75-year-old Swedish woman gets world’s fastest Internet connection

“A 75-year-old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books – with the world’s fastest internet connection,” The Local reports.

“Sigbritt Löthberg’s home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed,” The Local reports. “But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council’s network arm, has arranged the connection.”

“‘This is more than just a demonstration,’ said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson. ‘As a network owner we’re trying to persuade internet operators to invest in faster connections.'”

“Sigbritt will now be able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously. Or, if there is nothing worth watching there, she will be able to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds,” The Local reports. “Cisco contributed to the project but the point, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, is that fibre technology makes such high speed connections technically and commercially viable. ‘The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt’s PC,’ said Jonsson.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: You’d think an “internet legend” would use a real OS for his mom, wouldn’t you? Sheesh. It’s not like she has years of Windows’ bad habits ingrained. For her first computer, give poor Sigbritt a Macintosh running Mac OS X, the operating system whose forerunner, NEXTSTEP, was used to invent the World Wide Web! On the bright side, with Windows in “action,” at least Sigbritt won’t have to wait: she can set a world record by getting pwned in a millisecond.

51 Comments

  1. Apple should do us all a favor and send the poor woman an iMac. Then they could at least get some free publicity. Or MDN could start a fund that the readers could make donations to.

    I would give $5. Only $994 to go.

  2. In Paris here and I have a 30Mb cable connection. I’ve actually managed to measure 28.7Mb/s with speedtest.net.

    It would be good if sites could push out their content at those speeds. So many roadblocks on the ‘net in real life though.

  3. So true, I have 25MB symmetrical fiber pipe here in S.F. for the most part things stopped getting faster once I passed 10 MB, MDN for example is no faster on a 25MB connection than it was on a 4MB connection… kinda takes the sizzle out of the steak.

  4. “…..give poor Sigbritt a Macintosh running Mac OS X, the operating system whose forerunner, NEXTSTEP, was used to invent the World Wide Web!……”

    Invent the WWW ?? … well, maybe hypertext … but the WWW actually grew out of something called ..ARPANET …
    And if memory serves … the first browsers were text browsers … called Lynx and Mosaic …

    And then came Netscape & CyberDog !

  5. Luck lady!

    Meanwhile here in my (admittedly very nice) hilltop village in England, my so-called hi-speed connection struggles to top 900kbps on a good day. On a bad day like yesterday, it managed just 148kpbs.

    Ho hum!

    ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smirk” style=”border:0;” />

  6. > > “…..give poor Sigbritt a Macintosh running Mac OS X, the operating system whose forerunner, NEXTSTEP, was used to invent the World Wide Web!……”

    > “Invent the WWW ?? … well, maybe hypertext … but the WWW actually grew out of something called ..ARPANET …
    And if memory serves … the first browsers were text browsers … called Lynx and Mosaic …”

    No no, you’ve got it wrong, both of you! Everybody knows Al Gore invented the Internets

  7. Invent the WWW ?? … well, maybe hypertext … but the WWW actually grew out of something called ..ARPANET …

    One could say that the WWW grew on the internet which developed out of ARPANET, but the WWW was a new layer on top of that (it also works on top of other networks and does not require the internet):

    World Wide Web – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

    “The underlying ideas of the Web can be traced as far back as 1980, when, at CERN in Switzerland, the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE (referring to Enquire Within Upon Everything, a book he recalled from his youth). While it was rather different from the Web in use today, it contained many of the same core ideas (and even some of the ideas of Berners-Lee’s next project after the WWW, the Semantic Web).

    In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal[2], which referenced ENQUIRE and described a more elaborate information management system. With help from Robert Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal for the World Wide Web[3] on November 12, 1990.

    A NeXTcube was used by Berners-Lee as the world’s first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:[4] the first Web browser (which was a Web editor as well), the first Web server and the first Web pages[5] which described the project itself.

    On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup[6]. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.”

  8. In a related story, Sigbritt Löthberg, 75, was found drowned in 1s and 0s when her superhigh speed internet connection sprang a memory leak. She swam as long as she could but soon tired when the overload of bits reached the ceiling of the second floor of her Karlstad home. She is survived by her grieving son Peter Löthberg who was last seen three hours ago donning scuba diving gear prior to disappearing into the frothing maelstrom of data bits seeking his new Windows Vista computer, which he had loaned his mother. “I don’t know how I would survive this loss,” Peter wept, “I really loved that computer!”

