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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.
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!!!
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.
Great! Now my neighbors can flood the first hop router with adware and Paris Hilton DIVX' at fiber speeds!
Might as well dial up.
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
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.
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.
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]
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.
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
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.
"Give me fiber to the business!"
My internet spa^H^H mass-marketing company will be very happy to provide your business with crates and crates of cheap Metamucil at a very affordable price.
Garanteed to increase your employee's regularity speed.
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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.
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
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/
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.