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Good News From The High-Speed Networking Front
Degrees writes "Over at Small Times there is an article about two Danish companies that want to make deploying fiber optic lines easier with MEMS-based packaging technology. (MEMS is Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems - described here). Also mentioned is that the big three U.S. telcos are working on fiber to the home plans." And punkmac points to this eWeek article which begins "An Intel Corp. backed startup, SolarFlare Communications Inc. said Monday that it has developed a working prototype of a chip that will permit 10G-bps communications over standard CAT5e copper wiring. SolarFlare's chip will be used as evidence that 10G-bit over copper can be done, in anticipation of a draft IEEE standard to be developed later this year."
Still not fast enough to beam my body from my bedroom to the office to hooters to the office to the bedroom.. all the while allowing at least marginal performance from the Vonage piggyback.
will boost the communications businness heaps on 2004 since with no big investment we get a performance upgrade. Way to go folks. and the rest of our should pay attention to the stock market.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
But only as long as it's nothing to do with a TELCO. I'm extremely happy with the QOS I get from RR and was VERY PISSED as the LACK OF QOS I got with DSL..
Sweet!!!!
More porn at the speed of light and more carpel tunnel syndrome claims at your local hospital!!!
It should read "shooting out of my"
Give me fiber to the business! I want fast connections on my Business, in a downtown metropolitan area, and I'm willing to spend large amounts of cash to get it! ($1-2K/month) T-1's are too slow now and T-3's aren't much better for the extra price you pay.
BRING IT ON!
Getting ?fiber to the home? ? telecom?s long-sought solution to the problem of directly delivering high-quality and high-speed video may cause some more problems. Alright, this would be able to bring high bandwidth lines to homes, but how about backbones? The current technologies are still pretty much limited at 40Gb/s for one single fiber. And since all-optical networks are still developing, I believe it may still be a while before we can profit from this.
DrkBr
Obviously, this ain't coming to the home for a few more years (heck, Gigabit switches are only just now getting home-use priced), but it'll sure be nice to not have to re-pull all that Cat5e cabling we ran all over our house, especially since we'll probably be in our fifties by then.
At that type of transfer speed, the network should effectively vanish completely, even if we're streaming HD video to or from the downstairs entertainment center (I'm assuming that the internal bus bandwidths in the computers will have improved proportionally as well by then).
"SolarFlare's chip will be used as evidence that 10G-bit over copper can be done, in anticipation of a draft IEEE standard to be developed later this year." "
Copper breaks down to easy, picks up to much interference, and is no good maintaining the speed over longer distances. They should concentrate on new technology instead of constantly trying to upgrade the old, now matter how much work you put into a '68 Mustang, it's always going to weigh a ton...
Mod +5 Drunk
Now I can transfer gigs of p0rn from my server in my home office to my laptop in my bedroom quicker, for when it is really needed.
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein," - Joe Theisman
There are a ton of applications out there (some good, some bad) that require high band width to operate. I'm personally intersted in piping virtual reality environments to other computers over the internet. But most of these new ideas never come to full fruition because few people have high bandwidth.
When I make a webpage, I make it for someone with dialup so everyone can see it. I even have dialup.
I know many people are changing to DSL/Cable. But the adoption of new bandwidth-hungry applications is really lagging because most people can't handle them.
We would sure get a big boost if we could impliment much higher speeds over already existing infrastructure. That would allow a lot of applications that are already out there to be used.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Will you still be blocking port 80 so I can't run my own server?
Great! Now my neighbors can flood the first hop router with adware and Paris Hilton DIVX' at fiber speeds!
Might as well dial up.
The limmit used to br 56kbs for our modems
then came isdn and got us up to 128kbps
then came adsl and got us up to several MegaBits per second. all on the same old phone lines.
This latest isn't the same phone lines
but it is still copper wiring and find this very impressive.
however I think it is likely to be a while before
we need this kind of bandwidth.
even though a while back I had a need to send an
uncompressed video stream and 100Mbps was not enough.
