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."

Comments

Universal access first

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we have universal access and better content first please?

-Johan

PS> Oh yeah, contribute to wikipedia.

CONTENT!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats the point of blazing high speeds without the content???

Net's content value improvement rate is trending downwards ..

Re:CONTENT!!

[Ra5pu7in]

For the same reason we can now get hundreds of TV channels ... with a similar downtrend in content. Of course, a large part of the problem (IMHO) is that more people want to be content consumer than content creators. Where is that quality and quantity of content supposed to come from? Someone else. There are too few "someone elses" out there compare to all the wanna-be critics who chew up the content that exists and spit it out.

The Bottleneck

[Louis Savain]

Superconnect's Lehenbauer agrees that "it's fascinating" to have material for an optical switch, but warns "it could be awhile until an all-optical network is possible." Lehenbauer said switches and routers must identify individual packets and route data intelligently, tasks that are not possible using a simple optical switch. "Unless you have an optical computer inside the switch to make these decisions, you'll still need electronic components."

Therein lies the bottleneck. Unless we develop optical computers (not for a while), we still need electronic switches and computers to analyze the content of the optical data in order to make intelligent decisions as to which direction the data should be channelled to.

Not to minimize the importance of this development, but until we do have optical computers, we are condemned to live life in the slow lane. But then again, someone may think of a clever way around this problem without using optical computers. One never knows.

Light speed is damn close.

[SharpFang]

1s. Minimal human decision time. Light travels 3e8m
1e-1s. Minimal human reaction time.
1e-2s. Minimal human recognition (sensory reaction) time.
1e-3s (1ms). Sensible task switching time.
1e-4s. in-task high level function time.
1e-5s. in-task medium level function time.
1e-6s (1us). Single microcontroller instruction; in-task low-level function time.
1e-7s Single high-speed microcontroller instruction.
1e-8s Single low-end CPU or DSP instruction time. Light travels 3m.
1e-9s (1ns) Single modern CPU time, light travels 0.3m
1e-10s A single modern CPU gate reaction time. Light travels 3cm, just above 1 inch.

Using standard $8 24bit ADC you can get down to the 3cm level with a $3 1MHZ microcontroller.
Using 1Gbit interface, your bits moving at light speed are 30cm away from each other.
A 300m LAN won't allow ping roundtrip shorter than 2 microseconds.
A 3000km (global network games) line WILL introduce perceptible delay.
A CPU of 3 GHZ just has to have its cache built in. Memory placed 3cm away causes 1 cycle long request-response roundtrip.