    Karlstad city officials were at a loss as to how to turn off the flow of pornography, mp3s and bit torrent files that were still streaming into the small cottage where the tragedy occurred. A large tornado of air is spinning around the Karlstad Stadsnät ISP office as more and more data is pulled into the feed and directed to Sigbritt’s home. The wind velocity is estimated to be over 200 mph and five Pakistani techs were dragged into their telephones by the suction when panicked Karlstad Stadsnät operators called tech support for help.

    Reports coming from as far away as Pahrump, Nevada, USA, say that hard drives are being stripped of data to feed the voracious internet feed to Sigbritt’s broadband connection. Suggestions have been made that to prevent the drain of all data from all computers in the world, the World Wide Web may have to be shut down until the disaster abates.

    MDN magic word: perhaps…

  9. Wow! 40Gig’s I did have 5gig’s in London back in 95, but that was because it was part of the 10Gig net working (Universities, colleges, IBM & Wang) provided by Cable & Wireless.

    No! No! No! Everyone knows the internet was invented by those 3 Aliens that crashed in Area 51 (New Mexico) since they now had time on their hands :^)

  10. I’m curious of the kind of hardware she has in her PC to be able to process a network stream comming in at 40Gbps.

    Installing a very fast internet connection is nice up to the point where the common Joe can still take advantage of it. What’s the use of a 40Gbps link if most people can only afford (or make use of) a 1Gbps network card ? 97% wasted bandwith ? creating a “small” 40 PC “home” network ?

    While I agree that the growth potential should be there (we do need more than 640k in our PCs now), I wonder how much more expensive this would be compared to 1Gbps or even 100Mbps.

  11. RE: Windows.

    Yet another case of abuse and the elderly.

    Giving her a Windoze system with the worlds fastest connection = assh*les! I want that hookup.! I’d sell the PC on e-bay in .0001 seconds flat!

  12. This is evidence that when you know so much about so little, you end executing very little of that much you know about so little!

    Take me as an example…I know so much about Camel’s Milk that all I can talk about or execute is Camel’s Milk……Anyone like some?

  13. GH
    What, no heroin use?

    Camel Dude
    It is a female camel you are milkin’, right?

    TMF
    Did the Swedish meet balls with Italian noodles?
    Sounds like the makings for a German scat-sausage movie……

    holy crap, the MW was nations!!!

  14. ‘No! No! No! Everyone knows the internet was invented by those 3 Aliens that crashed in Area 51 (New Mexico) since they now had time on their hands :^)’

    Actually, area 51 is in Nevada. The crash was in Roswell, and it’s a myth. My family has been here since the late 1800’s; the family that owned the ranch the crash site is on are friends, and sadly, it really was just military stuff. Sorry to burst the bubble.

  15. nextstep- tim berner’s lee invented the web on it at CERN. Though the article is actually talking about the Internet, not the world wide web which while the overwhelming usage for the internet, is not the sole usage. Gopherspace, etc…

    So at least we could maybe get that right and not take credit for something that existed before there was an Apple (the Internet).

  16. I guess Mrs Löthberg is not going to re-design ancient markup-languages -> not OS X.
    Neither will she build a server park -> not Linux.
    Probably Mrs L. will browse the web and choosing the market leader for that purpose is the obvious choice for most of people outside MDN. Not within, of course;)

  17. @oh my

    In case it hasn’t already been said, you are confusing the Internet with the World Wide Web, which is not one and the same. Do your homework !!

    It is correct to say that Apple did not invent the Internet OR the WWW. What was said correctly is that Tim Berners-Lee USED a NeXTCube running NeXTSTEP to invent his WWW browser while working for CERN.

    Got it?

  18. As quite often MD don’t know what they’re talking about. And most comments are in the same basket.

    Early this year the was an interview with Peter Löthberg in the Swedish Macworld. He’s a member of the Internet Task Force or what it’s called, and yes he does use a Mac.

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