Distance barriers are breaking down all of the time, thanks to the now-taken-for-granted miracle of the Internet. The fact that you are reading an article on a server located in Connecticut that was uploaded from a Linux PC in Indiana from wherever in the world you are right now is evidence of that. The world, it seems, is becoming distributed.

The technology behind the Internet is no mystery or miracle. Wires, routers, servers--it's all been talked about before. But a new form of technology is putting some serious demands on the old plumbing of the Internet, which is leading one company to provide more transfer bandwidth on an almost ubiquitous scale.

The company is called Force10, and they make some seriously fast routers--like up in the 1 to 10 Gigabit (Gb) range. The demand for such speed and capacity is rocketing upwards, and guess what? A lot of it is due to Linux.

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