Me.
What!! This is not what the poster meant! WTF do you mean!!! I'm stopped up here! Too much Atkins', ya know!!
Hey! Help me here!!!
The EETimes carried this same story with more technical details and a few criticisms as a cover story in the week's paper edition. It's also available online here at the EEtimes website.
Nerd 1: "Now you can download porn 500 times faster"
Marge: "Does anyone need that much porn?"
Homer: (drooling) "aghghghghghgh 500 times faster"
easy enough to get around, set your http server to use a different port.
I use 8124, and its simple enough to use with DNS, just tell your domain name provider to use http://12.34.56.78:8124 instead of just http://12.34.56.78
i guess that keeps some bots from visiting you, but oh well, and in my case i dont necessarily want them...
cheers
I'm happy at the prospect of fatter pipes, but...
I wish I had a time machine...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
The French love Jerry Lewis movies.
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
Any crappy router and you still have latency.
When I see porn on it.
FIRST POST!!!!
With 10gb over copper... All your pr0n are belong to us!!
Not unless you're connected to an intranet with massive amounts of pr0n lying around you won't. CAT5 is used in LANs, is it not?
Oh, and by the way... stop using AYB references. They give me rashes.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
"The current technologies are still pretty much limited at 40Gb/s for one single fiber."
That's true, so then you deploy DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) to multiplex 50 or 100 (or more) wavelengths of light, each carrying 10 or 40 Gb/s in traffic.
Add to that all the dark (unused) fiber deployed in long haul terrestrial networks in the U.S. and we have a lot of backbone fiber capacity. Typical fiber counts on the long-haul cables deployed in the late 1990s were 144 to 288 fibers or more.
Al Bonnyman
Community Broadband Networks
10Gbps over copper was done, over limited distances, by Nortel three years ago. It's not new. In fact they are working with 40Gbps now, though not over copper, yet.
The technology ofr literally blistering speed is already available and hass been for some time. Additionally, it is not that expessive, relatively speaking, to offer speed that are significantly higher than todays broadband offerings. But, people keep bringing up the fibre to the home story and this is where the whole thing falls apart.
While new developments may indeed get fibre to the home but, no provider is going to "rewire". If they already have copper in the ground they are not going to upgrade. Why? Because of the cost.
Providers are already getting top dollar providing anything from 128Kbps (sometimes less) to 2Mbps. There is no incentive for them to make the massive capital outlay needed to bury fibre on routes that are already served by copper. It is unlikely that their customers will pay $100 per month versus the $50 that the providers already get for broadband so, there is no real demand to motivate the providers. Even new services like video on demand work adequately well over copper to negate the need for revamping the infrastructure.
No, providers will continue to offer the same services over their copper infrastructure and when things become saturated they will start to penalize people that use it the most. This is already happening with Comcast and AT&T.
By Jeff Karoub
Small Times Staff Writer
March 23, 2004 - Industry watchers predict 2004 will see progress in getting "fiber to the home" - telecom's long-sought solution to the problem of directly delivering high-quality and high-speed video, voice and data. But the rollout still moves at a glacial pace because of the high costs of deploying fiber-optic networks to individual homes and businesses.
Two Danish firms hope to offer some price-busting help in a small package.
NKT Integration AS in February announced it is integrating MEMS-based packaging technology from Hymite AS into a planar light circuit that encapsulates the optical devices necessary for sending and receiving data and video signals. Such a system potentially could be cheaper because it can be assembled automatically - as opposed to the current manual approach - and micromachining the protective caps makes them smaller and lets developers pack more parts within them.
"That's why optical equipment is so expensive; there's a lot of manual labor in packaging optical devices," said Jorgen Hoeg, Hymite's business development director. "The hurdle has been the cost of ... the installation of fiber and the optical transceiver that sits in the home. With this approach, we help reduce the cost of that device because it's built automatically and it's smaller. And smaller means less expensive."
