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Comment by drfuchs | Hacker News Reader

The second sentence in the article:

Engineers have transmitted data at a blistering rate of 1.84 petabits per second (Pbit/s), almost twice the global internet traffic per second.

Traffic is already measured in bit/s so “traffic per second” would be something like data acceleration. Of course this is wrong but journalists have no idea.

The most popular topic is so often the post title.

Why be wrong if you can be right.

Yeah, it's like saying "this spaceship can go 10% of the speed of light per second"

Sure it does. It says per-second.

What is confusing about it?

Per-second doesn't make sense in this context. Either it can transmit all of the internet traffic, so it has sufficient bandwidth to theoretically mirror the whole internet traffic, or it can't. A time unit doesn't make sense here.

The alternative interpretation would be that it can transmit the whole amount of data ever sent through the internet in its existence per second, but this seems rather unlikely.

> Either it can transmit all of the internet traffic, so it has sufficient bandwidth to theoretically mirror the whole internet traffic, or it can't. A time unit doesn't make sense here.

It’s not a time unit. It’s a rate. The rate is twice the rate of traffic on the internet. Therefore it can transmit all the traffic on the internet.

Ideas like traffic only make sense in the context of per-unit-time, because they’re fundamentally about a flow.

Yes, it's a rate. The aspect of time is already baked in. Adding an additional unit of time is either redundant or means you're talking about acceleration.

I can run twice the speed of Usain Bolt.. per second

Well barring the title they define it in the article and say it can match the current speed of all internet traffic raw traffic speed. doesn't matter what units you use as long as it's based on basic units bits/second. Pretty straightforward. Can it keep it up? probably not currently. Can it handle similar amounts of switching? Also probably not.

"Car X is capable of the same velocity as car Y, per hour."

Why would you ever say that "car X is capable of the same velocity as car Y if you measure car X's velocity by km/h and car Y's velocity by mph"?

The word traffic already implies a rate

> What is confusing about it?

If it can transmit it per-second, then it can also transmit it per-hour, so it's redundant and doesn't add anything, which means it's confusing as to why it's there.

What are the units of internet traffic?

It can transmit one internet of traffic per second. So the unit is an internet.

They should have used a more common unit like encyclopedia britannicas.

But how long of an internet?

That's the tricky bit: "internet traffic" is already a measure of units over time.

How many tricky bits are there in 1.84 petabits?

They use Pbit/s in the article.

Data volume transmitted per time increment.

10000 libraries of congress per second.

The Library of Congress claims† to host 21 petabytes of digital content. That would take†† a little over a minute and a half to send over the link described in the article, assuming, of course, that the content has been put in a ready-to-send form.

†https://www.loc.gov/programs/digital-collections-management/....

††https://www.google.com/search?q=21+petabytes+%2F+1.84+petabi...

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