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New Fiber Optics In The Works
Logic Bomb writes: "An article from MIT's Technology Review has the details on a new kind of fiber optic cabling that could provide part of the backbone bandwidth increase everyone is looking for. Instead of sending the light through glass, the light is actually sent through nothing but air. The key is a tube lining made of a special class of materials called "photonic-band-gap" which manage to perform an almost-perfect reflection of particular wavelengths of light. I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use. :-)"
goatse.cx is already pretty fast. What more do you need?
This had crossed my mind. It would actually be easy to do with this fibre -- just pump it down from one end. If you don't do this, I imagine you do at least want to fill the central space with clean dry nitrogen, or something, rather than mucky ambient air.
I don't care so much if this new technology will be priced for home use - I'm more interested whether this new fibre cable will cause the current higher bandwidth technologies to drop in price...I'd be quite satisfied with a home T-3. I'd even settle for a good T-1, even.
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Indeed with many of the increases in fiber-bandwidth having come from multiple frequencies of light & with greatly improved hardware soon to roll-out ('tunable' lasers & all-optical switches, some using light-frequency as a routing determinant) if these new fibers are truly limited in their frequency-transmisson they could find themselves hobbled when they eventually come to market.
I also wonder about splicing these cables, terminating them, etc. The difficulties of a single fiber were surmounted but with a number of wave-guides closely bonded together I imagine most present technology wouldn't work.
Those concens aside I can see a number of applications where a long-distance non-repeated cable could be of enormous use, particularly in under-sea cables.
Back to the when-can-we-see-this-in-our-homes I doubt we will ever as this particular technology seems unsuited for such an application. If the question were about fiber-in-general expect it to become possible in a few years.
Plastic-based fiber is proving to be cheaper & more versitile then glass based in the sort of mid/high density generally assumed for residential and now the sticking point is the connections & switching. Once cheap optical switches come onto the market it'll just be a matter of physical installation - presumably in about the same pattern cable-TV has used.
If you can get cable-TV now hopefully in about a deacade you'll begin having the option of fiber.
Imagine a Bewulf cluster of these... - sorry, couldn't resist.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I'm sorry, but the author bio had me chuckling for a few minutes.
He is also the author of H2O: A Biography of Water.
I have to say I'm curious, in the extreme. When is he coming out with "Air: Friend of Foe?" and "Fire: Ouch!".
we can nail down where a fiber is cut by measuring where the refractivity of the cut takes place
Is this the same sort of thing as using the impedance change for a cable to determine the length (or length to the break) with traditional coax and TP networking? Never heard of a similar technique in fiber, but then again I haven't had much experience with fiber.
If you read your stats, you'll notice that bandwith price/performance ratio is improving at an even faster rate than CPU price/performance - the jumps in performance are bigger, but spaced farther in time than CPU performance jumps.
So bandwith is cheap, and getting cheaper. The only true barrier is latency. After all, increasing bandwidth is (basically) just a matter of bundeling more fibers pr. connection
The problem with transmitting yourself one atom at a time lies with having to destroy yourself and thus all the molecules in your body in order to transmit yourself. They are sending individual atoms that have little better to do than be the subject of experiments. The atoms in my body and yours are much too busy right now to bother with being guided through anywhere.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
A Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters of course.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
This is only a test
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
As a kid I knew the inherent limitations of a string based network, and chose to forego it for costlier, yet more flexible hose network.
There is already, and they dont sell to many units either. The cost of deployment is very high. Forget the price of fiber, even for a second. Their NID costs $900 EACH (thats per home, folks)
http://www.opticalsolutions.com/index1.htm
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Speed of light in glass is what, about 1/3rd speed of light in vacuum? So it's only a threefold increase anyway; you get more than that with clever use of multiple frequencies down the same fibre etc.
Just checking, but I hope you mean you can get a better bandwith increase by using multiple frequencies (than by increasing the speed of transmission). I deal with Network Performance on a regular basis and most people keep forgeting that there are always two numbers to think about:
Bandwidth (how thick your pipe is)
and Latency (how long it takes to get from point A to point B).
