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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."
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..
"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
Will you still be blocking port 80 so I can't run my own server?
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
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.
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
You have to be careful with that. Remember, most homes already have a connection that could make 100 mbit look like child's play: A cable television connection. There's an awfully large amount of bandwidth there, it's just used for something other than data.
Getting a 100 (or 1000) mbit connection into your home doesn't mean that you'll get a 100-mbit connection to the Internet. It just means that you *can* get whatever connection to the Internet you want, and that you can also get phone, video, and perhaps other services over the same connection.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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
10 Gbps over copper is here. Cisco will have a xenpak out by the end of the month for $600. It does not use Cat5 or Cat6, it uses infiniband cable. According to:/ optic al/serdes/txn17431.htm
http://www.intel.com/design/network/products
It is a "4X (8-signal pair) electrical connector. The connector is a shielded structure for low cross-talk"
Of course you need something to plug the xenpak into, and that is where the money will be spent. Cisco is also releasing a 16 port 10/100/1000 switch with one slot for a xenpak for $20K. Not bad... especially with the 32 Gbps backplane cable they use for stacking.
Actually, this isn't quite true.
The real issue is that there isn't a 'killer app' for the home that would justify fiber to the home.
My ex-company has been trying for years to get investors to realize that putting HDTV to the home over IP is really the only way to go. This is the only 'killer app' in the near term that I can see. This company even had the digital rights figured out with studio contracts to prove it.
As you may know, coax and satellite won't handle a full channel lineup with HDTV. And, with Video over IP, you get all of the synergies one would expect: clicking on an ad to go to the company's home page, one-click buying directly from TV ads, etc. It's all there and implemented but isn't being funded due to the cable monopolies.
*sigh*
Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product. -- Ferenc Mantfeld
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.