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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."
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).
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.
Yes, but for a telecom, re-wiring is a pretty heavy investment. Depending on what state they are operating in there are different requirements for using unionized labor, there's literally tons of mechanical equipment involved, etc.
I'm not sure where the point of diminishing returns is, but it's still quite important that someone concentrate on taking the utmost advantage of copper since a lot of people are going to be stuck with it for a while.
My sigs always suck.
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
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
It's funny but, that's what people said when networking vendors:
Increased modem speeds each time from 300bps to 56Kbps.
Introduced xDSL and then increased its speed.
Moved Token-Ring from 4Mbps to 16Mbps and then 100Mbps.
Move ethernet from 10Mbps to 100 Mbps to 1Gbps.
Wireless is fine if your only serving a few customers but once you get over a certain point it becomes very slow.
Wireless is open air is basicly the same thing as cable modems. There is only so much useable bandwidth in the spectrum. Cablemodems are atleast limited to a coax, while wireless can interfear with everything and everything can interfear with it.
Fiber to the home is a long ways off, we need better faster backbones yet. Cable modems and DSL can go faster than the 1mBit that most are capped off at. They are capped because backbones bandwidth is still pretty expensive and untill prices come down from more avaible bandwidth we are not going to seem more than a few mbit to the home.
That said, you will see it in new subdivisions and apartment buildings. Why lay copper and coax when you can just run fiber for the same cost. CPE may cost a little more.
In the mean while wireless is a great way for us Geeks to connect up.
God, root, what is the difference?
No incentive? What about the company that does it, and offers it for $50 a month, and then steals ALL of the other companies subscribers?
You underestimate corporate greed; any opportunity to steal subscribers from other companies will be taken as soon as it becomes viable.
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.
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.
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/
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.