residents there to get by with dial-up connections. However, all but the most remote rural residents are already served by a powerline.
Meanwhile, technical problems involving interference, line noise, and signal range were all solved within the last three years.
"Previously we were not quite there with the technology in terms of speeds and chip sets, but now we are," explained Ralph Vogel, spokesman for Utility.net, a Los Angeles-based BPL installation firm.
City use too
Despite BPL's advantages in rural areas, the biggest planned BPL installations are in urban areas (specifically, Dallas and Houston.) In urban settings, the rationale for BPL is to create "smart grids" to monitor and control the power network.
"Today, utilities have to wait for someone to call in to say their lights are out, and then send out a truck to find the problem," Roden explained.
Meanwhile, giving each subscriber a digital meter that can transmit real-time readings via BPL would not only end the need for meter readers, it would allow time-of-day pricing, with premium pricing during times of peak demand.
With BPL installed throughout the network, offering retail internet access (probably through third-party internet service providers) would be the logical next move, and plans to do so have been announced in Dallas.
"It's icing on the cake," said Mike Arden, principal analyst at ABI Research in Oyster Bay, NY.
Move over fiber: Cable TV modems may soon leave you in the dust.
That's right-optical fiber-to-the-home service had previously offered the fastest available connection for residential Internet. The best-known example is the FiOS service from Verizon Communications, which peaks at 50 megabits per second.
But the cable industry has recently taken the wraps off new cable modem technology that exceeds the FiOS speed by a factor of more than three. Called the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) 3.0, it allows data throughput of as much as 160 megabits.
"The technology lets you bind together cable channels and then run data over those combined channels-you don't need more wires," said Mike Schwartz, spokesman for Cable Television Laboratories (Cablelabs), which defines operational specifications for hardware used in the cable TV industry, assuring interoperability.
Each digital channel can provide a bandwidth of 40 megabits, so binding them together provides multiples of that throughput, he said-although the user will have to sacrifice several program channels. With four channels consumed by Internet bandwidth, the user will get 160 megabits downstream (from the Internet) and 120 megabits upstream (to the Internet).
"Cable systems are looking at their ability to deliver high data speeds, and are putting channels aside to assure that kind of throughput when the market requires it," Schwartz told LiveScience.
The DOCSIS 3.0 modems will work only on digital networks, and only after appropriate "head-end" transmission systems have also been added.
Schwartz estimated that DOCSIS 3.0 modems would start appearing on the market early next year, although the carriers would also need DOCSIS 3.0 transmission gear, and none has yet been submitted to Cablelabs yet for interoperability testing. But Schwartz said there is plenty of time for that.
As implied by the name, these modems represent the third generation of the DOCSIS standard for digital cable TV networks. Version 1.0 offered 10 megabits, and version 2.0 offered a maximum of 40 megabits, Schwartz said.
The first operational DOCSIS 3.0 modems were shown recently at an industrial convention in Las Vega by Comcast Corp., and one was reportedly was used to transmit a copy of the 2007 Encyclopedia Britannica, plus a Merriam-Webster's dictionary, in less than four minutes.
The cost of the modems, it was announced, would be similar to that of current modems.
But fiber will probably not lie down and die, since the technology offers the potential for enormously higher speeds in the future. The speed of a fiber connection is determined by the speed of the electronics at either end, since the capacity of the fiber itself has been found by researchers at Bell Labs to be an astronomical 100 terabits. That's 100 trillion bits per second, or 666,667 times faster than a DOCSIS 3.0 modem.
Schwartz estimated that the maximum capacity of a cable modem line is ultimately about 5 gigabits.
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