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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."
I'm tired of hearing about all these advances that we will NEVER see. Our public inferstructure budgets are lame, and I'm tired of hearing about a "market-solution". No company is going to spend the massive amount of cash needed to wire even one city with this, especially when there's not much of a percieved market for faster broadband. Why doesn't the FCC get off their ass and mandate this kind of thing instead of doing nothing? Also, why in the world does is this at least 5 years away? I mean, I understand they need to research this and then set up manufacturing and distributing routes, but I just don't understand why that would take more than a year and a half, at most. Stop telling me about things I want, but will never have.
1) They didn't transfer 1 Tbit/s in an actual network, at least it appears that way if you RTFA. I am more impressed with Bell Labs 100 Gbit/s in actual ethernet reported a few weeks ago. As far as I know they could have measured the rate photons got from point A to point B in the cable, worthless statistics, like measuring the speed of electricity.
2) According to other news entries like RTFA, they don't contain any info whatsoever about how the company actually conducted the test. One source, Returters IIRC, says it's "secret". Right.
Over the years, I've been tracking the waiting attention span on my downloads and those who got from me. I've ran BBSes since 1200 baud modems were $500.
The 3 minute mark seems consistent over the years as the shortest period of time necessary to acquire something of value. Shorter times are nice but not needed.
To download a 2 hour HiDef movie in 3 minutes, we'd need a connection speed of 222mb/s (28MB/s). I can see little need for a format beyond this at any time in the future. In fact, in 1993 I figured a preferred video resolution would be 2560x1440, not much greater than 1920x1080.
We'll soon see posts about how corporations won't want to spend money running these fibers to the home, but this is pure bullshit. Cities prevent more cable runs, not economics.
Municipal Wi i is a huge waste due to ever increasing wired bandwidths and the costs and latencies of government changes would never keep up with free market changes.
Allow ISPs the freedom to run fiber. Deregulate TV and radio frequencies in exchange for more wireless frequencies. You'll see the most amazing growth of information distribution in history.
If only 10 gigabit upload service for the user was widely available, one could imagine some great solutions to the problem of offsite backups (perhaps 20 minutes per terrabyte, allowing for necessary overhead in the transfer). Could this be Google's challenge for the next decade?
I don't understand the big deal here. Nobody runs a single strand of fiber; if you're going to be laying fiber in the streets, you put 100s (if not 1000s) of strands in there, "just in case". How is 1Tbps over 1 fiber any better than 1Tbps over 100 strands @ 10Gbps/strand (as is easily achievable today)?
This article, like every other one we read these days, is not reporting, it's public relations. Even the point quoted in the summary, "2 hour movie in 0.5 seconds", is useless for anything but getting a technohick to say "wow". Because no user can get that speed, even just due to RAM/CPU speeds, or will, because they certainly won't be the only user sharing the bandwidth. And because a "movie" is an undefined quantity, especially now that we're dealing not only with DVD and its incompatible competing successors, but also digital cinemas. This reporter could have spend a half hour researching (or paying a researcher) to verify and corroborate the accuracy and relevance of the quotes no doubt faxed by the power company's PR department. Instead, the reporter and their editors decided that their story was "news" solely because it's news to them. But not to nerds - to us, it's "Libraries of Congress per second", which was expectable nonsense when reporters hadn't used the Internet. Now that they use these systems as much as we do, it's obvious that what they do ain't reporting, it's typing.
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make install -not war
We don't even use the fibre we have available today. So what's the point?