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Bell Labs Achieves 3.28Tbps Over Fiber
Dave-V writes: "Scientists at Bell Laboratories said they have set a world's record by transmitting 3.28 trillion bits of data per second over 300 kilometers of fiber optic cable. The research arm of Lucent Technologies said it was the industry's first demonstration of long distance, triple-terabit data transmission. Researchers achieved those speeds using Lucent's experimental optic fiber, called TrueWave. Bell Labs scientists said they used three 100-kilometer fiber spans to transmit 40 gigabits over each of the 40 wavelengths of light (colors) in the conventional C-band frequency range and 40 Gbits/s over each of the 42 channels in the long-wave L-band range."
The FoxNews article contains more details. With Iridum about to heat up in the worst way, and landlines jumping in capacity, maybe the future really does hold a fiber-optic link straight into every permanent structure on Earth.
I'd love to make a beow...hmm, no.
Man, imagine installing Lin...nah.
Is this going to be open-s...hmph.
A-hah!
Imagine the amount of hot grits you could pour through this thing.
Actually, AT&T recently bought out TCI Cable, so in this case, the phone company IS the cable company =)
As far as TCI used to be, I dunno howbig they were, but I know they were really the only cable provider in at least the state of Colorado
You know how to troll, that's for sure.
You go girl!
The slashdot sourcecode was reliced months ago!!!
You are unbeliveably stupid!!!!!!!!!1
Do these just end up getting moderated down, or do these just get "edited out"?
These all get modded down only, its really sad that these people feel the need to do it, I mean it kind of bothers me that there are people so stupid that they derive plesure from making these posts.
moderate this up! its a classic!
Wireless ip repeating/switching is jumping too, and I'm guessing that the cost of laying extra fiber to everyone's door is going to cost a helluva lot more than a stationary wireless rx/tx for the equivalent area of servicethat they would provide in URBAN and sprawling suburban areas.
I'm not suggesting the earth be blanketed with wireless first off; but wireless makes huge sense especially in densely populated areas that have enough to pay for it*, because then that volume of people can enjoy ubiquitous remote computing.
Can you imagine everyone in Manhattan wired with a Palm?
*of course, maybe in cities that are dense enough, sharing even the cost of local fiber might be workable.
AFTER SEARCHING FOR DAYS, AUTHORITIES HAVE FOUND MR_BILL'S CORDLESS MOUSE IN ONE OF HIS FECES! AUTHORITIES HAVE CONCLUDED THAT IT WAS A CASE OF MISTAKEN INDIGESTION!
THIS IS NOT A TROLL POST. THIS IS OFF TOPIC. PLEASE MARK DOWN ACCORDINGLY.
THANK YOU.
AAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! My eyes! My poor eyes! I'm blind!
Wireless is getting there. It will probably never be very viable for backbone use, but it will be very viable for commercial and eventually residential use in the next 5 years. IIRC, there are many companies working on wireless up to 155mbps right now.
problems with wireless:
-high attenuation limits distance
--wave propagates out of sphere
--signal strength reduces quickly
-high noise due to interference from other transmitters
--however, aggressive encoding techniques make signal less sensitive to noise
-multipath fading, security etc etc
-use of frequency spectrum is regulated by fcc
-lots of different user communities
--e.g. emergency response, FAA, military, commercial radio, television, unlicensed..
--use of different frequencies among adjacent "cells" can reduce interference
-unlicensed around 900mhz, 2.4ghz, 5.8 ghz have lots of users
microwave positives and negatives:
-can cover long distances and can be directed
-more bandwidth than radio
-buildings and other objects cause attenuation
-limited roaming
satellite:
-lots of bandwidth but high delay
-good broadcast medium
"Apparently In San Francisco, they've run out of OC3 lines"
So they build more - what's your point? There's plenty of aggregate bandwidth coming out of san fransisco.
it's called QoS. Also, generally the higher delay you have, the less bandwidth you have. Also, the gaming protocol only addresses a problem from customer to ISP (the modem).
BGP usually takes care of backbone routing problems. The main problem is that there are limits to re-routing due to an ISP having limited public and private peering arrangements. A gaming protocol can't magically stop delay along a physical line. In the distant future there may be QoS tags on certain protocols that allow it to be routed a certain way - but that's not happening soon on the global public internet (it's generally more productive to just increase bandwidth and reduce latency in the process as well).
don't respond to trolls. They're 13 year old boys (or 30 year old men with the mind of a 13 year old boy) masturbating to the replies they get because they have absolutely not life.
First, wireless speeds cannot approach anything nearly this fast.
Second, there is a major problem with using lasers for space communications. Lasers are very dangerous to pilots - I guess they've been known to cause flash blindness, or, at the very least, distract pilots.
(joke) Yup Teledesic is using the Ka band so Bill Gates and company can time your packets and track your movements throughout your house to make sure you are using MS products. At least Muxing multiple lines at 2400 baud doesn't give away your exact location.
I am sure you need to file a lot of paperwork to get an optical uplink. I am wondering though if they have changed wavelength so you don't to assign a freakin no fly zone box around your property?
Teledesic has gone public with their plans to use laser for their inter-satellite comms. No details about OC3 uplink yet though.
Yeah, I can't wait. All those porn flicks, in minutes! Keep up the good work guys!
Do you design for AOL or something?
FAWCK OFF YOU FUKKING PIECE OF JIZZUM SPATTERED SHlTSICLE
200ms crap how can I play quake against the other side of the pacific with lag like that. Note that currently from Toowoomba Queensland Australia pings to the US are just over 500ms. I know that's not quite the other side of the planet but the networks are going pretty fast to already have 500ms.
Enough with all these fancy toys we cannot have!
I want one. We all want one. They should start bringing it out.
but you get your ass fragged every 4 seconds in Q3A
:-)
Kindof depends on who you are playing against.
(Think 'johnc' here...)
That's a good question. Sure, they were able to transmit it across an admirable length, but what could have sent all that? That's like saying we designed a medium capable of sending a million people at a time across the Atlantic in 5 minutes. But how are those million people going to get in the medium? Okay, so the bottleneck will be shifted back into the box.
San Francisco has an OC48c link to Los Angeles via NSFnet (MCI). Both cities have OC12 connections to various centers across the States, including Houston, and Denver. For more information, check out the vBNS network.
