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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.
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Good, and then you'll have to wait 4 hours for your HDD to write them ;-).
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
If Bell Lab's new technologies are used, does this mean the bandwith problems discussed recently can be fixed?
I was wondering... How does this stack up next to the transferrates of those fiberoptic telecomunication cables, like the ones they lay underwater and I beleave are used in the net's backbone?
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Tera is a prefix meaning one trillion (10^12), in this case it refers to one trillion bits (not bytes).
What?
but no seriously can anybody think of a practical use for a tb/sec connection?
pr0n. lots and lots of pr0n.
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.
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Not for one person, but for a million people, I could think of a lot of reasons for one.
What?
Question's like "who needs this much bandwidth/disk space/ram/cpu power" seem rather silly - don't worry, we'll catch up :)
sic transit gloria mundi
I'm pretty sure this would be used by telcoms for their communications lines. Long distance voice calls are sometimes (always?) converted to a digital form and sent over these types of data lines. I think though the use of compression technologies, this is cheaper then analog.
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Tera-BITS per second. So that would be 320 Gigabytes per second, so half would be 160 Gigabytes of MP3's.
While I have to admit 2.56 Tb/s is darn impressive the article doesnt mention if this can be applied to currently existing fiber optic networks. After having invested millions in new fiber and equipment for my area I seriously doubt my provider (twc) would be willing to just jump up and make large (read as: expensive) modifications. Especially if our network is "just good enough". Advances like this are interesting but how long will it take to "filter down" to us consumers?
To tell you the truth: I had to look it up to make sure of the spelling. At least I looked it up before using it! =] Maybe they really did mean a mountainous region on the moon? You never know.
What?
Maybee I can finaly get a good ping in quake now.
Hacker Media
to transmit my Natalie Portman jpegs..
Actually, though technically a terrabit should be 10^12 bit, I think they mean the binary power closest to one trillion - 2^40 (or whatever it is). I believe that's technically called a Tebbibit or somesuch nonsense, that never caught on so everyone just calls it a terrabit (except for HD manufacturers who try to use this to pass off their products as having more space than the really do)
sic transit gloria mundi
So this thing could transmit my entire mp3 collection in under a half second.
/dev/null, so you may as well save the net bandwidth and use the mv command.
Sure, and unless you have a storage device that can accept data at that speed, the only place your MP3s are going is
or whatever number of r's it has
sic transit gloria mundi
being trite and obvious has never been harder...
sic transit gloria mundi
...(Sending a gigabit of information per second is equivalent to transmitting the information content of approximately 1,000 novels every second; sending 40 gigabits per second over 64 channels is equivalent to transmitting the information content of 2,560,000 novels)...
:).
Information measured in units of novels? Novel is text only data. So, 1000 novels doesn't sound impressive. 1 DVD per second would be more impressive
Well, all them terabits are all well and good. But what about ping times? Would this system make them infantesimally small? Or would it ping as bad as satmodems do? 1 mu57 kn0w! 1 n33d 17 70 pl4y my c0un7ar57r13k!
Bah. All I really care about is that 2 terabits/second would download me a whole lotta porn, a whole lotta fast.
Er, no, scratch that. Most servers are on ADSL/T1/T3s, which can only output at a certain, arbitrary, preset rate. So. I ask you, what's really the point? It'd be like having a cablemodem back in the days that everybody's BBSes were running off of 300 baud modems. I honestly don't think that you'd see a terribly higher transfer rate than you already do off of your cablemodem or dorm T1/T3/whatever.
But, baby... Imagine these 2tb lines becoming the standard... drool baby drool.
I still long for the day that I can pull broadband out of thin air. Now THAT'D be sweet...
Heavy heavy fuel... Heavy heavy fuel... if you wanna run cool... you've got to run...
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
Was there something I missed that lead you to think they meant a binary power?
For fun, look up bit and byte in the dictionary. They're not actually the same thing.
.... Using the existing fiber that is in the ground would be.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Just this week, I saw that the big news pages are going to start charging for video clips, and the like. The reasoning is that bandwidth costs too much for this kind of service on the web.
What I find interesting is that the optical sector has a ton of equipment which could/should reduce the cost of bandwidth by a tremendous amount, but nobody seems to be buying it.
Why, for downloading pr0n and playing quake of course !
On Thursday, we have a slashdot story that we're going to face a bandwith shortage RSN and today we have Lucent to the rescue Put your buy orders in now!
I could be just plain wrong - that's been known to happen.
sic transit gloria mundi
I'm curious about what they used to generate the data. You need some serious fire power to keep a pipe that wide full all the time.
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.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I know that genetic research companies deal in large (800GB) filesizes at times, might probably need to transmit those trans-continentally at some point to other offices, etc.
However, that also goes back to "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 with box of tapes on it".
I like music
I'm sorry, but the record referred to (see the article) is on ...high-bandwidth, ultra long-distance transmission[s].
