2.56 Tb/s Transmission Record

RalfM writes "2.56 terabits of data per second in new transmission record by Bell Labs, Lucent's research arm." So this thing could transmit my entire mp3 collection in under a half second.

Comments

what a fat pipe

[56ker]

I want one :o) - but no seriously can anybody think of a practical use for a tb/sec connection?

Re:what a fat pipe

[morgajel]

this will do wonders for out backbone- maybe even help us lower the general price of high bandwidth net connections. imagine if your local ISP's incoming bandwidth could easily be doubled? that *might* mean more alternatives/chaper bandwidth for us consumers.

Re:what a fat pipe

[Emugamer]

okay so now you put up the challenge I had to go looking.. damn you

1/2 serious 1/2 not so serious post here...

Lets imagine the population of new york which is a tad less then 19 million. now lets give each of them a phone.
given the assumption that no more then 35% are on their phones at any given peak time we have 6.65 million pone conversations going on. Now lets assume that of these phone calls no more then 40% are inter-city phone calls which would use this type of pipe.

2.66 million calls now.

Now lets say that compression algorithims bring the average phone call bandwidth to say 20Kbit/s

quick math leads that to 53 Gb/s so all of New York uses for voice communications on a high end is 2% of this pipe.

so now we have 98% left to fill

Ive heard that an *average* (this puts us in the minority) computer user on an internet connection will use 40kbit on average during a session with the net. and with that number on average there could be 64 million people using that line (which seems high to me) but I can't find any statistics to backup that 40kbit estimate at this time.

So here of course are the lame responses:

one script kiddie with an Outlook "add-on", a remote exploit he downloaded somewhere and to much time on his hands

One large dorm full of p2p, porn, warez hungry students

one slashdot reader who wants to test to see if this article is true.

Thats nice.

[Yarn]

The theoretical maximum (for silica) I've heard quoted is 40Tbit/s, but I'm sure you could squeeze a bit more out. The current limit is the gain spectrum of the Erbium Doped Fibre amplifiers that make sure a signal can travel long distances, these have a (relatively) narrow gain band. Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (think of them as diode lasers, without the mirrors) could have a wider spectrum than the optical fibre! Lots of problems with them currently though.

I think I'll wait for the quantum dot lasers to catch up.

Re:Novels?

[Random Feature]

No they're not. Grrrr...

Maxtor started the base 10 crap in the mid 90's so stupid users could figure out how much space they had.

64kbps, 128 kbps, 384, 768, 1.54 Mbps...

And file sizes are STILL in traditional base 2. When someone says a file is 1KB, it's 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes.

64KB of RAM is 65536 bytes, not 64000.

Just because someone bastardized the numbers for idiots doesn't mean it's actually propagated into reality.

Packaging and marketing doesn't change the guts, it just makes it easier for the average joe to feel like s/he knows what s/he's talking about, even if they don't.

2.56Tbps=320Gigabytes/second

[markh1967]

What sort of device can read that quickly? That's an order of magnitude or so faster than the fastest RAM I've seen. I suspect they simply transmitted a simple repeating pattern rather than actually reading and writing data from a device of some sort.

Re:Novels?

[mistered]

No, they are. Gtrrr indeed!

Read this:

Some sources define a megabit to mean 1,048,576 (that is, 220 ) bits. Although the bit is a unit of the binary number system, bits in data communications are discrete signal pulses and have historically been counted using the decimal number system. For example, 28.8 kilobits per second (Kbps ) is 28,800 bits per second. Because of computer architecture and memory address boundaries, bytes are always some multiple or exponent of two. See kilobyte, etc.

So what's that mean? An ISDN 64Kbps B channel is, in fact, 64000 bits per second. A typical 115.2Kbps maximum rate on a PC's serial port is 115200 bits per second.

Hard drives are also measured using SI definitions. The power-of-2 definitions come from memory. Memory devices often inherently have power-of-two sizes, since the n address bits going into a memory provide 2^n addressable cells. Hard drives have no inherent reason to be a power-of-2 size so SI units make much more sense.