Hoeg said the deal is a "design win," meaning NKT engineers are working with Hymite's technology but the firms have yet to sign a contract. Still, he said, such a purchase order is likely, and he expects that a system incorporating the technology could be ready for the market by the end of the year.
That dovetails with developments on the fiber-to-the-home front. The three largest telecom providers - Verizon, SBC and BellSouth - agreed last year on a set of standards for residential fiber-optic networks. Still, cost estimates of rolling out such networks range from more than $1,000 to nearly $3,000 per home.
New packaging techniques also could benefit the MEMS industry, which places the price of packaging at anywhere from 60 percent to 85 percent of the cost of developing a device. The challenge comes in integrating parts into a package that protects them from the environment, but the package must also allow for those parts to interact with the environment.
Hoeg said Hymite's packages, which are micromachined out of silicon, serve as a cap over the device as it sits in a cavity on a silicon substrate. The electrical connections are on the silicon and signals come out through its backside, which allows for a surface-mountable package. The approach creates packages that are hermetic, meaning they are free of leaks, and thermally compatible with silicon. When a package made of ceramic gets hot, the ceramic and the device expand at different rates and create tensions.
Hymite also announced in February that it jointly developed an optical leak detector with Germany's NanoFocus AG for the hermetic testing of thousands of devices at a time on a wafer. Simultaneous tests are common in the electrical industry, but most optical testing today is done one device at a time, Hoeg said, and it can be both expensive and inaccurate.
Once the caps have been sealed in place, Hymite changes the pressure surrounding the package, so the walls bend inward, or deflect. Then, using optical techniques and equipment developed by NanoFocus, the company measures the deflection to determine the presence and size of leaks.
The leak detection system is used at Hymite's production facility in Berlin, but Hoeg said the company intends to sell it to customers using the company's packaging techniques.
Although the company focuses on developing and selling packages for encapsulating optical component
When I hear Fibre optics network a home it is just too good to be true. I can't imagine U.S. EVER getting 100mbits nevermind 1000.
I have heard a rumor that it's mainly to slow piracy down. Anyone know if that's complete BS?
Yeah, they've shown that they can get much more bandwidth out of our wires. The bounds of Moores Law and related "theoretical limits" fall every few years. But the problem with this particular solution is that we have a huge entrenched market and severe commodity pressure on broadband already.
Maybe a new killer app will come along, but what companies are STILL rich from laying the old copper or even optic pipes? Most of them got sold off at a huge loss. Who made bucks beaucoup off of VoIP? It's heavily used, even when you don't know it, but that's the point - it became a commodity and you never even know you're using it.
This is probably going to suffer the same problem - it requires an end-user actually pay some attention, install new hardware (not that it's a big deal, but it is for most people) and for an increase that they currently won't care about. It's a bigger win for the trunks, but I bet early adopters will wind up with more arrows in their backs.
Check out this eetimes article for a little more detail than the article in eWeek:
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?article ID=18401022
Understandably, the companies that manufacture the cable aren't enthusiastic about SolarFlare's technology, as they would prefer that everyone rewire with Cat6 or better to do 10Gig. They claim that SolarFlare is "overclocking" the cable (my own words), and that some installed Cat5 will work at 10 Gig and some won't. Cat5 is tested to 100 MHz; SolarFlare claims they can do 10G with 350 to 400 MHz of bandwidth and that Cat5 really supports this bandwidth. The cable manufacturers just need to test their Cat5 to this higher frequency.
I used to have Ameritech, now it's SBC. I still miss Ma-Bell and couldn't stand dealing with GTE and Verizon when I had to.
... if the remote site has the bandwidth. I regularly consume the office(s) T1's -- combined I'm blocking everybody out with 300K/sec.
... it is also my dialtone (VoIP ... thanks to number portability SBC just lost my last account w/ them). No issue making UNLIMITED long distance calls for FREE. $40/mo additional for the first dialtone. $20/mo additional per line. Quality? I sound *better* than when I use my ISDN line/equipment. No lag. No echo. Free calls. No SBC.
