This headline bears no relation to reality: we're not using all the fiber we've laid, and this isn't a last-mile solution or an ansible. The project page itself (http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/overview.html) makes it sound like they've built some new computing centers and connected them to terminals at universities: am I missing something?

The most interesting bit here was that CERN will produce 15 petabytes per year, which by my rough calculations is within an order of magnitude of the rest of the internet combined. The last time I thought about petabytes was when I interviewed at Chevron's geological data analysis department.

I was way off about the scale of the internet: the US alone currently sends 5 exabytes of traffic per month over IP, or 60000 petabytes per year. Edit: or ~12000, depending on the study.

http://www.discovery.org/a/4428, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.html

For a minute there, I was thinking I was 1/500th of the internet. :(

To push this kind of data around, they'll be using Internet2 and ESnet when it hits the US and whatever the Internet2 equivalents are in Europe (Geant2 ?) to push it out.

http://www.internet2.edu/science/

Is it just me, or does this feel like linkbait? The facts seem to be accurate, but the style and the title make feels like a cheap shot to get attention to the article.

the quality of the writing is poor, too. didn't expect that in a british times publication

They might as well have gone for broke with "superfast internet that has sex with you".

I always cringe reading articles about technology that were clearly written by people who know nothing about it.

Can anyone point us to a well-written article about the this "superfast Internet"?

“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,”

Oh jees not this again. Doesn't this 'grand idea' come up every 5 years or so and just die when people realize they don't want their photos, personal documents and media stored on some corporate servers (where it can be analyzed, and sold to the highest bidder)

Oh and with 50% of Americans still on dial up, I don't see this super fast kick ass Internet taking over anytime soon (not when there's money to be made selling small incremental speed bumps over many years similar to how cell service has evolved here)

I'm perfectly happy having 99% of my photos and media stored offsite. There are a few things I'd want to keep local, but I couldn't care less if Smugmug keeps the originals of my vacation photos. In fact, I'd much prefer that because I can access it from any computer (work desktop, personal desktop, iPhone), I don't need to worry about synchronization, and when done properly they take care of backup far better than I ever could.

If I have the only digital copy of my photos then I need to worry about a hard drive failure, fire, flood, power surge, theft, etc. I can certainly take care of some of that by buying an off-site backup service, but then we're back to square one (I will have sent all of my media to a corporate server, but without any of the functionality). Or I can mail DVDs of my data to my trusted friends, but that's also a giant pain.

If done properly, with the right privacy controls, there's no reason why all data shouldn't live in the cloud, with a local backup copy only.

"people.. don't want their photos, personal documents and media stored on some corporate servers "

Email? Credit cards? If it's easy, people will do it.

We've already agreed not to sell your personal information:

http://ourdoings.com/tos.html

So when could I see something like this in my home?

Coming soon to another country near you. US, you pirates destroying our legacy profit streams, please continue to enjoy your rate-limited internet experience.