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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."
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The gluing process creates a material composed of larger electron-rich molecules with sufficient power to cause light that passes through to control the direction of other light, providing the switching capability, Sargent said.
With switching occuring at the speeds available through a layer such as that, there would be an incredible decrease in cumulative latency across the 'net. That is, if all or most of the switches are as above.
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."
I wonder what the cost of those type "devices" will be - both direct in terms of the devices and indirect in terms of whatever infrastructure is required to implement them. Well, either way, it's great sounding technology.
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
A lightning fast transmission medium is no match for a mechanical data access sytem, i.e. your hard disk.
I have a fast internet connection but a slow hard drive. Sigh.
I was going to try for a first post - but the speed of light barrier slowed me down.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Can we have universal access and better content first please?
-Johan
PS> Oh yeah, contribute to wikipedia.
Do you really think that people are going to give up the ease of ethernet when your typical broadband maxes out at 1.5Mbit/s? I predict a painfully slow death of ethernet, which will probably go the way of the floppy drive.
Whats the point of blazing high speeds without the content???
..
Net's content value improvement rate is trending downwards
Call me when they reach ludicrous speed. Here's hoping the data doesn't all turn to plaid;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
A Beowulf Cluster of.....
AAAARRRGHH! My Eyes!!
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.
You think it's hard getting a win32 broadband box on the net now? Wait till there are all-optical switches! You'll be hosed before the light from the screen reaches your eyeballs!
stuff |
What we need is Bistromathic signaling tech!
Bye!
SeqBox
Optical-networking company Infinera is taking another approach... has developed a photonic integrated circuit, a hybrid of optical and electronic technologies... the technology combines discrete functions into a single chip, and can transmit data at speeds of up to 100 Gbps.
Although the 100Gb/s is the max, it would be interesting what the sustained rate would be.
This technology seems to have a better light/energy conversion than the 'bucky ball' solution, since it lists 40Gb/s as the transmission rate.
Perhaps the Inifera solution is limited in distance.
Assuming you care what Wired does.
according to Wired the other day it's not 'Internet', but 'internet'.
But it's part of a title; therfore, the first letter of the first, last, and every major word (not as, in, the, etc.) would be capitalized.
Within the body of the text, internet remains uncapitalized.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
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.
When using your 100Gb fiber-optic internet at the campgrounds, always practice safety. Surround your network card with rocks to keep the fire from spreading. Be sure when you're done with your internet to put it out with a bucket of water and make sure it has stopped smoking before you leave the area.
Remember what Smokey the Bear says. Only you can prevent your 100Gb fiber-optic internet connection from starting a forest fire.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Ever heard of wave-division multiplexing? The idea is to transmit light packets that contain different wavelengths (or colors) at the same time. I'd like to see that in wide-spread practice as well.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Redundancy may soon be more vital than speed.
Once the internet was designed to withstand problems (a euphemism for a nuclear strike) at multiple nodes but since commercial interest like to keep as many things as possible in one building we see today that a small fire in a maintenance tunnel has a dramatic effect on the over all network latency. There just isn't as much redundancy as there used to be and that may be worse for us all than your download time for SP2.
What happens when you put all the switches together and actually have to route the packets, and the next hop is "busy" on that light frequency already?
You would either have to:
a) shift the frequency to a different portion of the light spectrum, or
b) somehow delay the light signal until the previous message is completely transmitted through the router.
But without using a light-electrical-light conversion?
I don't know how a) could be accomplished other than using one laser to pump another (but there would not be enough intensity for that), and using cryogenic sodium to slow the light pulse down long enough is not practical in a low cost router (yet).
Any ideas? Or did I miss something obvious here?
More porn, faster!
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
*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.
Bell Labs invented them in 1999.
Yes, but can it go Plad!
I don't know anything that can go "plad". Maybe if you drop an iPod from the top of a building, it goes "iPlad" on the ground. You meant "Plaid"
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
... as my former advisor Prof K. Likharev used to say. When you send a sharp electrical pulse down a matched transmission line/waveguide it propagates with, you guessed it, speed of light in the medium. If your insulator is the same SiO2 they use for optical fiber you will get the same speed as in the fiber!
;-) ) showed that we could make a 128x128 non-blocking self-routing packet switching matrix at 60Gbps/line that could fit on the palm of one's hand, and after packaging with refrigerator fit on half a rack.
The problem with traditional voltage-based electronics at 40G speeds is that when you drive a SiGi/InP/GaAs transistor that fast it dissipates LOTS of power (measured in Watts per handful of transistors). Moreover, CV^2f/2 power dissipation when you constantly charge/discharge line capacitance to ~1V operating voltage is significant. And of course the maximum operating speed of any substantial logic is determined not by transistor speed but by RC constants of the wiring.
Now, if one departs from traditional transistor logic design, say, to superconductor electronics (which I've spent all my life designing up until the beginning of this year, when my current employer decided to "discontinue that effort"), you can start from a clear sheet of paper. In superconductor case, first of all you lose R in RC, not bad! Second is that when temperatures are that cold, thermal noise (~kBT) is small and operating voltages (pulse amplitudes in our case) could be ~1 mV, not ~1V, and Josephson junctions are pretty happy generating ~1ps wide pulses.
The downside is having to deal with refrigiration, one would not see this technology on the end user's desktop any time soon, but for the telco switching center it is almost doable.
My personal estimates (well, down to the complete circuit diagrams
The "packet" feature is important, often when "optical computing" people talk about their switches they conveniently omit the fact that while switch might be fast enough for some 120GHz of bandwidth the re-configuration of that takes milliseconds (think long-haul traditional SONET lines), we were talking about routing/re-configuration at ~256 bits packet length (think TCP/IP).
Oh, well, it's a pity that I can not work on this stuff now, it was -> |- THIS close to actually coming up with a viable demo/product. Maybe some day...
Paul B.
pbunyk (at) lycos (dot) com
P.S. Google for SFQ/RSFQ for more info
The telcom industry is STILL reeling (I know, I'm a layoff casualty) from heavy investment in optic fiber still dark today. The technology to lube the internet to lightning speeds (whatever that means) is merely interesting, but unnecessary, and unlikely to come to fruition unless there is compelling evidence of a burgeoning market -- one I doubt exists. I wouldn't invest my money in it. Once bitten...
Consider the comment from the article: Polishuk also questioned the need for higher-speed networks. "Who's going to buy it when 40-Gb networks aren't getting off the ground?" he asked.
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Covered it in one of his books. If you want a computer to function with a one nanosecond cycletime, in a perfect universe it could be no larger than the cube root of one foot along any axis. You simply bump into the speed of light at that point.
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
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Your solution would require all-optical (what they call, "transparent") switch to re-configure itself on each of the packets that you are sending down. It's OK if one packet length is a complete ISO image, but is you are just sending 256 bytes to update your position in the game on other player's computer -- well, tough luck! ;-) Did you know that like a third of the packets on the Internet at any given time are under a couple hundred bytes long -- mostly TCP/IP ACKs.
Paul B.