Imagine a video of 4096 on 3072 pixels. To make you understand, that's the same resolution than 12 screens of 17 inches: three lines of four.
Imagine that to keep this high-quality, this video is not compressed and that you decided to send it on the Internet.
Finally, imagine that you send it… by streaming, i.e. the receiver must read it as soon as it receives it, without interruption.

Knowing the current means, you quickly understood this is not really realizable. Sometimes, you still get troubles with small videos where the fuzzy characters move at the same rhythm than the clip "Around The World" of the Daft Punk.

Yet, researchers of the Purdue University (Indiana, USA) succeeded to send in loop and streaming such a video two minutes long. With possibility to pause, fast back- and forward.

A rate of 7.5 gigabits per second with a peak transfer rate of 8.4 gigabits per second! At this speed, they could have transmitted approximately 12 movie DVDs in the same two minutes!
On the Internet. On the super-fast National Lambda research network, at the SC06 conference in Tampa, Florida. This is maybe not the absolute record of downloading on Internet but Laura Arns, associate director and research scientist at the center, explained that the equipment to realize this can be bought off-the-shelf for less than 100,000 dollars. Which is quite cheap when looking at all possibles applications: industries, medicine, theatres, ...


Source: Perdue University, last week.