We did some work for a company (who shall remain nameless) who moved all their servers to an East Coast data center and were trying to figure out why their Dallas branch office was having poor responce times. The final report to them included a sentance to the effect that "The top speed of this application is limited by the speed of light. There is no way to make this application go faster short of altering physics as we know it."
The customer was a bit angry (lots of dollars spent) and the DB Consultants from one of the BIG houses (won't say who but it starts with an "O"
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There are two main advantages of this technology: (potentially) ultra-low loss, and increased bandwidth. The increased bandwidth is due to the nature of this type of waveguide to have low to zero dispersion, while the "band-gap" allows for a wider range of wavelengths to be used for WDM.
Now the bad news, this technology is likely a few years off, for telecom anyway, and will certainly be more expensive than silica fiber, which is amazingly cheap these days. Not to mention that the main barrier to any improvements in the fiber part of fiber optic telecommunications is the huge installed base of single mode silica fiber. Installation/right-of-way is the currently biggest cost associated with fiber systems. There is alot of unused bandwidth out there right now and any service provider would be crazy to spend mucho dinero to replace silica with any new technology at this stage in the game.
For the near future, other applications can benefit greatly from this technology. Especially since hollow band-gap waveguides can transmit near, mid and far-IR energy as well. Medical and industrial IR laser applications are longing for a low-loss, high-power IR delivery system.
This is still a very exciting concept and I hope to see more from these guys in the future.
-Dan
Beauty is truly in the eye of the tiger
Synopsis: What happens when the air-fiber-optic line is cut underwater and it fills with seawater?
One of the biggest problems facing this is underwater lines. Let's say you produce one of these new lines underwater from California to Japan. All is well for 2 months, when suddenly all communication is completely cut.
A crew investigates at the bottom of the ocean. Something has cut the fiber-optic line into two pieces, and since the fiber is filled with air, the entire line has filled with water. Murky seawater. What do you do now? Pump air through it? There's bound to be residue that will impede light transmission. I guess that means there will have to be a new line laid.
Maybe they'll produce an armored sort of line to reduce the possibility of a cut. Hopefully that will prevent anything weird from happening.
Ok, I agree with your point. However, this is not FUD.
FUD is fear, uncertanty, and doubt. It is trying to undermine a product by making people think less of it. FUD is not "lame marketing crap I don't agree with".
Sorry to nitpick, but since the term FUD is used so often here on /., I would hope it would be used correctly.
It wasn't the MIT people who created it, it was the University of Bath in England.
This is very similar to this article from Slashdot in March. This is another form of "holey fiber" making use of photonic bandgap effects.
It's not identical is application or results, but it's similar and another use of the same basic idea, so the earlier article and posts should make good reading. The article that prompted the previous story doesn't mention the photonic band gap, but this paper from the researcher discussed in the article does.
-Puk
Yes please...
I can see it now:
"Dad, what do you mean that you could only download at 300k/sec... wow, that must have been soooo slow"
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
"I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use. :-)" "
Fiber is cheap now. The high cost of fiber is not the fiber cable, it is the installation and maintenance. Add on the cost of all the routing equipment and you see where the real costs lay.
I thought it was Fucked Up Data... (when people kept talking about the mindcraft shit, it made sense).
there is no thing
what else could you want?
The only difference in this case would be that the traditional fibre would be easier to repair (assuming you can repair them).
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
For the last time, THE BACKBONE IS NOT IN YOUR BASEMENT.
Technologies that are being developed for the core are not being designed for your house. They never have been and, unless the semi-hierarchical design of the core dissolves into fractal jelly (which would be pretty interesting, actually, but won't happen as long as it's privately owned), they never will be, because the scalability problem in last-mile deployment is an absolute bitch.
That said, QWest and others are swimming in backbone bandwidth -- they can't sell it all!
