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

A "light" transistor to the rescue!

[erick99]

The buckyball layer produces what sounds like a transistor of sorts:

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

Meh

[Shadow Wrought]

Call me when they reach ludicrous speed. Here's hoping the data doesn't all turn to plaid;-)

Service in Texas

[samtihen]

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.

Great, speed of light infections too

[192939495969798999]

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!

Re:What about Ethernet?

[Kenja]

"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."

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.

The next step in optical networks:

[homeobocks]

$ beam me up, eth0

I sure hope none of my packets are lost.

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.

Planning for the Future

[The Subliminal Kid]

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.