Optical Fiber Capacity Growth

kastaverious writes: "I found this on Scientific American. It talks about developments in all optical switching and the growth in capacity of optical fiber. The article has some interesting graphs of bandwidth demand and the growth in bandwidth availabilty. There is also a good explanation of some of the technical issues involved in increasing switching capacity, and efforts underway to overcome these problems." The article also has lots of good SciAm-style graphics. This short article at Janes also sheds some light on the world on undersea cable laying, which also recalls the article Neal Stephenson wrote for Wired a few years ago.

Comments

one day...

[LordArathres]

One day we wont have internet lag.
One day our connection will be several gigs/sec.
One day there will be no keyboards.
One day etc etc...
This is all fine and good and it will be one day, however I do not think that fibre optic cabling will allow us all to do this. First of all it is VERY expensive and not easy to repair if it sits on the bottom of the ocean. I think better satellite systems and/or wireless will be the future. But currently that is what we have and we are making it work.
It impresses me how much cable has already been laid and how much more will be. The cost and resources must be staggering. I've been on ships and just trying to imagine laying cable behind the ship for THOUSANDS of miles if well and I quote...
"Whoa"
I still guess it is easier than laying down fibre optic networks on land b/c of all the construction etc necessary.
Until that day that we all have a direct fibre optic connection or satellite (not current crap satellites but good ones) connections I guess i'll be stuck with my 18 kb/sec DSL connection. I should not complain as I remember back when the 2400 baud modems came out and then the 9600 was revolutionary that we HAD to have even thinking "How can they make this better?"

just my 1:40 am half asleep at work opinion.
Lord Arathres

Re:one day...

[grammar nazi]

Everyone on Slashdot thinks that the cost of laying new fiber optic cable is the only cost associated with cables. Let me inform you:

1. Copper cable is heavy. One mile of Copper cable is a few thousand pounds, compared to one mile of optic which is under one hundred pounds (depending on the type).

2. When used in telecommunications systems, copper wire needs repeater stations every 2-3 miles. These are stations that people have to routinely check and fix when something breaks. Fiber optic in contrast, only needs 1 repeater station every 300-500 miles.

3. I forget the actual sizes, but you can send more bandwidth on one little optic than you can send in a large diameter bundle of copper wires.

4. Glass is cheaper than copper. Once the manufacturing technology of glass fibers catches up to that of copper wire, than the prices for optical cable will be cheaper than that of copper.

Finally, I fail to see how copper wire is any easier or cheaper to repair than optical wire when it is on the bottom of the ocean. This is an argument for a wireless system, but I think that there would be too much latency in a wireless system.

Re:one day...

[NetCurl]

All of those reasons are valid, and possibly "Everyone on Slashdot" doesn't understand this, but the real reason fiber optics hasn't completely replaced copper is that it truely is more expensive. One of the main reasons it is so expensive is that they can't make enough of it, fast enough, to meet the demand.

All major communications companies want to be laying fiber. It's widely accepted that it will be the communications medium of the future. I worked for Lucent Technologies as a summer intern, directly in optical switching and networking. I was told on a number of occasions that Lucent couldn't even produce enough fiber to meet the internal needs, much less fill the huge back order on cable.

This example is why fiber optics are expensive. Especially when you look at multi mode and single mode fiber. The price increase is huge. They can't make it quickly enough to meet demands.

Re:Remember the fibre optic cable shortage in the

[Barbarian]

hey, my parents had one of those lamps somewhere. I wonder what happened to it.

Articles accurate but too fluffy. Smoke & Mirrors

[Devout Capitalist]

The article misses the key technologies of the future summarized as the smoke and mirrors story I came up with over at Sun Microsystems. We used this to talk about honking bandwidth, the need for big servers, and why a portable language like Java makes sense.

DWDM is a start, but there are two major problems:

• Smoke:Right now we can throw a lot of bandwidth across a long haul fiber, but these use expensive lasers that run only one or two protocols. There are a lot of seperate networks, HTTP/TCP/IP, SONET, some voice stacks, even Telex. Each of these networks has its own protocol stack right down to some fiber based ethernet standard or hacked up 1990's protocol. The best solution is to make a 'smoke' box that will allow splitting by frequency so that I can run a dozen frequencies as SONET, a dozen as voice, and twenty TCP/IP. The magic 'smoke' box splits the incomming fiber into several seperate fibers, each carrying a distinct set of frequencies that can leverage other equipment. By combining together different inputs, I can use a single long fiber for multiple networks. One order of magnitude.
• Mirrors:This is the area where Lucent is making some progress. I need to do some nifty tricks with routing or my gross bandwidth buries my useful bandwidth. All the ATM switch cloth with IP cache in the world won't help if I need to cross over the optical/electrical boundry for every packet. A 'mirror' could be the simple stuff with Lucent using a physical switch to reimplement timesharing (1 cycle for SF to NY, 1 for SF to Boston, 1 for San Jose to NY, ...). The mythical mirror solution is to hit a lattice with a signal such that the reflection property reflects to a different destination. You would only need to cross the boundry for the destination part of a packet or routable stream. This 'mirror' magic would be an independent improvement from DWDM or 'smoke'. Most likely, you would use DWDM, split to fibers with smoke, route with mirrors. Another order of magnitude; maybe two.