So what if i'm an AC? Mod me up baby!:)
*AGB*
I can't stand a smart ass. If you knew one damn thing about what your talking about, you'd still be a dumb ass. You post a reply to somebody who was just making a remark and dog him. That, to me, shows exactly how intelligent you are. Do your homework before you try to sound like a badass, ok...
Consider:
;-)
My (lovely) 10Mpbs net connection:
1.25MB/s saturated, which it never is, unless I'm transfering from the same network.
7200rpm ATA/66 drive:
aprox 20MB/s sustained
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
The HD still costs the user more time, since it usually is used 'slightly' more than the net.
(there was a point to this post, but I lost it)
ff
Strange thing, I agree with every single word and sentence you wrote, but completely disagree with the overall context. This is why censoring software is so hard write.
The comment you replyed to isn't "sick", it's just trolling. It's a parody. But it should be moderated down. Not because it's sick or because it's a parody, but because it's not funny enough.
A Troll is a noble thing which shouldn't be abused. It's not enough to write something vulgar or shocking, you must also be original and imaginative. A good Troll should write completely unexpected things. That's why I think the "FIRST POST by JonKatz!" should be moderated down.
SHUT THE FUCK UP! DON'T MAKE ME SMITE THEE! THANK YOU! -GOD
I can stand the Malda/Hemos gay porn, the meepts the portmans and even the Grits. But you are one sick fuck. Get some help.
Yet I read it and I find more childish flames than anything else. What is slashdot turning into, Usenet? This is ridiculous. I think I'm gonna crawl back into my cave and watch anime and forget about computers. This amount of stupidity on a forum populated by supposed fellow geeks makes me want to retch. - =^o.o^=
If the anti trolling system does not work, are you insisting on trolling like I've never seen trolling before ? I troll because it's fun. I love watching morons like Hadlock scramble. Flamebait is good fun for everyone. ;-D BTW Kiddy rape is just not on. Ever. I never defended "kiddy rape". And I never took credit for the post I assume you're referring to ("JonKatz rapes and kills kids", paraphrased). If you think I'm the only troll in this forum, that's pretty funny. Any dumbass can figure out that multiple logins means you get to post at +1 with anything you do. if you artificially raise your Karma up enough by posting like crazy in "older" stories it goes to +2. What have you proven by exploiting that ? I've never done that. I don't care about the initial score of my posts. In fact, with this account, my karma is so negative that I automatically post a (Score:0). I'll bet some ovf you didn't even know that could happen. Well, check the score of this post. No moderation, yet I'm at zero. Too fucking bad. I wouldn't troll if I cared about scores or karma. Believe it or not, I have two non-flaming accounts, which have quite positive karma. One, I use to express my real opinions. The other, I use for trolling in the "classic" sense, (in the vein of dmg), and so my scores will obviously be high. ;-) But I don't care that I've lost my normal (Score: 1) privileges for an account, and I don't care that I get modded down. What, you think I post this crap expecting to get modded up? Yeah, right. (Although, very occasionally, a troll is read and enjoyed by so many that it beats the system and gets modded up. For instance, if you can find it, my "News from the Linux frontlines" post, a few weeks ago. That sucker actually brought my karma back above zero, temporarily of course. ;-) what a waste of what appears a fairly bright mind. Thanks, um, I think. But trolling is healthy. I've been doing HTML-generation scripts in Perl for the past ten hours, so I'm taking a break. Coming here and antagonizing the rest of you is my "venting" for the morning. So deal. ;-p Don't forget to check out my homepage
Jesus wannabee, you are just an idiot, and a fake, of course! =) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE respond to this flamebait. Waste your life being a loser that posts continuously to these posts! YOU WILL LOSE.
And just when it was starting to get entertaining!
Oh well, I suppose hadlock's made a big enough fool of himself for one day, and there would be no real challenge in continuing.
A pity, really. Nobody makes it hard for the trolls any more.
1. Do you really think you had to announce that this should be moderated down?
2. Does asking the moderators to moderate the post down make the poster more or less likely to do this again in the future?
Think about it for a second.
Come on, who here has taken more than three weeks to realize that Jon Katz is the biggest troll on Slashdot?
(And three weeks is on the slow side, mind you.)
Why sweety, are you looking for some action?
Why do these two words, Cunt and Fuck, go so well together?
i've sent at least 3.28 trillion bits of hot grits per second over 3 feet of tubing and into my pants. thank you.
Hey karma whore, your drivel-esque posts serve as much of a purpose as the post you moderated to, and this one. If he gets moderated down, so should you. Moderaters are quite capable of distributing their points as poorly as they choose, they don't need your guidance.
>>Apparently In San Francisco, they've run out of
... *yet* .
... it lets you setup one side, then force a switch on the gear to the newly setup side, and then reconfig the old side
>>OC3 lines. Too many DSL and cable customers in
>>the area, times general
As long as they are not currently using wavelength division multiplexing (read put lots of different colours of light down the fibre), the system isn't at fibre exhaust
Basically what they would need to do is migrate their systems step by step (can even be done on "live" systems) over to a WDM product (Nortel, Lucent, etc all make them).
They key behind this is the fact that the systems have working and protection fibres
this is the ultimate solution for those of us with CWC licenses!
Can you do that, please?
If you can't see the beauty in a man bringing another man to orgasm by sticking his tongue up the other's anus and licking the inside of his ass, then there must be something wrong with you.
Oh, Hell, there's something wrong with me!
Oh, got yourself nailed on the cross of free speech again? If you are going to troll, make it entertaining. Here, you are just being a dull prick. Quit whining about politics and get back to posting stuff about child rape!
WWWAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! YOU LITTLE WHINY BABY! SHUT THE FUCK UP IF YOU CAN'T TROLL PROPERLY! DON'T GET INTO ANY PISSY ARGUMENTS WITH THE LOCAL PRICKS! YOU YOURSELF ARE FALLING INTO THE FLAMEBAIT TRAP!!! MORON!!! IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT THEN DON'T POST ON SLASHDOT!!! are you gay?
"frac T3s in the late '80s", and I'm not even positave about that one.
You misspelled "positive."
Anyhow, I want to get one of those network cards to hook up my Beowolf cluster.