We're not talking last-mile here, we're talking a distance of 4000 kilometers (2500 miles), roughly the distance between Orlando, Fla., and San Diego (article).
That's a little different, wouldn't you agree?
--
m iso socially aware artistic geek pen-pal, m or f, in '1337 edu. jazz, poetry a must.
So this thing could transmit my entire mp3 collection in under a half second.
Engineer wanted for creation of 2.56Tb/s DRM system. Must be able to scan for copyright flags in data stream and deny transfer permission.
Similar stuff has already been deployed and is in use today. Here are two examples. The first is a MCI Worldcom deployment from 2001. Your voice calls and data are already flowing around the world on these pipes. The second is, perhaps surprisingly, a Chinese deployment. I'm sure that there are others too but, frankly I can't be bothered to look them up. I know, from personal involvement that there are several other high-speed installations around but, these do not span such great distances. Rather the are 30 and 70 mile rings around metropolitan areas but, they are just as fast and in one case even faster.
just think of how much more spam could be sent if you had that much bandwidth. Mmmm... streaming dvd quality video spam.
or, replace spam above with...
pr0n...warez...romz...iso ripz...pr0n
i cant wait
I want 2D games back.
Yeah... I'll take 2... just put it on my credit card. Having a 2 tb/s would be fun to have even though it transfers information faster than my computer can process.
-=-=- I don't suck... you blow. -=-=-
ummm ya... if you happen to have your mp3 collection in on (many) pc(s) with a memory transfer rate of 2.56 terabits/s and also happen to have a modem that can transfer 2.56 terabits/s!!
"The scientist describes what is; The engineer creates what never was." - Theodore von Karman
That speed is soo slow. Why is this a new record? I mean my TI-89 can transfer at least twice that. geez..
Damn, it must be expensive to setup a line like that. Just the boxes in each end that must deliver the data. It must take some processing power to break the flow down to slower connections, like "slow" gigabit connections.
Anyway what are the requirements for the fibers and how much could you speed up existing lines? I guess it depends on the quality of the fiber.
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.
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
And in related news:
These same engineers hope to set a new 1.00 Tb/s reception record later today.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
Clustering. Currently the bottleneck in clusters is network connections, simply put most computers you will cluster are faster than 100Mbps and 1Gbps networks. THe faster you move the data between systems, the faster your cluster- High end supercomputers do this, maximizing transmission speed between the individual porcessors as much or more than the CPU speed.
Lets say you take 4 Quad PIV 1Ghz systems, build two Beowulf clusters. The one with Tb/sec networking between the systems will be faster, noticeably, than the one with Gb/s networking.
This will also push things like Gb/s networking from its heights down to the average person. I don't see the average person having a Tb/s network anytime soon, but Gb/s networking will probably be more common within a couple of years. That will probably be the biggest benefit of this advance, the people that absolutely need the fastest networks go to Tb/s, and those that only WANT a fast network now get Gb/s
*drool*
Interesting. Let's take this one step further. To broadcast "broadcast-quality" radio, you need 128k bitrate. Assuming there are 10,000 radio stations in the US, that's 1.2 Gig. Assuming there are 100,000 radio stations in the world, that's 12Gig. Broadcast quality television is about, oooh, 5Meg? The UK has, including pay-per-view, around 500 stations, so let's assume there's 50,000 stations in the world: 250 Gig. ...it's really rather difficult to fill this space...
Virgin Radio
Even just connecting to some poor web server, itll get slashdotted :D
:D
Not much good on slashdot tho, im still throttled by the 20 second limit on posting on slashdot
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Most people I know have way more then 2.5gigs of MP3s, I think I have 20 or so myself. Taco indicated that he had about 150gigs himself. (1.28Tb = 163TB)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
one mebibyte = 1 MiB = 2^20 B = 1 048 576 B
See http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html for more.
Factor Name Symbol Origin Derivation
2^10 kibi Ki kilobinary: (2^10)^1
2^20 mebi Mi megabinary: (2^10)^2
2^30 gibi Gi gigabinary: (2^10)^3
2^40 tebi Ti terabinary: (2^10)^4
2^50 pebi Pi petabinary: (2^10)^5
2^60 exbi Ei exabinary: (2^10)^6
--Neal
Go IETF!
Send on Demand Entertainment ... its the only thing that could satiate this type of pipe and then only with a large subscribition base
Following this
page (google cached) the boeing 747 can take (full of fuel) about 200000kg at max distance 13000 km and at speed of 910 km/h
I estime the DVD-ROM weight to 20g, and use the 17.1GB ones (=136.8Gb)
so "data capacity of 747" is 200000
the time of the fly in the worst case is about 13000/910*3600 ~= 51000 seconds.
let's divide 1.4Eb / 51000 ~= 27Tb/s
So ower beloved 747 has only 10 times bigger data transfer capacity, but the Bell Labs solution must be much more than 10 times cheeper
(And we have not discused the latency yet
Latency is definitely a problem. Pinging by air-freight is not the way to go.