Finally, give up on rewiring the last mile. The DSP and other signal processing tricks will get faster and cheaper more quickly than any solution that requires rewiring. It makes financial sense to swap end point electronics rather than rip open walls. You may see many more COs making shorter runs to the houses, but either existing coax or twisted pair into the house will carry our future bandwidth. (Thanks to Brent and Richard for convincing me.)

I miss Sun, they had more interesting problems than running a non-profit. See the non-profit at TrueGift Donations.

Cheers!

Charles

Re:I have a (real) question.

[Technician]

Take another look at how fast high tech has grown. 100 years ago the first radio broadcast over 100 miles took place. Since then it has gone from radio telegraph to teletype to voice to TV to Color TV to Stereo FM to Stereo TV to Packet radio to satalite TV to digital direct broadcast TV to Cell radio (phones, GSM and Trunked radio) to digital voice phones to Satalite phones.

Now project forward 10 years. 20 years ago Direct Broadcast Satelite on a small dish for home was thought impossible.

Re:Staggering

[cicadia]

What would be your criteria, then, for deciding who should be allowed to have a broadband connection? Would it really be practical or fair to implement these criteria?

Well, first, we're gonna need some sort of moderation system, so that we can rate the worthiness of people's Internet usage... then we can set up a kind of 'karma' system for determining who should get how much bandwidth...

- cicadia

More bps is no use for me

[Caid Raspa]

At least here the major bottleneck for web connections is the "last mile" of copper wire between the user and the optical fibres already used by the phone companies. So, what would really help is to put down the cost of fibre installation. (or ADSL) I think the major cost in fibre installation is wages of the guys doing it. This will not bring down the costs of setting a fibre connection. After setting, one only gets more bps than before.

So, this will not give web access to those who can not afford it now. I think wider web access is more important than more bps. Also, this will not increase the quality of the web, except for those who 'Download large image files from the busiest servers of the web'.

"Unlimited bandwidth" - When will they learn?

[Arkleseizure]

They keep referring to unlimited bandwidth in this article. People seem to fail to realise that minds operate in an infinite-bandwidth environment and that any resource which can be measured in bits or bits/s can easily be consumed by a person. Even if you cover the entire globe in optics with optical switches and routers with mind-boggling information rates will that cope with every high-res videoconference call, every TV broadcast and movie on demand, every book sold, every office which ceases to exist physically and becomes virtual, etc, etc? Unlimited, my arse.

Serious question about the article.

[Operandi]

It mentions huge bandwidth usage by 'metacomputing' and 'web agents'. What IS metacomputing and what ARE web agents!?!

Re:Serious question about the article.

[Cato]

A quick Google search reveals that metacomputing seems to be related to the Grid, i.e. it's a way of gluing disparate systems together (usually supercomputers) with a single set of middleware that makes it much easier to write large-scale distributed applications.

Such systems will be used for all kinds of scientific calculations, as well as telemedicine, distributed virtual reality caves, and so on. The Grid will eventually impinge on us all (e.g. running massive simulations to make a medical diagnosis as you sit in your doctor's surgery).

Depending on the sort of application, the bandwidth demands can be enormous.

Obfuscation

[Cato]

You are making this more confusing than it really is, by not using any technical terms that might make sense (e.g. add-drop multiplexer, optical switch). A shame, since your points are valid...

- 'Smoke' - it's hard to work out what you are talking about here - seems like the 'smoke' box is an add-drop multiplexer for DWDM, which puts multiple frequencies (aka wavelengths) from various input fibres on a single output fibre. DWDM is inherently multi-protocol of course, as each wavelength can carry a unique protocol.

- 'Mirrors' - this is just one of the many possible all-optical switching technologies that are under development. These include MEMS (tiny mirrors that can reflect light onto different fibres), electro-holographic Bragg gratings (completely solid state and with useful testing/monitoring features), and even a bizarre technology that involves using inkjet techniques to blow bubbles in and out of place, thereby affecting switching (from Agilent).

Further Reading

[yesod]

A good site for further reading is www.optastic.com.

Nicely written analogies making many of the optics issues much easier to grasp.

point-to-point interactive video everywhere

[peter303]

InterNet growth will continue until there is
interactive video of broadcat TV quality or better
everywhere- office, school, home, vehicle.
This is the natural human-communications-computer
interface. We still have a way to go to figure
out computer-video interfaces. Text interfaces
are a passing form, mainly for academic use.

No. The last mile will be wireless.

[Ars-Fartsica]

No company or group of companies can afford such capital outlay in today's short-term obsessed stock market. Investors would severely punish any stock that hedged its profits on a infrastructure plan that would take at least a decade to pay off.

The days of home-installed telco equipment are coming to an end. It is expensive and problematic for telco companies to maintain equipment in consumers homes, be it for phone or data. Added to which, rapidly changing standards prohibit any telco from dedicating any strategy to any particular technology. Consider the current state of optical computing - SONET is currently the main standard, but probably on the way out in the next few years. Hence no telco is going to roll out a SONET network to consumers homes because much of the equipment driving the network will become obsolete.