It's was either Slashdot or The Register where I got this link from a few months ago. It's about the same subject, but goes as far to mention that this technology can be used to guide individual atoms through the fiber tubes. The article says that the research on this is just beginning, and will be used to measuring gravitational fields and the like... I'm not too up on my physics, but does anyone see this akin to teleportation? It's only one atom at a time, and it's not a "wireless" solution, but you are moving actuall matter over high speed communications lines. Any physics people have an opinion? (as if I had to ask)
--- Rectum?! Damn near killed em'! - Confucius
The speed of light in glass is lower than the speed of light in air (by about 25 percent if I recall), so using an air-core fiber would cut signal delays as well as the other benefits.
I know I'm probably wrong, but I thought the signal traveled through air an was reflected by the glass anyway? The wasn't as good as it distorted the final light result at the other end or something like that.
... then with no medium for the light to go through and slow it down, we will have true light speed data transmissions. You can't go any faster than that (at least not with current day theories.)
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
If the cable is really a honeycomb, with light passing through a small mirrored channel, does that make it more delicate than, say, copper? Or normal fiber? It sounds like an outstanding idea, but I'd have to imagine that a cable like this could be a little delicate. Anyone have any info?
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Of course that raises the problem of the tubes collapsing under the atmospheric pressure outside. I imagine it'd be pretty hard to cheaply manufacture tubes that can withstand that pressure and remain flexible. And how would you modify the length of the cable? Either you have to order it the perfect length or revacuum it after shortening it. That and hope it never breaks. Of course many people who use fiber today are incapable of cutting it properly so perhaps that's not an issue. Sounds like it'd be nice though.
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I don't think he was questioning the possibility of light travelling through a vacuum, but rather the feasibility and/or further benefits of it.
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Don't see why it should be that hard.
You're talking about a vacuum in a cylinder at most 1mm across (internally), with probably 1mm walls, that should take the 10^5 Pa required easily (standing on it would give a pressure of the order of 2x10^5, and you can stand on pipes with no problem whatsoever).
see the similarities?
coincidence?!?!? i think not ;)
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Crud....
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The goal, .. of course,.. is for faster porn....
Anyone got a guess on the availability? The fiber I mean,.. not the porn.....
Dirty Pirate Hooker
"We've spent so much money, can't you get us some, um, extra-fast light or something?"
Nice
Or a very long tube, with perfectly mirrored insides, and a vacuum all the way down the centre - not exactly easy to manufacture, and it'd be pretty delicate.
Speed of light in glass is what, about 1/3rd speed of light in vacuum? So it's only a threefold increase anyway; you get more than that with clever use of multiple frequencies down the same fibre etc.
There's another good article on this in the April issue of Discover. You can find it online here: http://www.discover.com/apr_01/feattrap.html
Actually, if you look at the waves traveling in a single mode fiber you will see that most of the wave is traveling outside the fiber in the surrounding cladding. kindof like in a high speed coaxile wire: most of the energy is travels as microwave radiation between the inner and outer cable.
Actually, that is a good point. I work for a large fiber company and we can nail down where a fiber is cut by measuring where the refractivity of the cut takes place. Makes it a hell of alot easier when you have to go out into the middle of Indiana and figure out which farmer cut your fiber...
B
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Most companies are more worried about how many lambdas (wavelengths that are carrying 10GB/s each) they can squeeze down a pipe compared to deploying new fangled fiber systems. This is probably still vaporware, and right now it's a hell of a lot cheaper to keep cranking glass-core fiber out instead of some sort of air/vacuum-core fiber.
The nice thing about cutting fiber is that the contamination ends right at the cut, not 30 feet up the pipe.
Next dumb question, what type of equipment would you hook up to a 1,000GB line?
B
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Although I agree that that folks like Qwest will have to pay an arm and leg to replace existing cable
Acutally, they won't. Qwest has empty conduit buried above their existing fiber network.
While fiber is expensive in relative terms, the optoelectronics are often 20x more expensive.
