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Qwest Achieves 100-Mile IP Round-Trip At 40Gb/sec
TheShrike writes: "As reported in the Denver Rocky Mountain News:
'Almost without fanfare, a joint venture of Denver-based Qwest Communications and Dutch telecommunications company KPN has smashed the cyber speed record for transmission of data over the Internet.
The joint venture, called KPNQwest, transmitted 40
gigabits of data per second in a 100-mile round-trip
connection between Frankfurt and Gernsheim,
Germany, last week.'" Add Napster, stir. [16th May, 4:50GMT: Updated headline to read "Gb" not "GB." Thanks, all. -t.]
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but if you check out this article, you'll note that Bell Labs transmitted 3.28 terabit over 300 kilometres by multiplexing different wavelengths over a single fibre strand.
another story about blazingly fast communications records being set & I'm still waiting for Bell Atlantic to run a string out to my tin can.
<OFF TOPIC>I'm wondering if the Bull system does loop qualifying for DSL by a certain list or is there some way to let the last mile monopoly know your waiting for it and please DO ME FIRST & stop wasting time qualifying people who can't even spell DSL.</OFF TOPIC>
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Well, this is missing the point of MBone and multicast technology. To send a 1 Mbps video signal down the MBone to 100000 people requires exactly 1 Mbps of bandwidth on any single link. Routers that are routing the signal to multiple destinations need some multiple of that for their backplane speed, but not on the wire. Sadly, the current popular streaming formats (RealVideo, in particular) would require 100 Gbps to do the same thing. Sigh.
Ten 100t cards to each 100t hub, 10 100t hubs to each 100t switch, ten 100t switches to each of ten Yellowfin switches plugged into the uplink ports.
/. once. Not only do you get the peak 40G figure, you DDoS /. as well!!
Ask everyone to reload
When did they say they did the testing? Hmm.. Makes me wonder..
Seriously though.. They didn't use commodity PC equipment.. Prolly a purpose built signalling device just sending an alternating binary stream on each specific range. Easy to check for error!!
You could do it with just over fifty 556 ICs and just over seventy transistors..
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I seem to remember hearing that 40 Gbps was the maximum amount of information that could be processed by the human vision system. If so, this breakthrough represents a key step towards absolute telepresence, no?
I'd like to see them get the latency down. What good is extra bandwidth if it doesn't improve your gaming experience? 8')
I find it very interesting that the 2 telecommunications companies were American and Dutch while the actual test was conducted in Germany. The lure of beer must have done it or something...
Weren't "they" supposed to put a 40Gbps Fiber cable in the ocean around Africa? /. article.
I remember reading about that a while back.
Here's the
So, what makes this cooler?
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
My local newspaper carried this story from the Associated Press. The article read that some nonstandard hardware/software combination compression method was used to attain this speed. Just a bit of information not mentioned in the article.
Several issues/questions are raised by having gargantuan amounts of bandwidth as in this story:
1. Streaming video. Streaming TV. A good idea I think, but when you get people who start to stream movies, that will naturally piss off the MPAA.
2. MB overload. Even the most modern computer systems can only handle so much bandwidth...
3. Overki...never mind, there's no such thing as overkill when it comes to having too much bandwidth.
And last but not least....
4. $$$$$. Bandwidth is a Good Thing(tm), but it can get rather expensive.
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I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Maybe now with higher speeds like that, you can visit the Starcraft Linux page faster thatn before. Hooray for technology.
Hmm..
Uncompressed: 40G/s
Compressed: int x=1; while (x) cout x --x++;
For any significant amount of data, I'd say near infinite compression..
But it doesn't have to be limited to such insanely small homogenous granularity. Say you're using conventional CMOS components. Rig it to just spew random data. Trivial to do. While it would repeat eventually, the granularity is 1/infinity instead of 1/1.
Watch it strip mp carats..
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There isn't one. Just the +1 starting at 26.
their stuff switches IP at full wire rate, on all wires, at the same time. AND, it can filter all that stuff at full wire rate, too.
pretty amazing stuff. you hear that cisco? ;-)
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I have to relate this short little story (which is nearly completely off topic) about modem speeds. A friend of mine, much more comptuer literate than I at the moment, who is soon to be working in silicon vally, once explained to me why I wasn't getting the full 28kB/s out of my 28.8kb/s modem: "Oh, there is just transmission overhead, you shouldn't use AOL." I swallowed that, we switched to enteract, and I imagined that my downloads got faster, not that they ever got as fast as I thought they should. Now, of course, we both know a lot better than that, but let it be a lesson to any of you who think that the average person pays attention to the difference between B and b.
2) About 20GB/Sec one the IDE bus, IIRC. Well within the limits of streaming video.
3) Companies know that.
4) As companies compete to increase it the price will fall. I expect either really fast flat rate or for pennies a gigabyte to become a reality fairly quickly. Of course, when you start streaming 4 to 6 gigabyte movies, it'll add up fairly quickly. Should still be less than your current phone bill at the end of the month (Unless you're a real bandwidth whore.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ok. Once I make my first $billion, I know exactly where that money's going: One of these connections between my house and www.cybererotica.com
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I don't think that convention is universally accepted. I've been working in data communications for a long time and BPS, as in BPS, KBPS and MBPS, has always stood for bits per second. Bytes per second, or more properly, octets per second, has never been a popular unit of measurement. When multi-bit units are involved, symbols per second is commonly used. Most data communications are serial, and at the hardware level, serial streams of bits. It seems that bytes/sec is primarily relevant to the parallel buses used in computers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You use a time division multiplexer (TDM) to combine 20 2 gbit/s signals into a 40 gbit/s signal, or you can use a frequency division multiplexer (FDM) to put 20 2 gbit/s signals on 20 carriers or optical wavelengths. Analog cable TV systems use FDM, a T1 line used to carry digitized 64 kbit/s voice streams is using TDM. Very high speed fiber systems use a combination of TDM and FDM.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Will you people STOP abbreviating gigabit as GB? PLEASE?? Everyone is going to immediatly think this wire is 8 times faster than it is.
Ok, I can understand the scientific and technological revelations of ths discovery, but when do the benefits come down to us, the average (ok, maybe not so average) users? How long 'till we get a worldwide network at that speed? Not friggin' soon, unfortunately. It's like all other monumental scientific discoveries--it takes years for it to trickle down to us. I applaud the feat, don't get me wrong, but I'll be more impressed, hell, I'll give them a standing ovation, when it's made available to the rest of us.
Why would they use TCP? I would have expected them to use UDP for real-time audio and video, plus you can multicast UDP.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Just how does one generate 40 gigabits - 5 gigabytes - of data per second? That's well above the throughput of any bus system I'm aware of, let alone RAM or hard drive. Any idea how they do this?
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Yeah, but what's the latency? A station wagon full of tapes has a higher bandwidth, but pretty poor latency.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Errr.. Sure, we can get f***ing loads of bandwidth down a fibre, but that's not the hard part. The point is that the latest test shows that this bandwidth has been achieved with IP.
DWDM (the multiplexing tech.) isn't that new, the trick is to find a router that can handle it. We can get massive bandwidth over SDH, it's getting it over IP that's tricky.
I note that the latest announcement didn't actually use the word 'IP' anywhere, but the talk of new routers implied it to me - that and the fact that if they meant SDH it wouldn't be much of a big deal.
P.S. I'm not fibre optic expert, but I think this explains the discrepancy.
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