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Terabit Fiber (In 2010)
Paul Heavens writes "A Japanese company has developed technology to transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds, the world's fastest speed achieved with fibre-optic cables in the field, it says. Kansai Electric used fibre-optic cables on power-transmitting steel towers to achieve the speed of one terabit per second, which is more than 100 times faster than inter-city data transmissions currently in use, a spokesman says. The company, Japan's second-largest power supplier, has not decided when to put the technology into practical use but says it is possible that it would come in 2010 or later."
Its a poor way to measure speed... Since you wouldn't use this line to connect to internet directly you harddrive is not that fast to read/write data at such a rate. It will be used in between large ISPs to trasmit data.
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Although I doubt this will see deployment by 2010, if it does, it will be in Tokyo or some other extremely high-density area. Why doesn't the FCC get off their ass and mandate this kind of thing? First of all, it's a Japanese company that's developing it. Second of all, America is so sparsely populated that even regular broadband is typically not economically feasible in many areas, let alone cutting edge technology. You'll get your Tb/s connection when it sees deployment in areas that make more sense first, and eventually the price will come down and it'll make its way to the states. I wouldn't count on it for a long time.
As an aside, if you don't want to hear about things you want but will never have, stop reading Slashdot. =)
If you have an 8-ways dual-channel Opteron setup, you get 8x2x400x64 = 410Gbit/s... almost half-way there.
one strand or multiple strands is a good question./ 04/04/wo_garfinkel042104.0.asp . Assuming each byte takes an average of 2 cycles (which is a very low estimate), google cant use the entire bandwidth, even with their world's largest distributed system infrastructure!
What about this? Do we have systems that can accept around a terabyte of data in its storage? Google has an operation speed of 4 tera-ops/sec source:http://cache.technologyreview.com/articles
. Are we getting to a state where we are going to finish off the remaining ISPs, now that telephone companies are all already done!.
It is only impressive if they are doing it by using a single wavelength on the fiber. Systems that could transmit over a terabit on a fiber have been around since the internet boom. See for example:
http://www.ciena.com/products/products_261.htm
Look under Scalable Capacity about two thirds down the page. They can to 1.9 Tb and have been in production for years.
And it's marked TB, not Tb - the latter is a Terabit.
This will primarily be used for backbones. You have to remember though that backbones are always in need of more bandwidth. Many telecom providers are already utilizing VoIP to transfer voice thousands of miles. Also, LAN backbones could use the bandwidth to support gigabit enabled workstations and eventually, 10GbaseT enabled servers.
CNIT in Italy has reached up to 2.5 Tb/s; I do not know the details, but I once witnessed a presentation by one of their scientists, Gianluca Meloni. He seem to have a paper published in proceedings of ECOC 2005, called "10GHz to 2.5THz Optical Frequency Multiplication". Surely that contains more information.
:-)
By the way -- 0.5s * 1Tb/s = 500 Gbit = 64 GByte = 58 GiByte. Pretty long movie, I'd say