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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. :-)"
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
... 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
-----
Crud....
Dirty Pirate Hooker
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
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.
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
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?
360 degrees of Karma
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.
"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.