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."

Comments

Re:"transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds"?

[romka1]

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.

Re:"transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds"?

[InvalidError]

If you have an 8-ways dual-channel Opteron setup, you get 8x2x400x64 = 410Gbit/s... almost half-way there.

Not as fast as the Italians

[MacFreek]

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 :-)