Internet Gridlock Over

Got bored with slow downloading while surfing the Internet? Don't worry. A research team from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena has come up with a solution that will download a whole movie in just five seconds. The Caltech team has developed a system called Fast Transmission Control Protocol. 

To avail this system, you need not add anything new to your computer, just load Fast TCP software. The findings of the Caltech team have been reported in a recent issue of New Scientist. Fast TCP is the developed version of existing TCP, which was originally developed in the 1970s by network engineers Vinton Serf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 

A computer sends large files to a remote computer via the Internet. Sometimes sending large files on the Net becomes difficult. TCP solves this problem breaking down the large files into small packets each having information of about 1500 bytes. A computer sends a packet to a remote computer. On receiving the packet, the remote computer gives a signal. This triggers the sending computer to transmit the next packet. If no signal comes back, the sender transmits the same packet at half the speed of the previous one. This process is repeated, until the delivered packet reaches the remote computer. 

This slows down the speed of transmission on the Net. With Fast TCP, same packet is delivered with greater speed. Addition of Fast TCP software to a computer increases its delivery speed. Because, the Fast TCP continually measures the time a packet takes to reach a remote computer. This software also calculates the time taken by a signal of acknowledgement coming back from the remote computer. This helps the software to predict the packet size that an Internet highway can support. This minimises the risks of losing data. 

The advantage of Fast TCP was made public at a recently held supercomputing conference. Researchers from Caltech, Stanford and CERN near Geneva in Switzerland have already sent data from Sunnyvale, California, to CERN at an average rate of 925 megabits (8 bits equal to 1byte) per second. The distance between Sunnyvale and CERN is 10,000 kilometres. 

Ordinary TCP managed just 226 megabits on the same line. An assembly of 10 Fast TCP has achieved an enormous speed of over 8.6 gigabits per second. This is 6000 times the capacity of existing broadband links. Entertainment industry is eager to cash in on such fast data transmission technique. Microsoft and Disney have already shown interest in Caltech's invention.