Depends. If the network connections are fast enough why have local HDs? ASP are supposedly coming. Video on demand is supposedly right around the next corner [or is it the one after that] How about this? No more film reels being sent to cinemas. Instead they are hooked up to the server someplace out there. Where doesn't matter. The film is sent down digitally and shown digitally. Give us bandwidth and we will find a way to use it. Remember 640k is more then enough for everybody but us.
Cos quite frankly, i don't want to know, and im sure im speaking for everybody else as well here, is we don't want to hear it...
Speak for yourself, asshole, I want to read the good trolls, not the shit you post.
You don't get it do you? He's just a troll trying to get your goat. Looks like it's working to. Just don't respond to it. He is loving all the pain you're suffering. Remember you died once for his sins isn't that enough?
Bell Labs Achieves 3.28Tbps Over Fiber
Posted by timothy on Saturday March 18, @04:05AM
from the crazy please-don't-tell-some-spammers dept.
Dave-V writes: "Scientists at Bell Laboratories jibba jabba'd they have set a world's record by transmitting 3.28 trillion bits of data per second over 300 kilometers of fiber optic cable. You couldn't take on a bunch of girlscouts singlehandedly! some Jibba Jabba arm of Lucent Technologies jibba jabba'd it wuz the crazy industry's first demonstration of Helluva distance, triple-terabit data transmission. Fool! Researchers achieved those speeds using Lucent's experimental optic fiber, called TrueWave. Bell Labs scientists jibba jabba'd they used three 100-kilometer fiber spans to transmit 40 gigabits over each of the 40 wavelengths of light (colors) in the darn conventional C-band frequency range and 40 Gbits/s over each of that darn 42 channels in the Helluva -wave L-band range."
http://penn.netroedge.com/~mrt/
0, the napster server crashed 5 minutes ago.
You left out a simple thing though - Your not going to have 1 person using it. This is a type of technology that you would see appearing on backbones. You may only be getting data at XXXkbps, but this now opens up the doors for (thousands? millions?) of others to do the same, at the same time.
And anyways, I'm sure Microsoft can arrage for this excessive bandwith to be put to use somwhere.
I think the moderation system is adaquate.
@Work is busy advertising their 5GBps network while this company is coming out with one nearly 1000 times faster. Muhahaha.
Alas, your claims of my biggotry are unfounded. Congrats on nitpicking though ; ). I have nothing against gays, but when i'm forced to scroll through offtopic rants, especially particularly long ones, i'm going to bitch about it. I pointed out that they were "gay porn related" in an attempt to clarify what I was bitching about; i'll bitch equally about lezbian porn, or about commentaries about monster truck rallies for that matter, content doesn't matter if it's long and has to be moderated. I just scroll through it anyways. Ah well, good luck and have fun trolling..
Hadlock
moox. for a new generation.
personally i'd like to see a "filter" option that filters out posts with 3 word or more combonations of what was used in there... that'd solve alot of problems. not to mention the other one that was posted pretty recently on this same thread
moox. for a new generation.
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
That sounds an awful lot like JonKatz, wouldn't you say?
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
Nonsense. You are a facist, racist, pedophile bigot.
You're also a moron. I've read the rest of your troll-replies in this discussion. You say,
That's idiotic. Vulgarity and obscenity are not so much in the words themselves, but how you use them. For instance, a "ram" is an animal. An "ass" is an animal. But if I say I want to ram your ass, that means something entirely different. That means either I want to buttfuck you, or hit your donkey with my Ford truck.If you filter out the seven no-no words, then you're going to end up cutting out posts which use the words in a more conversational sense, such as "What the fuck?", or "You're shitting me!". Those are not vulgar or obscene in meaning at all.
Get it? You're stupid. I love debunking you dumb little bastards. You're the same type that would design that "web content blocking" software that just greps index pages for words on a "naughty" list, and then blocks sites which contain them.
If you're such a hard-line Puritan tightass that you can't take a little fuckin' profanity :-), then the Internet is not the place for you to be hanging out. Go burn some witches or books or whatever else you facists like to burn (besides my time, which could be better spent trolling!).
I note in another one of these absolutely brilliant posts, you say,
That's the whole point of the moderation system (pun intended), dumbass. Anyone who's posted here for more than an hour knows that. And from what I see on your 'User Info' page, you've been posting here fot at least a week and a half. So, tragically, I must conclude that your IQ is lower than your karma! Since you're slow, I'll make it reeeeeal obvious: YOU'RE SLOW.
Now go fuck off and die before I call in Jon Katz to molest you.
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
(Although, very occasionally, a troll is read and enjoyed by so many that it beats the system and gets modded up. For instance, if you can find it, my "News from the Linux frontlines" post, a few weeks ago. That sucker actually brought my karma back above zero, temporarily of course. ;-)
Thanks, um, I think. But trolling is healthy. I've been doing HTML-generation scripts in Perl for the past ten hours, so I'm taking a break. Coming here and antagonizing the rest of you is my "venting" for the morning. So deal. ;-p
Don't forget to check out my homepage.
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
Do you think that you can gain back your dignity by replying to me? By having the last word? Please. When you feed a troll, we all lose.
I'm sure you'll respond to this post, just like the rest. And I'll have to post more flamebait.
If you really want to continue our little bullshit war, write me at my real e-mail address, noted at the bottom of my homepage.
Thank you.
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
I read your post, and I say, Hadlock! Hey!
You're being such a motherfuckin' cunt today!
Is it because your parents found out you're a flamin' gay?
Hadlock, you're a cunt, but that's okay...
because...
(1... 2... 1, 2, 3, 4!)
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
You can use them to hold your change,
You can use them to kill and maim,
You can fill them up with strawberry jam,
and squirt it at the baker-man!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
They come in many sizes and shapes,
Some are big, and some are small.
Oh my! Yours must have come from an ape!
I'm sorry, I have no monkey balls!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
Cunts are for her, and are not for him
But they do grant rewards, even though they are smelly:
One a month, they fill to the brim,
with delicious raspberry jelly!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
...
So, you see, dear Hadlock
There's no need to cry!
You're a cunt, and everyone loves you,
So please fuck off and die!
Too hot for CPAN!! Get PerlOS now from
No, I don't think it's adequate. There aren't enough negative points to give this guy. I wasn't born with enough middle fingers....
Anyone up for the DDOS attack to end all DDOS attacks?
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Hard drives nuttin, my memory doesn't even go that fast. Neither does my L1 processor cache for that matter.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Not supprising. I'm dislexic, half the time you can spell the same word three of four diffrent ways and I won't even notice.
