downloading 1 gigabyte a second is imposible at the moment. Not only due to connection limitations, but also because of limits that hard drives have.

Perhaps what your friend was talking about is gigabit backbones? If i remember correctly from some lectures, backbones between countries get up to 100gigabit a second. Could be wrong though.

the international link out of australia, gets up to so many terabytes/second
telstra then use all this crap to spread it out, and escee is right, the reason u cant get a gigabyte/sec is cause ur comp would melt

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The Southern Cross cable (which was laid in 2000) is a big phatt backbone between Australian and the US. Currently it's 120 gigaBITS per second, however will be upgraded to 240gigabits during late 2002. It is also the reason why we have to pay so much for internet in Australia (as it cost XXX billion dollars to build). It's actually two cable which meet in Hawai, with the reason being that should one cable break the other will remain. I think the chance of both going down at once is 0.0001%

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"To that guy, who asked me to sign this piece of paper saying that I’m number one… thumbs up to you man!!!" - Ferry Corsten

I'm on a 10megbit connection ;-), though i actually download sets using another computer which has a fiber connection (i think) many 100meg anyway, nice quick downloads, then i transfer it to my machine. My computer cant cope with 900k a sec too well, less alone more.

Good ol' Optus Cable. Shitty 16k upload though.