One more problem is power, running two sets of photonics equipment that are not interchangeable as opposed to one standardized piece of equipment doesn't make sense. Comapnies like Notel (r omitted on purpose) Lucent and Corvis are dumping huge amounts of capital into DWDM as opposed to telling their largest clients that their existing fiber systems are useless.
Want to make a leap in optical technology, develop a box that will deploy dialtone/DSL to a neighborhood off of a four fiber system (eight for SONET)
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Why not put a giant mirror into geo sequences orbit and bounce lasers off of it.
.sig for sale, low mileage, one owner only. Serious inquiries only.
Even better, build a huge Tesla Coil and beam death rays to each subscribers home!!!
Oh sh*t, we did that already, it's called Radio...
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OTDR's...very cool when some backwards farmer or water company can't read the damn "FIBER BURIED HERE" signs.
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That tosses anything to do with IoR out the window since it is dealing entirely with reflection and wave propagation origination in the initial direction.
For those of you that were talking about a total vacuum in this cable, that's impossible. There will always be some particulates in the cable and desorption of gasses due to lack of pressure in most all materials. Even space has pressure. Although small.
It would help some to pump out the tube and it is not that tough to build a tube that withstands 14.7 psi.
Lets say at .375 in. diameter. you're only seeing about 17 pounds of force per inch. Not too hard at all to design.
This type of technology will go a long way to fix bandwidth issues.
What I would love to see is cheap reliable fiber IN the boxes. 1 TB per second to your lasercube, that's what I want. Storage being accessed at better than memory speeds now, oh mymymymy.
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The first time I read FUD I thought it stood for fucked-up disinformation. I think I like my version better.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
Anyone got a guess on the availability?
If you read the article and you make it all the way to the fourth paragraph, you'll find this:
"It is still early in the development of this new generation of optical fibers. Even the most advanced of the new materials remain several years from widespread commercial use."
Is this anything like the holey fibers that were Slashdotted last month?
So these are the same technology? This article didn't mention holey fibers, and I posted about it but of course no one cared...
And while you might think of metallic mirrors--silvered glass--as good light reflectors, the truth is that they are not nearly reflective enough
Ohmigod! I AM handsome after all!!
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But for your short distances (unless you live in a 5 acre house) you're better off with copper. Sorry to bust your bubble. Maybe, if you really want to go nuts, you could pick up some old surplus microwave guides. My dad has a pile of them and you can play with them like Lego (brand building blocks, for you Correctness-Nazis)
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
View the past through Slashdot-O-Scope! =)
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hoover, Oreck, or Eureka?
Ok, that's bad... Not sure how you preserve a vacuum in something like that... Make the fibre in an airless production facility? Maybe NASA has one.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes, I can see how you wouldn't want to combine laser beans and a high fibre diet.
Surprise is a phart with lumps.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Although I agree that that folks like Qwest will have to pay an arm and leg to replace existing cable, I believe that it's important to realize that this underlying economic argument is not true for all carriers. Some folks out there have multiple conduits -- 12 on all routes in the case of Level 3 -- which allows them to pull smaller fiber-count cables. When new generations of fiber come about, the new fiber is blown through an empty conduit (roughly a 1.25" pipe) at a very low incremental cost.
This way, one can take advantage of the new fiber systems as they become available. While fiber is expensive in relative terms, the optoelectronics are often 20x more expensive. Thus, with photonic band gap 'fiber' technologies, huge cost savings can be realized as hundreds of multiplexed lightpaths can transmitted without amplification.
Why not put a giant mirror into geo sequences orbit and bounce lasers off of it. ;P
Wouldn't that be faster then a hollow fiber optic connection?
Maybe this is a bad idea with cloud cover and all
First you have your GAP khakis, then GAP swings and finally GAP country line dances. Now they're invading the fibre optic cable market! I can't wait for that commercial. Somebody please make that company stop.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Another alternative fiber structure was described in an article in The Economist in March, referring to work by a Danish company.
