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Nationwide Fiber Optic Science Network
zCyl writes "An article at SMH describes a large fiber optic network called the National LambdaRail, which has completed 1,084 out of a planned 16,000 kilometers between major universities and research institutions. Upon completion it should transmit 400 Gbps and stretch across the continental U.S. Access to the network will be intentionally restricted to scientists and researchers only 'for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications'."
Linking up universities and research centers with high-speed data communications. That has a real deja-ecoute sound to it.
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Shouldn't getting broadband communication capabilities to rural America be a top priority also? Where I live, I cannot subscribe to DSL due to the poor quality of the telephone lines. Hell, just 4 years ago, the telephone company,(Inland Telephone), changed all the lines from the old aluminum wiring to the "new" copper wire. The fastest I can transfer connect out here is only at 33.6k on a good day. As we speak, I am only connected at 26.4k. I find this assanine, esepecially when I can move 14 miles to town, and have access to DSL, Cable, and WiFi. Out here, the only option for high speed data transfers is sattilite. Far too expensive for me. This should be a major priority if we intend to bring rural america out of the mid-ninteys, and into the 21st century of data transfer speed. Hell, I would be happy if I could connect at just 53k, but I do not think that the monopolistic telephone companies will be upgrading the lines within the next 20 years. After all, the aluminum wiring went out of common usage during the 1970's, when copper wire replaced it. How long am I going to have to wait for 56k capabilities, 40 more years? I will propanbly be dead by then, as that would put me at 65 years old.
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If this network is to stretch across the USA then no matter how fast it transfers data, there will still be a noticeable latency between one end and the other. The speed of light is not getting any faster. The limiting factor for serving files over NFS, for example, might end up being latency rater than bandwidth or server performance (if CPUs are also getting faster and RAM cheaper).
Perhaps in the future bandwidth will be an almost infinite resource and protocols will be designed around minimizing latency. For example for a remote filesystem you might design a server that spews out all changes to all files as they happen - to every other host that is looking at the filesystem. The bandwidth cost of sending unnecessary files is not significant, and it means a saving in latency because file data will be immediately available at the client end rather than requiring a round trip. (This assumes you don't care about locking and race conditions - but classical NFS doesn't anyway.)
Similarly, web servers might be designed to spew forth a whole bunch of pages you might possibly be interested in as soon as you connect to their site, and your browser's job is to cache them and then show the ones you want. If you want a page that isn't in the set the server sent you, you'll need to make another round trip, and that could be the slowest part. We will certainly need something like this for interplanetary web browsing at acceptable speeds.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com