This may sem like a dumb question for some, and I know I've heard it, but I can't quite work out the reason.
Are the distances that much greater, or is there something else that slows it down. Does air slow down the signal?
Actually no, as DSL is copper pair technology and this is fiber-optic. I'd settle for a fiber-optic line to the house instead of DSL, though :) except for the price :(
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Cable is from the cable company, DSL is from the phone company. Not the same people. Both afraid the other will start competing in the business of the one, therefore both holding back in markets where they don't want to compete with each other (but the phone company is using underground sheilded twisted pair messengered with coax for all their new installs up to the subscriber network interface, just in case).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The would ease bottle necks on all networks but the tre bottle necks will be the cpu and the harddrive mostly the hardrive they should start looking into this technology for the parts in the computer
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
If you go look at the Bell Labs site you can see that the papers on the subject reference erbium doping for the fibers, which IIRC is fairly common for extremely high speed applications.
Sam TH
Sam TH
AbiWord Developer
ISDN was a late '70s, early '80s technology. It wasn't aggressavly marketed, well, ever (by the telcos that is). It wasn't lighlty marketed until late in the '90s. It was very hard to buy in the early '90s (like it was hard for ISPs to buy it, and they were use to talking to telcos then).
That is true for a number of reasons though. Many ISPs didn't have trouble getting ISDN, the problem was the lack of standards. Unlike Europe and Canada, the US has no single ISDN standard, which makes uniformity and support more difficult than it needs to be.
Much like with digital wireless connectivity, our capitalism, although making for great advances in technology, screws the consumer a little bit, by creating a lack of standard.
-Jer
-Jer
Well, CMU does have Forum2000, which uses at least 32 terabytes.
Most of the fibre which is currently underground is laid using tubes. Replacing them is a matter of pulling the fibre out of the tube and blowing new fibre through the pipes. Besides, many new telcos use 'dark fibre' when expanding their networks these days.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
The networking of that speed isn't really required for the average local area network where simultanious HD access would be commonplace. This technology IS needed on the internet backbone, but since the backbone consists of of nothing more than wires and routers, HD speed isn't really an issue.
:)
Not that I'm saying HD's shouldn't be faster anyways.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
bah, i'd like to see the numbers on the bit error rate
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F Scott Fitzgerald
Actually, the earth's circumference being 4e4km, and light travelling at 3e5km/s, that makes circumnavigation take 0.13 seconds. The other end of the earth is half that distance, requiring 0.067 seconds.
Of course, there will be additional delays from routers and switches, and the fact that not all traffic will travel in great circles, so 0.2 seconds is probably more realistic.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
(you mean THz * km: longer distances are more impressive). 40 Gbit/s per channel with 100 km repeater spans is not bad, but it is definitely not why they got postdeadline paper in OFC 2000 (Optical Fiber Communications Conference, paper PD23)! There is another OFC postdeadline paper about "320 Gbit/s single channel pseudo-linear transmission over 200 km of non-zero dispersion fiber" (also from Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies) -- there the amplifier spacing is 100 km as well. So that's 64 Tbit/s*km. Probably, the reason that that paper had two amplifier spans rather than three was that they could not get it working for three amplfier spans :-).
Once you allow for amplifiers (which are more expensive than just fibre, but not too expensive), you can basically go unlimited distances, e.g. 10,000 km at 10 Gbit/s is almost run of the mill. And as long as it is just amplifiers, the telecomms companies don't mind putting in a few more, with a slightly smaller amplifier spacing, if that will make the system more robust. What they really hate are regenerators, where you demultiplex the signal, put it through a receiver, (probably do error correction), and then retransmit it again: that is horribly expensive. But amplifiers are relatively cheap.
The smearing you are talking about is not a major problem anymore, with properly designed systems (and fibres): with dispersion management and dispersion compensation the net linear dispersion can be brought down to zero.
Jeroen Nijhof
At 10 gig per lambda we can put 160 (or so) wavelengths through on dispersion shifted fiber.
At 40 gig per lambda we can put 40 (or so) wavelengths through on dispersion shifted fiber.
I'm assuming using the 1550 window here.
I'm sorry I can't rememeber more about the relation between modualtion speed and # of wavelengths. Higher speed you have shorter pulses, so I am guessing you need more space to pick out these individual pulses. Also you can only launch so much energy down a fiber.
Remember the article says three spans, which basically means they do a optical/eletrical/optical every 100 km. Which is quite reasonable, but it would be more impressive if they went farther on a span.
The whole key to this article is the fiber they used. I am guessing they engineered every meter of it to make sure they have as perfect of fiber as you can make today (minimize dispersion, etc.).
In conclusion, just because they have done this doesn't really mean alot in the real world. It will be a few years until you can buy fiber that will consistently do these speeds. Unless your Qwest or someone you now have OC-192 speeds going over 15 year-old fiber, that is the majority of the fiber in the world. We need solutions for old fiber at the moment. Its expensive to dig-up peoples back-yards.
So with that technology, can I FINALLY get some DSL service now? Im waiting......
actually, screw quake. how about participating in the battle for hoth or storming the beaches of wwii, neh?
--
They've all been posted in the last half an hour or so. They will be moderated down to -1 soon.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
And if you don't know what WDM means, do some research before making another irrelevant post.
Sure, you could use fiber for the interconnects within a computer. But why? The signal starts as electrical, and it needs to be processed by more electronics which are only a few inches away. The expense, heat, and latency of converting it to photons is absurd when compared to simply sending it over copper.
Now when you start getting into external perhipherals, fiber becomes viable. The expense of making a cable and connectors that can withstand life outside your case, transmit lots of signal very quickly, and perhaps get a signal several meters down the room, fiber suddenly becomes a really good idea.
However, even when we're talking about Fibre Channel SCSI, we're still referring to multimode, which is way different from the fiber that telcos use. I'm not going to go into the details, but it has to do with the way light pulses stretch out as they pass through the fiber.
These researchers are pushing limits that have nothing to do with your garden-variety optical semaphore. The speed at which your SCSI controller might modulate light will result in pulses several meters long (do the math -- speed of light, frequency of signal) so it doesn't much matter what color they are, and you can send several colors down a fiber with no problem. Now try sending pulses so fast that each pulse is only a couple waves long. Suddenly it becomes more difficult to cram closely-spaced colors onto the same piece of glass.
