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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.
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.
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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
The speed of light in fiber is about 69% of the speed of light in a vacuum, roughly 100 ms to travel 20,000 km.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I've read papers that argue that compression will no longer make economic sense as bandwidth becomes really cheap.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
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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.
A quote:
The speed of light depends on the medium through which the light travels. In empty space, the speed is 186,000 (1.86 X 105) miles per second. It is almost the same in air. In water, it slows down to approximately 140,000 (1.4 X 105) miles per second. In glass, the speed of light is 124,000 (1.24 X 105) miles per second. In other words, the speed of light decreases as the density of the substance through which the light passes increases.
124/186=0.666 0.666*300.000km/s=200,000km/s So it would take 0.10 secs for light to get to any point on earth. That still leaves about 0.1 secs for processing of various sorts.
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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...
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Said it couldn't last, said it wouldn't last... This is the last stand against tomorrow's world.
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:
This is a backbone technology, not feeder. Think in terms of a great many nodes feeding into switches. The local switches are connected by 40Gbps connections. Multiple local domains are agregated into the 3Tbps backbone for long haul to the next major city.
If the system is used for a SAN, the inter-city connection would be used to have an offsite mirror for disaster recovery. It would probably serve many customers rather than just one (1 customer needing 3Tbps would be a HUGE customer). Certainly, no single disk drive could move that fast, but consider one 40Gbps channel into a switch serving 60 file servers each with a large RAID.
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)
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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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