The better approach for voice and data is wireless. Not only does this allow location independence, but it also allows the telco to avoid the costly business of maintaining the line into the consumer's home.

Economics of the unavoidable fiber glut

[Ars-Fartsica]

The authors of this article fail to address the obvious issue of the ongoing build-outs of fiber networks -the imminent oversupply of fiber.

In a bandwidth-starved world it seems odd to think that there is a glut of fiber, but the very soon will be if there already isn't.

If all of the fiber in the ground right now was lit, the cost of transmission would effectively drop to zero - its just a matter of who can ride out the inevitable shakeout in the market and consolidate the networks of the ones that can't compete. In the mide-term, consumers could actually see reduced capacity as the market consolidates.

Uhhh, I donno

[twitter]

The author did have a sense of humor, however:

PowerPoint slides at industry conferences emphasize why the deluge is yet to come.

I think he hit the nail on the head, considering my only PowerPoint effort yeilded a 75 megabyte monster. When you understand this, 'metacomputing', 'web agents' and IT will all make sense.

They're doomed

[Ars-Fartsica]

The cost of patching in a new line to even a small number of homes is astronomical.

Unless there is a major telco behind this, or another form of long term capital, this cannot take off.

Re:I have a (real) question.

[Ars-Fartsica]

Wireless doesn't need to work like cell phones. Surely your own company has been involved in the trials of shooting light over the open air. Its optical without the fiber, and its in development right now, and it refutes all of your spectrum arguments.

Cable TV was the last great wiring build-out to consumers - no one is taking on that cost ever again. The last mile will be wireless.

Re:there is a mistake in this article

[Meathead]

The decision/need to regenerate the signal is strongly dependent on many factors (error tolerance, fiber type, cost of transmitters, number of wavelengths, etc.) For submarine systems regeneration may only occur after 1000's of km, but the cost of these systems is much higher than land based systems. There exists a data rate/distance/cost trade-off.

If you are in the SF bay area and interested in this subject, Photonics West is currently happening at the San Jose Convention Center (through Thursday.) For information check here.

Re:I have a (real) question.

[crgrace]

Why wireless won't work

Wireless communication is great for cell phones and GPS and a bunch of other things, but when you start talking monstrous bandwidth, you need cable. Say, for instance, that 5 million New Yorkers want internet connections of 2 Mb/s each, and that your wireless technology can pack 10 bits per Hertz (that's really tight packing!). 5 million x 2 million / 10 = 1x10^12 So to give those folks their internet access, you need 1 THz (terahertz) of electromagnetic spectrum. But the whole usable spectrum is only about 300 GHz, and the FCC probably wants some of it for little things like radio stations, air traffic control, military communication, etc. ;) Wireless connections won't work because there are too many people.

I don't agree with your example. You are assuming that all 5 million New Yorkers are simultaneously connected to the same base-station. Your example seems to "prove" even cell-phones are impossible. In reality, a network of base-stations, each connected to each other and the backbone by fiber, would be used to implement the last mile. If one base-station was used per 1000 customers, then only (1e3 * 2e6) / 10 = 2e8 MHz if required. So, using your assumption of 10 bits per Hertz, only 200 MHz of bandwidth is needed to implement the network city-wide. Agreed, it would be damn hard to find an economical A/D converter if we needed a high SNR, but it certainly IS possible.

Re:I have a (real) question.

[crgrace]

You don't seem to understand how a wireless system is partitioned.

All 5 million people could be online at once, but they are not served by a single base-station. There would be one base-station for every 1000 or so people. So, we would need 5e6/1000 = 5000 base-stations for all 5 million people to be online at once and still only use 200 MHz of bandwidth.

Cell-phone networks work the same way. Each "cell" is served by a base-station that can handle maybe 100 simultaneous calls in its area. When a call is made from cell-phone to cell-phone, each cell phone is actually communicating with its nearest base-station and the two base-stations are communicating with each other over a fiber-optic link. Because base-stations dynamically assign bandwidth to individual cell-phones requesting a connection, when two cell phones are talking to each other they could be on totally different frequencies.

In summary, when a wireless network is partitioned using cells, the bandwidth requirement is dependent on the number of users per base-station, not on the total number of users. Therefore, increasing the number of users from, say, 10000 to 5 million, only requires additional base-stations, NOT additional spectrum.

Re:I have a (real) question.

[Graymalkin]

Something I don't think you've considered is population density. For some places you could get away with 1000 people per base station with those stations fairly far apart (transmiting with a decent power output). In somewhere like New York or Tokyo you're talking about a thousand people in a couple blocks. Thats alot of base stations close together. To keep them patitioned you would need to reduce the transmission wattage to the point where some people would have to settle for slower speeds due to signal loss. Wireless communications are way too limited to enable 5 million New Yorkers to get 2Mbps connections all at once. If you don't agree you've never gotten a "Network Busy" message whilst trying to make a cell phone call in a metropolitan area.