Are you beginning to get a sense of why multiterabit optical links aren't practical inside your computer?
Sure, most telco transport equipment lets you "drop-and-continue" a signal. The logistics would be difficult, satellites are really better for broadcasting, where latency isn't an issue.
You could take just one of the 82 color wavelengths (40 Gbps), and use it to broadcast a thousand 20 Mbps HDTV channels, plus four thousand 5 Mbps video channels.
I wonder if a particular color wavelength(s) designated for broadcast could just branch-out over a whole country without having to be switched?
I am pretty sure that they only people on the planet who would be able to actually afford this connection would have to be millionaires. And make that per year, cause it'll prolly be that much PER year.
No momey for food, rent, or a car, yet I can transfer the contents of the M$ terra server in a second.
Seriously though? How the flying f*** were they able to test that speed? Someone have a couple terra servers across on each side of the country?
Okay they prolly used a smaller size file, but in order to be completely accurate for speed you'd think they would have to use something a hell of alot bigger than a text file, or the contents of my 30 GIG drives for that matter. That would happen instantaneously.
Never the less, like people have been saying above, anyone for a worldwide game of Quake?
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
It's my understanding that there ARE repeaters in the trans-oceanic runs. I believe they have ships that regularly pull up the cable and replace the batteries in the repeaters. They also have problems with sharks attacking the repeaters because they have a slight electro-magnetic field that sharks can detect.
If the anti trolling system does not work, are you insisting on trolling like I've never seen trolling before ?
BTW Kiddy rape is just not on. Ever.
I guess my point here is what is your point ?. Any dumbass can figure out that multiple logins means you get to post at +1 with anything you do. if you artificially raise your Karma up enough by posting like crazy in "older" stories it goes to +2. What have you proven by exploiting that ?
what a waste of what appears a fairly bright mind.
MRo
why do you reply ? do you enjoy abuse ?
I'm starting to side with the troll on this one.
let it go.
You don't have a clue do you ?
Individually you can't use the entire bandwidth, but across a MAN or WAN with multidrop ADM mux's you could easily fill this. The network I'm currently monitoring has 4 OC-192 ( that's STM-64 for SDH purists ) rings and at least 50 STM-16 rings. Those are 10GIG systems BTW. You can't fill that in a second from your harddrive either, but it CAN support 120,000 simultanious phone conversations in a 1+1 ring protected topology.
that's what is for... now.
In the future using tech's like POS ( Packet Over Sonet ) ATM/FR or straight GIG-IP we could *easily* fill that sucker up.
I guess to cut what would be a long and boring story short, don't think of yourself as an individual using this bandwidth, this thing is designed for carriers to interconnect cities ( or countries ) with one fibre. you don't have the processing power or IO bandwidth on a PC to ever hope to decode the number of channels associated inside one of these babies.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble Grant, but using the correct gear ( Newbridge 36170 - 36190 for e.g. ) we can easily do this. we approach similar speeds ( but down seperate fibres ) today.
MRo
Please pour corrosive hot grits down your pants.
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
sure a dollar buys twice as much microprocessor every 18 months, but bandwidth triples yearly through 2020.. quick math done: Microprocessing gets 64 times more affordable by 2010, but the Macrocosm will be 20,000 times more affordable.. hmmmm..
At the rate that Napster has been cutting people off short on downloads, their severs locking up and people using amazingly lagged Cable modems, I'd say your download will stay the same.
The higher, the fewer.
I'd make a slight modification to your chart, but I like it otherwise. 1988: ISDN 56k 1997: 56k modem 1998: 512-1024kbps xDSL 1998: 1024 kbps Cable As Stripes mentioned, portions of fat pipes (Tx, OC-x) etc became popular for business around 1988, and beginning around 1998 some provides such as UUnet and even locally Ameritech beganning providing these pipes residentially. How else would all those hacker shell-account ISP's for IRC users popped up? They are just families with a few linux boxes and a T1 or 2 running into their house.
The higher, the fewer.
-many people on earth
-people communicate
-many people on earth communicate
-need bandwidth for many people to communicate
-not many people have a Backbone connected to their house
-Max speed any one person would really get out of it is 10Mbps (if used as a backbone)
-hard drives can keep up with that
-Internet backbone needed for Millions of people communicating will be a lot
-that is why they invented a 3.28 Tbps Fiber Network
Hey, if it wasn't for dumb people I wouldn't be smart.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
No question about, dedicated fiber is what is gonna be holding up most of the 'net within a decade or so.
I bet that we'll get a multi-terabaud line going to every major city (and maybe 100-1000 gigabaud to minor cities and towns). From there, you run slower lines (still somewhere in the 1-10 gbps range) to every home, pretty much replacing the phone lines. Within the home things get tricky.
Only rich people and computer techies will have fiber optic cables running through their house: it's much cheaper to have a wireless LAN, unless you don't mind cables all over the place (as opposed to building them into the walls). You just hook up your home cable to a master computer in your basement (or closet or whatever) and everything in your house hooks up to that. Current trends suggest we'll be able to get 20 mbps or so over the airwaves, maybe even more at short range like in a single home.
You could get all the communications you usually get over that one cable: TV, radio, an internet connection, phone, email, maybe even things like delivery (don't want to wait for your copy of Quake IV to arrive? Just download it right from the site you bought it from, it can't take more than a second). Everything would perhaps be done by your CSP (communications service provider) or maybe ISP (informations service provider).
Now, the reason I don't see the world going fully wireless (IE, only have that big fiber optic backbone between cities, and for everything else use airwaves) is that you don't get the speed (about a factor of 1000), reliability (In a big city especially, I bet all the metal frames holding up skyscrapers could make for nasty static), and privacy (it's pretty hard to tap fiber without someone noticing, especially if they're on the lookout, which might be an automatic feature of the CSP) of cable. Not that people will be handing in their wireless phones, of course. More likely, they'll scrap their normal phones completely. Like I said, most of the stuff on the personal level (everything that you actually come into contact with) will be wireless, unless you spring for a home fiber optic network. You'd use your digital phone (slash PDA slash mini-computer slash anything) in your house, on the way to work, and when you got there it'd tap into the company wireless network. It'd be nice if we could get a wireless standard (instead of more than one wireless standard) that would work anywhere, so that you could take your phone across the world and still check your mail.
