The present Internet is typically more than 10 times and often more than 100 times slower than the speed of light. Why is the Internet so slow?! We believe it's time to take on the grand challenge of building a speed-of-light Internet.
Ankit's talk on why we need a speed-of-light Internet. This talk is meant for a general audience; no prior knowledge of computer science is necessary!
Slides from talk on cSpeed and PCC, November 6, 2014 at MIT Wireless Seminar
Our results show (plot below) that in the median, fetching just the HTML for the landing pages of popular Websites from a set of generally well connected nodes (PlanetLab) is 34 times the c-latency, i.e., the time light would take to travel between the same two end-points along the shortest path. What causes this gap? TCP slow start? DNS? The answer is more complicated and interesting than that. Check out our paper here to learn more!