One little problem -- it won't work. First, to get the light to propagate, you have to make the tube incredibly tiny. Second, to actually get it to move without loss, you have to magically suspend a rod down the middle of this microscopic cavity. Third, there is no way to actually build a perfect reflector. All materials absorb a little light, and these little bits add up.
Today's fibers can already go 50 miles or more without regeneration of the signal, and there's no reason to suspect these fibers would be any better.
Cool! We can step on the cable and disrupt networking. It's my childhood all over again!
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Fiber is expensive as hell and many companies like QWEST already have existing dark fiber all over the place. Many corporations have yet taken measures to move unto those strands of unused fibers, and it would cost many companies an arm and leg to replace their cabling, especially when they haven't even used it yet. This is looking way into the future. Has anyone here actually upgraded to a fiber ethernet based network, or is everyone hoping. In reality its again a very expensive thing to do, cheap to think about, but expensive to do.
With companies like PSInet which is a big ass ISP coming near the brinks of bankruptcy, many companies are in a rush to SAVE money not run out to buy more equipment, upgrade, etc. I would like to see networks get faster, but is it a complete neccessity at this point?
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From what he article said, you need a material around the transmission material (in this case, air) with a lower index of refraction to keep the light going along the transmission line. I'm not sure, but I would guess a perfect vacuum would have a very low refraction index, so the problem of finding a material with a lower index of refraction to surround the vacuum with would be even more difficult than with air.
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Somebody please explain to me why my post got moderated as 'flamebait'.
I'm trying my best to contribute to this discussion by asking an honest question (and I've been getting nice replies, thanks all who responded). To me, the question seemed logical enough to ask.
Yes, I know that light travels through vaccuum in space. My question was whether science will ever lead us to exploit that. It seemed an interesting idea at the time that I posted it, and I wanted to see if other people had anything to say about it. It was a post which was on topic, and provoked some level of intelligent discussion (not flames).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
It is interesting to know how these hollow tubes are fit together. It seems to be much more compicate than welding the glass fibers end to end. Any suggestions?
Don't be afraid of the whole "first post" mentality, as you say. Embrace it. It's beautiful. "The human drama of athletic competition", as they used to say on old TV sports shows.
You have achieved something. Revel in it. Wallow in it. The fp is YOURS! Savor your triumph, untainted by uncertainty. It's a GOOD THING(TM).
"I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use. :-)"
Considering you can put 100Gbps through 400kilomters on one strand of existing optical fiber, you're gonna have a completely fucked up home if you need more bandwidth than that.
That said, the article claims that this will "revolutionize the telecommunications industry" because it allows for longer-haul fibers without inline optical amplifiers.
That might be true, if we were using the existing fiber we have. But look at the people selling low-power in-line optical amplifiers - namely Corvis. Nobody's buying their shit. We have millions of miles of "dark fiber" in America - fiber that no one is leasing. In addition, no one is using the "long haul" capability provided by the new generation of companies such as Corvis - mainly because policing these long fibers for a break is expensive, in addition to the fact that in a store-and-forward network topology (like IP) you have to route at each hop, so there's no reason to go that far.
The only successful applications of long-haul fiberoptic technologies so far have been underwater trans-oceanic lines. and this technology may help with that. But revolutionize the telecommunications industry? FUD.
What would revolutionize the telco industry would be if Corporate America actually had applications they wanted to buy bandwidth for, and started doing it. Look at all the solid equipment providers with tanked stocks: lucent, cisco - the bandwidth explosion hasn't happened.
sigh. fud.
Hmmm...how do you think the light from the sun gets to the earth? Of course light can travel through a vaccuum, that's the beauty of Electro-magnetic waves. Only mechanical waves (such as sound, need a medium), light plays by a different set of rules.
Current splicing technology involves rotating fibers to align the splice. (As in
We cant make a vacuum! It is impossible to make a vacuum. There is no way today that we can possibly pump every particle from inside something, besides, if we could, how could it sustain itself without collapsing from the pressure? We can however make reasonable facsimilies of vacuums, but still it is very hard to make these and keep them from collapsing.