It looks like computers will have no trouble using that bandwidth (with an IBM 75 gig HDD, it'd actually take several seconds to fill it up with mp3s), although it's anyone's guess if they can actually take advantage of the data (will we still have programs that take up 100-200 mb? In that case, I'd have room for about 250-300 of them, with space to spare for files). Then again, what with my 38" 200 PPI 16:9 aspect ratio LCD, I might need all that space for the new graphics in the latest game (or the latest version of windows). I sure hope my computer comes with a chip to run all this stuff though...
Then again, I could be wrong.
As a great man once said:
"HOOK IT TO MY VEINS!"
Click here to read too much about my personal life
The economists often talk about second man's advantage as you don't have to discover each and every part of the technological invention again and again but you can concentrate on the best one of them... I hope this answers your question.
This is interesting. I've seen quite a few posts about how this will affect gaming, but not much else.
Not that this is a bad thing.
Gaming is an *excellent* benchmark for network bandwidth capabilities, and should be treated as such. If you can download stuff okay, but you get your ass fragged every 4 seconds in Q3A, maybe you should evaluate your connection.
Gaming isnt for everyone. But its a great way to stress test your line.
Raman amplification should not be confused with EDFA's (Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers). EDFA's use relatively short lengths of fiber ( 100M) doped with the rare earth element Erbium. These VERY expensive specialty fibers are contained entirely within the head-end equipment driving the fiber and in the repeaters along the way.
Raman amplification uses non-linearities and energy soakage effects of the long lengths of ordinary "outside plant" fibers to create optical gain. This works at least to some degree on all common single-mode fibers (the type used for long-distance transmission). The effect has been known for some time, but there were difficuties (apparently resolved by Bell Labs) in using this method in high-density systems.
TrueWave is not, by the way, an experimental fiber. There is a fairly large installed base of this class of fibers (Non Zero Dispersion Shifted).
I am very much afraid that we live in interesting times.
>That's idiotic. Vulgarity and obscenity are not >so much in the words themselves, but how you use >them. For instance, a "ram" is an animal. An >"ass" is an animal. But if I say I want to ram >your ass, that means something entirely >different. That means either I want to buttfuck >you, or hit your donkey with my Ford truck.
Actually, to be more descriptively accurate, it would be "or hit your donkey with my Dodge truck." Dodge builds the Ram.
Carry on.
All I want for Christmas is Bell Labs triple-terabit data transmission. Just imagine what I could do with it... *rubs his chin and looks up* Download every Linux distro in under a min, download lots and lots of mp3s, accquiring supreme dominance of the world!
Billy Transue
bill-transue@NOcoolmailSPAM.net
Open Source, Open Standards, Open Minds
if only hard drives went that fast, now....
:)
Physical movement is too slow for most things, lets work on that and not terabit networking
Ever need an online dictionary?
The repeaters are quite cheap when compared to the expense of laying the fiber. Upgrading the max speed of fiber like this is quite awesome to see - if they can keep the rate of bandwidth increase up, the might never have to lay more fiber on their backbones again!
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Maybe if we get some of these hooked up, at least someone might survive the slashdot effect.
xxx straight edge xxx
I'm just as excited about this as everyone else is, but when you stop to think about it, what's the point? Let's do the math:
.41 TBps = 410 GBps
3.28 Tbps =
410 Gigabytes per second. My present hard drive only holds 12.1 Gigabytes. So this thing could transmit the contents of my computer 33.88 times. And that's only if the harddrive could be read that fast (which it obviously can't).
So my question is what on Earth are we going to be sending at speeds like 3.28 Terabits per second? Even if we were to split up this little bundle and give each computer in a building one of those strands (for one wavelength), 40 Gbps is still huge. I don't think there's a practical medium for data storage of vast amounts of data that can be read at speeds even close to that.
So, we probably can't read the data that fast, but let's suppose we could. In theory, we could send this data at 3.28 Tbps. Now what are we going to do with it at the receiving end? Can anyone's processor even deal with data at speeds like that? (Especially while running an OS and who knows what else.) And how are we going to store it? Again, we need incredibly fast data storage to make this work.
In short, with present technology, this system could not truly run at 3.28 Tbps anyway. Processing and data storage speeds would slow it down. The 3.28 Tbps seems more symbolic than anything else...
Wow, I hate being the realistic geek...
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
So what good would this serve for the rest of the world? Okay so backbones could be instantly connected throughout the world. We'd see less seek time. Maybe even be able to sync DNS entries faster. But the cost of this alone would be huge. And what happens when a squirrel decides to knaw a lil hole in the fiber? You just lost a heap of bandwidth right there. Fiber is great, but it's also fragile. You need to insulate and pad it quite a bit to make it worthwhile. And considering we still rely on satellite for most international networking I don't see this helping any of us for at least another 5 - 10 years.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
That's about the best you can do. You occasionally *will* miss out on good stuff that hasn't gotten moderated up yet, and obvious parody that's really funny that got moderated down as a troll or flamebait, but the SNR is oh-so-much-better.
--
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
I wasn't born with enough middle fingers... I used to use that as a sig all the time. :) But that was back when MM was more popular...
Long signatures suck.
haha..bravo. couldn't have said it better myself
moox. for a new generation.
True. I guess i've started yet another flame war. Sorry 'bout that. Thanks for the advice, I've come to more or less the same conclusion that you have. I'm sure the trollers out there have a different oppinion, but hey, everyone's got their opinion, eh Jesus?
moox. for a new generation.
good point, i hadn't considered that.
moox. for a new generation.
Sigh, born and raised in Seattle, had you bothered to read any of my previous posts (listed on same page as profile).
moox. for a new generation.
Apparently In San Francisco, they've run out of OC3 lines. Too many DSL and cable customers in the area, times general over-population = need for high speed fibre optics. How long till we see these puppies in mainstream? Or are we going to see somthing piggy-backing this technology in the next few weeks? ...there always is somthing just around the corner.
