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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."
Article has little details why is putting fibre-optic cables on power-transmitting steel towers achieves such a speed ?
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That "story" is ridiculously short. What I want to know is, was that over *one* strand of fiber, or a big bundle of fibers with each at a non-record-setting speed?
But by the time this technology becomes widely used, assuming something faster isn't found by then, we may very well have low-end home systems that can easily handle that much data.
1 Tb of data is approximately 125 GB. The movie they're talking about is half of that, thus 62 GB. And that's probably not compressed. A PC with even just 64 GB of RAM could easily buffer such a movie in-RAM. With 500 GB hard drives being fairly mainstream today, saving such films isn't even that much of an issue, even without taking into account possible space savings via compression.
It's more data that most common people work with now, but overall it really isn't a whole lot.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
In the '60s, probably centered on the CDC 6600, an idea was promoted that a balanced' computer would have capabilities in a ratio. The 3 M's was one with 1 MIPS, 1 mbps, and 1 megabit of memory. So, it could executed 1,000,000 instructions per second, communicate to disk at 1,000,000 bits per second (100,000 bytes per second) and had 1,000,000 bits of RAM (one system had 130,000 bytes of RAM, for example).
The box i'm using to edit this note executes on the order of 1 GIPS, with 100 mbps, and 10 gigabits of memory. That is 1,000,000 instructions per second, 100,000,000 bits per second (10,000,000 bytes per second) to disk, and has on the order of 10,000,000,000 bits of RAM (1 GB). (These numbers are rounded, and, no, i'm not terribly interested in my-box-is-faster-than-yours pissing matches - its just an example).
So, if communications speeds will be 1,000,000,000,000 bits per second anywhere by 2010, that implies a computer with at lest 10 GIPS and 10 GB RAM - which doesn't seem that unlikely in five years.
Oddly enough, I'm hoping to still be running this box in five years. Its only two years old, and I don't really want to get a new one. That is, i don't want to spend the money to replace it. More importantly, i don't want to do the administration involved to get a new machine up and running with my current set of capabilities. I ran my 1987 Machintosh II as my primary machine for over ten years and the hardware lasted an additional five years (and counting) to allow for transfer of data. It pisses me off that my most long-lived x86 based PC has lasted only five years. So, i've just finished migrating from the Mac to Linux, and the Mac (with OS/x) now appears to be the better choice (low administrative maintenance) again.
With the recent announcement of low power PPC chips, perhaps Apple will abandon its move to the x86 hardware platform. Still, i've been pretty happy so far with my low-end Athlon's performance and reliability. Who knows? Perhaps i'd be happy with OS/x on AMD.
-- Stephen.
Nippon Telegram and Telephone had succeeded 3Tbps transimission on single optical fiber six years ago. Then what Kansai Electric achieved? They claims terabit transmission in OUTDOOR environment is the first time in the history. See http://www.kepco.co.jp/pressre/2005/1026-1j.html for detailed Kansai Electric's press release, unfortunately written in Japanese.
You have NO other options for landlines.
Since this approach hasn't worked, perhaps we need to get to the core of the problem by spinning off the portion of the business which actually provides the physical lines? That is, separate out the local Central Offices from the current Phone Companies. Instead of giving preferrential treatment to the Big TelCo's, let all of the businesses compete evenly here.
The key point here is to actively encourage a business to actually sell lines, regardless of what those lines are carrying. Right now we have the opposite situation, where you are banned from carrying higher speed signals than what the Phone Company sells.
An example of the effectiveness of this can be seen with "Naked DSL". Back in the late 1990's, some people figured out that they COULD get high speed DSL if they bought a "naked line". That is, a line without any of the normal telephone signals on them (these are commonly used by Alarm Companies, for home/biz security systems). At your home, you installed a high-speed DSL router, and at the ISP was another one. Presto, instand DSL.
Just like in the old days when Dialup first started the takeoff of the first real Internet ISP's like Netcom.
Of course, once the phone companies realized that people would end up by-passing the TelCo's for any time of ISP service, they quashed that immediately. Now they actively scan for any DSL signals on a naked line; and they disconnect the naked line if they find them.
If instead you spun off the CO's into a business model which was based upon profiting from active line connections, then this would never have happened. Instead, the DSL industry would be encouraged to grow, with speeds even faster than our current Cable offerings (Japan has been bragging about such DSL "modems" for years).
Of course, the Phone companies will fight this tooth and nail. They like having a discount compared to the CLECs. But the real question is at what point do we realize that the current scheme isn't working, and when do we cut over to a more market-driven approach to the core technologies? Only when we do so will we see real improvements to high speed connections. It is clear that the current scheme hasn't worked, nor will it work in the future.
Something has to change if it is ever going to work.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Just as people didn't have the slighest moral right to delegate anything to you, like, you know.. GOVERNMENT. Get your head out of your ass and realize you're living in a society.
I mean, we all run the same type of hard drives that can barely get over 10 megs of transfer speed a second (if you have a raptor or perhaps a raid array), so why are all these people trying to break the latest record? Where is that going to get us besides making these lines of transmit our backbones for the internet? And my second question is, how did they do this.... did they store the movie in a ramdrive of some sort and transfer it to a ramdrive, becuase its obvious its not possible with CONVENTIONAL rotary drives.
Not quite correct; HyperTransport is a strictly point-to-point connection, not a bus (this is the main reason why Opterons scale so much better than Pentiums in SMP systems). Multi-way Opteron configurations actually form a switched network, with each processor acting as a router (the upcoming 64-way Opteron solutions work by adding extra dedicated switch chips to expand the network).
But you're correct that in practice the bottleneck will be the PCI-X or PCI-Express interface.
With todays religious climate here in USA, science and technology has been put on the backburner.
/.ers would have it, we have people running around the streets in 1620s Pilgrim outfits with pitchforks stabbing anyone who works in technology.
1980 called. They'd like their anti-religious hysteria back.
No such thing is true. We continue to innovate and changes in the market and focus at various companies have nothing to do with any "religious climate".
Sheesh. The way some
These sorts of links are for aggregation of existing backhauls for interexchange carriage as it were. Not for getting faster pr0n to your box. There's no need for anyone to mandate anything be done. It will happen in its time as it always has, those who move too quick or too late will suffer for it and those who move right on the money will make the money.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)