Info Autobahn

By Charles Wardell. Movies on demand? They could soon be a snap. In July, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, Calif., test drove a new technology called “10-Gig” that multiplies Ethernet data speeds tenfold, to 10 gigabits, or 10 billion bits per second. For now, the technology requires high-performance computer equipment, but it has huge commercial potential. Downloading a digital version of “The Matrix” in avi format (about 236 gigabits of data) would take 66 hours over a standard DSL line. With 10-Gig, however, the user would have the movie in 23.6 seconds.