Hadlock
moox. for a new generation.
somebody take care of this atrocity...put the moderation to good use?
moox. for a new generation.
somebody with moderation points...go for it
sigh..
lamers
moox. for a new generation.
sorry if i'm whining here, but i was online and saw only 5 posts for a recent article, and posted a comment, and have been following it through the first 26 or so posts...about 3 of them so far have been gay porn related. Do these just end up getting moderated down, or do these just get "edited out"? By the time I end up reading most of a thread, it's got a good 200 posts. Maybe sombody could fill me in, the faq doesn't really explain what happens with the spam.
moox. for a new generation.
it's adequate, but (as all things), there's still some room for improvment. i haven't tested it out much, but i'm pretty sure that you can filter posts under a certian score...why not have an option to filter out the posts with say...3-5 or more obscenities? at least then you could cut down on negative moderation, and spend more time picking out the gems to help point out what has higher priority over the average post (score 2 and above)
moox. for a new generation.
...it won't make much difference to a lot of people, such as most British netheads - in Britain, an ISDN line costs about the equivalent of $150 per month, plus calls, and if you're lucky then cable modems might be available in your area soon! ADSL? Whats that??? :o(
Not much fun living in a low-bandwidth country with a piss-poor telecoms monopoly...
Game dev and music blog
If you want to see an early realization of this 'air fibre' technology, visit Lucent's page: WaveStar Optic Air system. 2.5Gbps is delivered through the a laser beam through the air. Designed for telco hops in cities and enterprise. Also -- about sat links: Teledesic promises to have a worldwide network capable of supporting 1 mil simultaneous broadband users by 2004. We're not talking about wimpy Iridium's pitifull 66 birds here -- their plan calls for 300. This is a fixed wireless solution, not mobile. It's designed to deliver very high speed connections to homes and businesses providing voice, video, and data at speeds between 2Mbps and 64Mbps. I don't think it's hype, seeing as though it has big backers (of course Bill G is famous for stupid hotair, look @ the X-box). Teledesic will have a few features similar to Iridium, like intra-satilite communication and routing. No, I'm not an investor -- I only wish I was.
Consider this: These signals from a switch's standpoint are not multiplexed. They enter the switch as 40mb trunks. Not a problem for a modern switch.
The hard part is a repeater every 100km. Can't sink this cable under water you need a repeater and power source every 100km. Your data travels halfway around the world? It gets recieved, buffered and retransmitted 200 times during the trip. Great throughput high latency. The beauty of fibre had been low latency "it sounds like you are right next door" and no noise/interference/path loss "pin drop"
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
You are right.. The first undersea fiber, called TAT8, was placed in 1988. It has regenerators every 79 km. Compared to TAT1, the first transatlantic communications cable (copper), TAT8 is a real workhorse. TAT8 can handle in 2 days the same traffic carried by TAT1 in 22 years of operation. TAT8 contains 6 fiber strands. 2 pair are lit and one pair is dormant. Distance required between repeaters is a function of the light source used. For a LAN type system, modems and repeaters using conventional LED's can achieve distances up to 2 km. for commercial bandwidth and range requirements, lasers are used. There are apparently fiber doping processes that can entirely eliminate repeaters on transcontinental cable runs when used in conjunction with certain frequency lasers. However since the existing fiber infrastructure was incredibly expensive to install most current technologies are geared toward getting more out of what is already in place.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
With that kind of bandwidth you could get streaming media the quality of DVDs. Also you could trade other copyrighted material as fast as your hard drive can pump it out. I think the advantages (speed) outweigh the disadvantages (piracy). The speed could be an advantage though, imagine having movie rental stores online that streamed the movie to you.
you keep fighting for your, right to whatever the hell you feel they've violated, or sexually abused when you where young, i personally don't give a damn. Im just sick of reading tasteless posts from sick people like you, did you ever ever see a sex-related banner on /.? why don't you try posting, stuff on yer so... sane and beautiful or whatever gay sites. Cos quite frankly, i don't want to know, and im sure im speaking for everybody else as well here, is we don't want to hear it...
Istigkeit -"is-ness" being and becoming & i'dfiying it with the mathematical abstraction of the idea
Ive got one thing to say... DAMN!
And just how are you supposed to switch this much data? They need to make major inroads on switching before this is practical (affordable) for most telcos. Not that this isn't cool inthe strictest geek kinda way!
Having worked at a national ISP at the time I would have to say lack of standards was not the big problem. Most telcos would let you pick which ISDN options to have on a line (there are 100s, maybe 1000s). If you order the line from the telco (as opposed to the customer showing up with a line allready) ISDN's "lack of standards" (really more of a lack of ability to throw out anything in the standard and to instead just enumerate all possable choices) was no big deal.
The two problems (as I remember them) were getting orderes filled (being quoted multi-month lead times, and then having them slip was not uncommon), and totally diffrent price plans across the country (it is hard for a nation wide ISP to have a nation wide price if the serice it is baised on is flat rate in Amaritech land, and per minute in NYNEX land). The ISDN PRIs (T1s) were even worse then the BRIs (2B+1D-channel 128Kbit home end).
I'm whole unconvinced that digital wireless in hte USA has been screwed by lack of standard so much as the licencing method used by the FCC. Find a socalist or comunist country that has a Metricomm-like service. While GSM is very nice, I like my SCH-3500 for datacomm far better then my Nokia-9000i. I don't feel screwed by CDMA. I do feel screwed by Sprint Spectrum, but that's a diffrent issue.
Actually, it will make it /less/ difficult. Remember how expensive plain old 10BT ethernet used to be? Remember how much cheaper it got when 100BT became the norm? Terabit technology will only serve to make gigabit, or whatever, the cheaper norm. Sure, the links will be slower, but hey, it's better than nothing.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Pardon my ignorance, and not too many flames please.
My gripe comes from the fact that TERAbit technology like this only makes it more difficult for the developing nations to catch up with the rest of the developed world.
I have every respect that technological advancement is wonderful, and I am glad that I can reap the benefits of this, but the problem in my eyes is that underdeveloped nations will get stuck on (relatively slower) links while the rich nations and people get richer, making them more and more advanced, compounding the situation.
Now this is a problem with all things, but with Internet technlogies, I feel this has a far more important position because of the nature of the Internet, to give everyone a "fair go".
I don't have an answer for all this but is there any way to make sure this issue is addressed early nad before (if it is not already) too late ?
