75-year-old Swedish woman has world's fastest Internet connection

You might thing DSL is spiffy, or maybe you have cable Internet service. It's official -- what you've got sucks. Sweden's Sigbritt Lothberg has a 40-gigabit/second connection into her home in Karlstad, Sweden. Her son Peter, who lives in California and is a "networking expert," helped. She can download a full-length movie in less than two seconds:

"We wanted to show that that there are no limitations to Internet speed," said Hafsteinn Jonsson, who runs Karlstad's network unit.

...

"She's a brand-new Internet user," said her son. "She didn't even have a computer before."

His mother isn't exactly making the most of her high-speed connection. She only uses it to read Web-based newspapers.

How fast is the typical DSL line? Mine from DSL Extreme is rated at 1.5 MB per second download, 384 KB upload.

So a gigabit is 1 billion bits, a megabit is 1 million bits ... 40,000,000,000 vs. 1,500,000 -- that makes Ms. Lothberg's broadband connection 26,667 times as fast as my own, or 2,666,667 percent faster.

Bottom line: The Internet can be -- and probably will be -- a whole lot faster than it is today. And some kind of mega-super-broadband will eventually be the everything-pipe into homes all over the world, delivering all the data we need for audio, video, all kinds of communications and who knows what else.