Slashdot Mirror
Internet Heading to Light Speed
dbaker writes "Wired Magazine has a very interesting article about the future of optical networks and the barriers we face before this technology is commonplace."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I few weeks ago I saw that Verizon is starting with some 15mbps lines in Kellar, Texas.
http://news.com.com/Verizon's+fiber+race+is+on/210 0-1034_3-5275171.html
I heard the price was going to be only 44.95 a month. With this kind of speed VoIP and Video communication, as well as video on demand, finally seem pretty feasible.
Eh? You seem to be very confused. Ethernet is not limited to the dinky little 10/100 network I assume you'r running. The gigabit fiber optic network I've got is also ethernet.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Assuming you care what Wired does.
Or someone may think of a clever way around this problem with using optical computers. A poster above suggests using prisms, I think this is a better idea now (a few moments after reading it) than I did at first. Part of the design of IPv4 is that it is designed to be processed in eight bit chunks at a time and to be calculated using trivial and atomic operations which take few cycles to complete. For instance the very use of netmasks lets you determine based on very simple procedures like an xor whether or not a packet matches a rule.
Perhaps characteristics of addresses could be encoded using color/frequency so that the packets would automatically be dumped into the right bucket when they came out.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
*WDM is very widely used today. Your major carriers all use them. Customers (universities, government, corporations, local ISP's) purchase (lease) individual wavelengths. It's quite a cool way of handling light (buying lambdas), and has been around for a quite bit now. Newer technologies, like MPLamdaS (that's lamba switching, not label switching), allow you to creative virtual wavelengths and do fun traffic engineering per lambda.
Yes, radio moves at the speed of light, but light has much more bandwidth because it's a higher frequency. Also you don't have worry about generating stray RF with fiber optics.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
"Are you saying that all fiber is really packet switched at a high rate of speed instead?"
Yes.
You USED to need fiber for Gbit Ethernet. Copper gigabit came later. The only real reason to use fiber now is distance and reliability(no matter how you look at it, electricity is less reliable than light).
I dont know if I would say mainframe, but early computers used what was called a Mercury Delay line
emt 377 emt 4
Actually as long as you were communicating only with Earth, this wouldn't be a problem. Red & blue shift as you point out are doppler effects where the frequency is compressed or expanded based on the source of the radiation (light) moving. This effect is only present if the sender and receiver are moving at different velocity vectors (speed/direction). If both are moving at the same vector, there will be no change in perception no matter how significant the doppler effect.
The simple observation of this is recognizing that your car's horn is the same pitch whether you're at a stop light or cruizing down the highway at 90mph.
Now if you think about it for a minute, it's obvious that the earth is involved in 2 curved movements -- revolution and rotation. This means that people on one side of the earth are moving at a different speed from people on the other side of the earth, particularly toward their noon/midnight. From this perspective, people on the dark side are moving faster than on the light side. However, I believe that the theory of relativity would come in to play here and avoid shift. Under this theory, of course, the speed of light relative to your perception of it remains constant despite your velocity. If you consider that the light must continue to travel the same distance, then it's not important whether you're moving faster on the dark side or slower on the light side since regardless of your speed, the light will take the same amount of time to travel the fixed distance of the cable. With out the theory of relativity, we would 'catch up' to the light a small amount, and effect a doppler. Red and blue shift occurs in stars simply because that distance is changing relative to us.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Stupid me, should have kept up with the conversation and realized the AC and the guy with the doppler stuff were just asshats.
I really wasn't considering anything quite so complex- if your purpose is routing ONLY then you don't even need IP2- you just need to know that the encoder on the other end of the fiber said that this packet is in the range that goes to such and such router down the line. Even if you only have two frequencies available, this is enough to switch millions of packets for millions of individual PCs between two cities.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.