Cheers,
denmaster
Something that many people overlook in investigating their download speeds and ping times is that backbones of the internet that your packets are traveling across affect it greatly. If your provider's connections link to a particular backbone that is saturated in areas, or dropping packets to certain destinations, your overall access times will be much slower to those places. Hopefully, this invention can be implemented in such things as Internet2 and other projects underway like IPV6, and the gaming protocol (the name fails me at the moment) will help alleviate the horrible ping times that gamers receive to far-away places. The world will be a better place when the only barrier for playing games is the language! :)
Simply put: Newer technology is often cheaper.
Laying a lot of fiber lines is trival in cost to laying any amount of fat copper lines. Those things were about as wide as Palm Pilot!
There is a trickle down effect and there will always be someone "at the top of the heap". But remember that the old G4 machine that will be donated to a developing country a few years from now would have been a supercomputer to anyone a couple of decades ago.
The tech gap is not the problem. Tech's cheap. Education is the problem. Intellectual haves and have nots is the growing gap. And problems with such gaps exist in developed countries too.
--
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
...and yet, Quake is still jumpy...
Kevin Fox
This is fantastic! If I read and understand this correctly, they have 100km fiber runs _without_ a repeater! That's truly excellent. Most of the cost for long distance runs [after the right-of-way] is in the repeaters and powering them, not in the media.
And they can run it at 40 GHz. That's 4 THz/km. Normally, fiber is limited by "smearing" over long lengths--the light pulses get spread out over the length of the media. Common fiber that is running around campuses and biz-sites is good for something like 1 GHz/km--a one km run can be gigabit, but a 10 km run has to drop to 100 MHz.
The 40 channels per fiber is also impressive, but nothing like 100 km between repeaters or 4 THz/km.
Your university only has 24 terabyte of diskspace? Wow! I know we're in the triple-digits of terabytes drivespace, and that's excluding students. Informedia alone has a few terabytes of diskspace.
Think of the pr0n! The pr0n! I could download all of alt.binaries.naughty.bits in a matter of seconds!
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
What a coincidence! wow!
.sig
This morning i wanted to know how cool and big your University was! Man, i'm impressed, you answered me the same day!
There must be a god!
phobos% cat
phobos% cat
cat:
High bandwidth for fixed-location machines is all very well, but when will we see something similar for the increasing number of wireless devices which are proliferating themselves in our lives?Text-mode for WAP isn't really the killer application that we want/need it to be.
I can see the possibilty of satellites of the future using banks of lasers to communicate across those regions of space between planets, and down to base stations, in a similar manner to this but without the fibre-optic cable in the way. Combine a GPS reciever with with your device, allow it to see the sky (or an intemediate relay) and bingo! The station aims a beam at your device, and you get instant connectivity at a reasonable transfer rate.
Of course the idea takes some thinking about and working round some of the more obvious problems (such as line of sight) but on the whole it would make for a much faster wireless system then is in place at the moment...
--
Said it couldn't last, said it wouldn't last... This is the last stand against tomorrow's world.
ISDN was a late '70s, early '80s technology. It wasn't aggressavly marketed, well, ever (by the telcos that is). It wasn't lighlty marketed until late in the '90s. It was very hard to buy in the early '90s (like it was hard for ISPs to buy it, and they were use to talking to telcos then).
The more intresting table would be for when T1s, T3s, fractonal T3s, OC1, OC3, OC12... were actually available from a telco. Not when they were "designed" but when they could be bought. Unfortunitly the closest I can come to putting a date on any of those numbers is "frac T3s in the late '80s", and I'm not even positave about that one.
Bandwidth has been growing a lot lately, but that's unsupprising, research into it has been better funded lately. An intresting issue is what you need to route (or even switch!) data moving that fast. Juniper has nice products, but this is a hell of a lot of bandwidth. Fortunitly (and unfortunitly) it is on a lot of diffrent colors, and you could optically split them and send them to diffrent boxes to route/switch... but that only buys you so much, and it costs a lot too.
1982: 1200 bps
1986: 2400 bps
1991: 9600 bps
1992: 14.4 Kbps
1996: 28.8 Kbps
1998: 50.0 Kbps
2000: 128.0 Kbps(DLS)
_________________________
how many mp3s per second on Napster is this?
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
According to researchers, the experiment used both DWDM -- a technology that combines multiple wavelengths onto a single fiber -- and distributed Raman amplification -- a technique that allows optical fiber to amplify the signals traveling through it.
This is absolutely not my field, but isn't distributed Raman amplification a way by which the fiber has been 'doped' with some molecule in its structure by which a beam of light gets amplified, so you need less repeaters for a certain distance to carry the same amount of data.
The repeaters are quite cheap when compared to the expense of laying the fiber. Upgrading the max speed of fiber like this is quite awesome to see - if they can keep the rate of bandwidth increase up, the might never have to lay more fiber on their backbones again!
The problem is that most of the fibre that is in the ground now is not capable of amplifying the light so you need more repeaters built into the network to reach these amounts of bandwith.
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On the other hand, you also have the earlier Bell Labs article; according to that, they managed 160 billion bits on a single wavelength; this, on the other hand, is likely more of a public use of the method. In comparison, however, it doesn't size up; tat 160 billion bits per wavelength, it would have only taken 20 wavelengths to manage this throughput, and I'm reading the article as them having 4 times that many wavelengths. Perhaps, at a certain point, they merely cannot distinguish that much data on cluttered wavelengths yet? Seems like a disappointment, after the hopes of 160 billion bits across 1000 wavelengths. Then again, maybe we'll be seeing Bell Labs breaking yet another record sometime soon.
It is great that they have shown the possibility to send this amount of data over a network. It would basically mean sending the entire contents of all harddisks (2000x) on my universities campusnetwork in about 1 minute. But when are we going to see this technology in service? It seems that not only do we need new repeaters, but also souped up glassfiber. Those are large investments and it may take some time too to get the prototype to become a real world model.
With Iridum about to heat up in the worst way, and landlines jumping in capacity, maybe the future really does hold a fiber-optic link straight into every permanent structure on Earth
My personal opinion is that fiber is definitely the way we are going to go espescially for long distance data transfer. The problem with satellite technology is the lag in the signal and the problem with wireless is that it has too low a bandwith. On the other hand fiber should be able to transmit a signal in 0.2 seconds to any place in the world. So a system where the last mile is covered by wireless and a backbone of fiber seems to be the most plausible way. Interesting little tidbit is that 0.2 seconds is also the maximum lag in a telephone conversation, before people judge it as unnatural.
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