I like music
Secondly, they don't mention the effective data rate on the receiving end of the transmission. They had zero errors, according to the article, because they used forward-error correction. Forward-error correction adds on more bits, to correct for errors. So they've given us the "bit rate", not the "data rate". So although they may have still set a record if you included only the data rates of this record and all previous records, it is still somewhat of a PR sham. Note that the article was written by Lucent, not a third-party news agency (not that it would be any more credible, but the news person may find holes in their "breakthough" if he/she knew enough". Very similar to the Intel "breakthrough in transistor design article" where Intel makes many claims about their new transistor, even though none of these improvements in design have ever been implemented together (although they make us believe that they have).
How bout the fact that it was demonstrated at OFC, this week????
In front of most of the worlds Optical Companies?
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
Quoth Taco: "So this thing could transmit my entire mp3 collection in under a half second."
You know the first time I read that, I equated that Taco's mp3 collection is somewhere round 1 terabyte. Then I did the double-take! Aha!, - So of course his collection is nowhere near 1 TB, but thats how I read it.
Learning some marketing tactics from the big boys, eh?!
Just kidding..
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Well, it makes for a really easy implementation of a lot of protocols. No need for some poor software engineer to run around trying to figure out what information he doesn't really need to send over the wire...just send the entire game/world state.
Same goes for VR worlds. Heck, you could have every single remote computer render a bitmap/voxel map that is your view of them and send it to you. Easy to implement, no limitations. Maybe to make things a bit more sane, only get all the renderings within a "virtual mile" radius. You don't have to worry about latency when you turn around (you've already got the images!), you can see as far as you want...
The main drawback is that a top of the line PC right now has a system bus bandwidth of only 2.05 GBps, which means that you'd need a computer about 500 times as fast or a lot of fancy dedicated hardware.
May we never see th
So this thing could transmit my entire mp3 collection in under a half second.
Most of those gains are due to the following ingeniuos compression scheme:
1. Download Taco's copy of Bobby Vinton's "Melody Of Love".
2. Instruct the client to make 135,275 copies locally.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Tera-BITS per second. So that would be 320 Gigabytes per second, so half would be 160 Gigabytes of MP3's.
Also, when you get into numbers this big, whether your using 1000 or 1024 bytes per kilobyte [or mega/giga/terabyte] makes a difference.
Using 1000: 1 Terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
Using 1024: 1 Terabyte ~ 1,099,511,628,000 bytes
there's a difference of just under 100 gigs
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Yet, I still can't even get 144 Kilobits/s from Verizon at 5 miles... where's my Fiber-to-the-home?
what did they send that is several TB in size?
(besides pr0n)
I can see that the media industry (maggots) will have a plan for you to have a 500gb/sec connection and your machine will be a thin client to a server at the RIAA HQ (If it is not already destroyed), Cant to much about copyright 'protection' now could we?
As In, If you want a 500gb/sec pipe you have to run one of our thin clients. This pipe will only work with it. No PCs will be able to use it because of Encryption, authentication etc.....
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Real time broadcasting of videos from studios. No more damned taped delays. :)
:(
All sent in whatever formats are needed, all at once. Nice and speedy like.
I myself am sick and f*cking tired of MPEG2 compression artificats in my digital cable.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I believe they MAY have demonstrated error free 40 Gig/s modulation, but they may have had to use a very bandwidth-costly FEC (forward-error correcting) protocol in order to reduce the errors. So their effective data rate may have been only 10-20 G/s.
way back when. A "standard novel" in plain text and an 8pt font was usually considered to be about 1MB worth of data. I don't know if it really is a MB worth of data but I've seen that type of comparison made before. So having 1000 novel/s is only a GB/s, however a DVD/s would be somewhere between 9-18GB/s, depending on if one or two sided.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
Actually, Base2 numbers aren't stupid, Base10 numbers are. A logical course of action would be to convert our entire mathematical system to Base8, since Base10 has no actual basis in nature or math. It just happens to be the number of fingers we have, which is where Base10 came from. Same with the 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day crap. This needs to go.
This is a special excite
This
Just out of curiosity... how does the 8-point font matter? I mean, I've heard of some people trying to save disk space by using smaller font sizes, but still...
This is a special excite
This
The stuff about the 8pt font was meant for the size of the text inside the novel. Just thought I would clarify, sorry about the confusion.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
Actually, my Seagate 40GB benchmarks about 78MB/s peak, 42MB/s *sustained*. Real-world I/O hungry code backs this up. Now imagine RAID 0 striping a bunch of these. You could reasonably expect to get hundreds of MB/s at reasonable cost.
This is my World Wide Web of Whatever
Latency aside, my arithmetic errors aside, the good ol' Jumbo-full-of-DDS still faces the problems of loading and unloading the data to and from the tapes (or DVDs in this case).
Which makes me wonder - what is going to be feeding this pipe?