I've tried all their services. Unfortunately not one of them could or can keep a sDSL connection at a mere 768K for more than a week at a time. Nor do they allow "unbundled" pairs any longer -- try and get DSL without paying for a POTS line. I couldn't even get DSL bundled to a ISDN line which _was_ my home phone system/backup-Internet.
I highly doubt they'll be able to offer 100Mbit speeds, much less what their talking about. They have a hard time with 1Mbit links. Personally I've gone wireless with a 10Mbit uplink.
Yeah, +900K/sec is common
On top of that
The "killer app" for many FTTH projects is -- get this -- responsive, locally-based, reliable service.
U.S. municipal power utilities are currently building FTTH networks to serve 100,000s of customers.
Most of these are built in small towns that have endured wretched service from their incumbent telephone and cable TV incumbents. Local residents want an alternative and turn to local government.
For a decade, small towns have successfully built and operated cable TV systems using HFC (hybrid fiber coax) technology.
By about a year ago, FTTH costs had dropped low enough to make it actually cheaper for a power utility to run ADSS fiber cable than coax. So these FTTH projects are just an extension of a trend that's been going on for years.
Al Bonnyman
Community Broadband Networks
Max cable length between nodes: 17 inches.
[sig] 10 + 10 = 100 [/sig]
I don't need more than 100 meters to do my house up in wiring (I imagine some people might, but they have enough money for other things.)
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
320mbps on wireless UWB
when I have a large file to move to different computers in my home network, I always first create a tracker for local use, and then copy it to all my computers.. the best thing is the decreased load on the original PC!
you should see my share ratios! it's just ever so much more efficient!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Acid + base = water + c02, unfortunately the co2 bit usally comes out as a firestorm of burps and farts, but hey the acid is gone.
now the RIAA can find me faster.
infrastructure that may still be outdated. My Mom lives in rural FL and can't get DSL because of the type of loop she's on. Yet, she's well within range of the nearest switch. :/ Those that need a solution are in rural areas (okay, so arguably does my Mom need 10G?) but they are also least populated.
There are things that wireless is great for, but they basically come down to an "is it a pain or impossible to run wire here instead" decision. Mass broadcast is a possible other reason. Running a wire to most people's houses is pretty easy - you probably already have electricity, phone, gas, water, sewage, etc. etc. It's about time the internet connection was treated the same as any other utility.
The frequency spectrum is a finite resource (cf: Shannon), we ought to conserve it like you conserve water in a desert (unless you're in Vegas, of course...). Once you've used it, it's gone, and if we have to start using Terahertz waves because the rest is used up, well don't say I didn't warn you... (Terahertz waves penetrate the outer layer of clothing, allowing people to 'see through' clothes to the body beneath, all you'd need would be a portable screen/aerial and
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
This article is about Cat5 cable. The last mile does not use Cat5 cable, so this article has nothing to do with getting a faster connection into your house. Let's mod all the "gee, I can download pr0n faster" comments as offtopic and get on with the real discussion about whether our processors are fast enough to drive 10Gbps.
No.
People already have more bandwidth than they can fully utilize on an individual basis. Faster downloads aren't going to just jam more into our sensory pipes -- they're already full.
Consumer routers and much less expensive then say a Cisco series router. Most home networks have routers that handle a few hundred Mbit/sec. Consequently, the network speed could not reach 10GB from the incoming WAN. So what's the point when you don't have $2000 to spend on a router to take advantage of all that speed?
I seem to have a hard time thinking about this. Lets say you DO get this uber phat pipe of 1gb or even 10gb. What data are you going to fill the pipe up with even if you can use it to 100%? The hard drive speeds of today can't even keep up with 1gb ethernet. Unless you are caching all the porn you can download in RAM, I doubt your computer will have the ability to actually save all the data you are downloading at that rate. Has anybody even thought about this yet?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)... oops
what I would really like, and believe me it would totally be kickarse is:
laser beams (pinky to the mouth)
laser hubs on every street corner, and a laser receivers/emitters on top of every building, connecting to the hub and to other receivers/emitters.
barring heavy fog or heavy precipitation, of course... though I remember reading somewhere IR gets through fog pretty easily.
All your base, all your base, all your base are belong to us!
As the distance going from 100mbit to 1gbit over copper dropped, how is the distance going to 10gbit over copper going to be affected. If the distance is going to be lessened it doesnt seem very practical.
http://interserver.net/
But it doesn't matter how great it is if your like me and simple can't afford it. All these graet gains in networking won't mean jack for the market unless it makes broadband chaper. Simple as that.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
With the abundance of bandwidth available on cable, I don't think we'll need to switch to fiber to the home any time soon. This may be interesting as a replacement for T1 Lines to businesses and such, but nobody is going to pay the huge expense of running fiber to a neighborhood for at least another 5 years.
There are other significant expenses apart from packaging related to making fiber-optic NICs compatible with long-haul or telecom systems. It's great that packaging may get cheaper, but that's only part of the expense. It's still not cheap to make a fast, high-power 1.55 or 1.3 micron laser. Also, Laser output power changes (a lot!) as temperature changes, so a package to drive a telecom laser requires an integrated photodetector and feed-back circuit to keep the output power somewhat constant.
Finally, if you're going to make things reasonably cheap (say by using WDM to multiplex several neighbors onto a single pair of fibers), you'll need each neighbor's NIC operate on a specific, narrow wavelength. This makes the price of the laser even more expensive (since conventional semiconductor laser wavelength changes significantly with temperature). This requires closely temperature-controled packaging or use of a less temperature-dependent semiconductor heterostructure for the active region of the lasers (such as quantum-dots).
Basically, we're not going to see these in the _home_ any time soon. Maybe in the office or as a back-bone for local DSL connections.
Perhaps in the upcoming standarization they will finally switch to so called "jumbo frames", aka raise the maximum amount of data that can be sent in one chunk. As the singaling rate has gone up from 10Mb-1Gb, there has been a 100x increase in signaling rate and therefore a 100x decrease in the amount of time it takes one packet to cross the network. Since we are still using the same paltry sizes, cpu usage goes way up and throughput is somewhat capped. Switching to a larger frame size would allow higher throughput and lower CPU utilization. Many networking vendors have started adding support for larger frame sizes into their products for these reasons, but being added to the official standard would greatly increase the adoption of such jumbo frames.. htm
For more info, see:
http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/jumbo.html
http://www.psc.edu/~mathis/MTU/
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/0105tolly
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I mean, really!
I have a hard time getting a decent speed form some servers when downloading. Now they are basically giving each person a 1GBit line so they can mooch off public servers. do we really have the technology to serve a Linux ISO on an ftp server so that 10,000 people with a Gbit line can rape it?
Its the end of the world....
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
You forgot one limit to copper: tolerance on the characteristic impedence.
One problem with twisted pair is that the twisting is what gives the pair its impedence. If you change the number of twists, you change the impedence. This is why it is important to make sure cable buildouts don't have kinks in them. The kink causes an impedence mismatch in the middle of the run, which causes signal reflections, which tend to piss off the receiver.
Similar problems can happen in coax, but the impedence is a function of the copper guage, and the size/coeffieients of the dialectrics. If you can keep tight tolerances, you have better impedence controls.
The connectors are probably the biggest cause of impedence mismatches. For coax, threaded connectors are better than bayonet, and you have to make sure they are installed properly.
How about rigid coax or waveguide to the curb? :)
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
AirFiber
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Has anyone ever achieved a sustained 1Gbps over copper? Usually it ends up between 0.4 and 0.7, if you've configured everything correctly, certainly not striaght out of the box.
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