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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys sure know how to bait the MPAA here, don't you?

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

[whathappenedtomonday]

I guess it means that pr0n fuels innovation once again.

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"?

[Freexe]

But what about ram, would my ram be fast enough to receive at that speed?

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.

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

[tjansen]

Depends on how they did that. If they managed to transmit it that fast by compressing it down to 20 kByte, maybe the MPAA won't care.

Details

[romka1]

Article has little details why is putting fibre-optic cables on power-transmitting steel towers achieves such a speed ?

2-Hour Movie Units?

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

How many Volkswagon-sized, Libraries of Congress is that?

Maximum transmission units

[totallygeek]

could you bump your mtu to 2937498723498, I don't want to keep fragmenting these...

Cool, but...

[Sigmund Dali]

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.

Re:Cool, but...

[Daverd]

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. =)

Re:Cool, but...

[Waffle Iron]

I'm tired of hearing about all these advances that we will NEVER see.

What do you mean? When I was a kid, fiber cable was just a novelty you read about in Popular Science. They claimed that it had the potential capacity to transmit things like War and Peace in just a few seconds.

Well, guess what: Today, in the comfort of your own home, you can download War and Peace in just a few seconds.

Re:Cool, but...

[Kjella]

Umm... so because people are unwilling to spend that kind of money, the FCC should force them to spend that kind of money through taxes? Besides, I don't want this. I'd be happy with 100Mbit (network, 100/100) to the wall. That's not in the "never have" category, it already exists in places like South Korea, Japan, many university campuses and certain apartment blocks here (Notway). There was a time not too long ago, when the main interconnect to my city of 150000 was 2.5Gbit, that has probably changed by now. But that is 25 people maxing a 100Mbit connection. Solutions such as these make sure I don't sit there with lots of bandwidth and nowhere to go. 1Tbit isn't all that much if hundreds of million of people try to transfer something over it...

Re:Cool, but...

[btarval]

I agree. Perhaps the problem is with how the infrastructure market is set up? It's all designed around the "big daddy" approach. For either DSL or Cable, you have to go through a big TelCo or a big CableCo to get access to a line. And they restrict your choices heavily to what they want to sell. Even those CLECs in the DSL biz have to go through the TelCo just to resell the same lines.

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.

Re:Cool, but...

[Sigmund Dali]

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.

Re:Cool, but...

[evilviper]

I'm tired of hearing about all these advances that we will NEVER see.

THEN WHY ARE YOU READING SLASHDOT???

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.

Not with this specific technology, no. But already, companies (particularly Verizon) are starting to set-up fiber-optic networks to compete with high-speed cable. I've recently heard a FIOS network is soon to be built in a nearby city, so I would guess I'm only a couple of years away from getting it.

Why doesn't the FCC get off their ass and mandate this kind of thing instead of doing nothing?

Because this isn't a socialist country, where the government orders companies to do things they don't want to do, unless it involves public safety and the like. A free country doesn't mean you get everything you could ever want for free... It means if you don't like what companies are or aren't doing, you can start-up your own company and do it yourself. What's your excuse for sitting on your ass and complaining, rather than very directly doing something about it?

Re:Cool, but...

[suitepotato]

With todays religious climate here in USA, science and technology has been put on the backburner.

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 /.ers would have it, we have people running around the streets in 1620s Pilgrim outfits with pitchforks stabbing anyone who works in technology.

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.

that's nothing.

[Enjoi]

If you throw a 500GB harddrive fo the empire state building, it's not only faster moving data that this, the data is accelerating.

Beat that, japan :)

Re:that's nothing.

[fossa]

Ha! My aerodynamic hd enclosure is still accelerating while yours is stuck at terminal velocity.

Re:that's nothing.

[SamSim]

You get quite a bit of packet loss like that, you know.

Where's the beef?

[timeOday]

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?

Re:Where's the beef?

[Varun Soundararajan]

one strand or multiple strands is a good question.
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/ 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!
. Are we getting to a state where we are going to finish off the remaining ISPs, now that telephone companies are all already done!.

Re:Where's the beef?

[earnest murderer]

Or the size of the file. I mean, under the right circumstances my lan can transfer a two hour movie faster than that.*

*Bitrates may vary.

Re:Where's the beef?

[fornaxsw]

That "story" is ridiculously short.

hehe and I still didn't read it....suckers.

"Honey, did you pick up that new movie?..."

[thrillseeker]

Ahhh ... just a second ... yep - I've got it right here.

I dont trust this

[Psionicist]

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.

It's not that much data.

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:It's not that much data.

[zecg]

And it's marked TB, not Tb - the latter is a Terabit.

Re:It's not that much data.

[InvalidError]

For a 2h of raw 8bits RGB 30fps video...
DVD resolution: 720x480 = 220GB of raw video data on 8GB DVDs
HD-DVD resolution: 1920x1080 = 1.3TB of raw video data on 20-30GB media
Ultra-HD resolution: 7680x4320 = 22TB of raw video data (in NHK's studios)

The 1Tbps wire speed probably includes framing bits just like most other serial links do so the actual usable bandwidth will be under 100GB/s with the typical 10bits/byte (4B/5B coding) approximation. Add other wire/link-level protocol details and the real-world usable bandwidth can dip even lower. 1/11 would probably be a more accurate wire-to-bytes approximation.

This would still place the transfer at around 45GB... a little on the high side even for the upcoming HD-DVDs. The only uncompressed video signal I can think of that would be around 90GB/2h is 12bits/12MSPS sampled standard definition composite. I wonder how many movies are actually stored in this format.

2 hr movie in 0.5s

[Gja]

Now we humans just need a way to watch that 2 hour long movie in 0.5 seconds

Re:2 hr movie in 0.5s

[HermanAB]

That is easy - just skip the commercials with your MythTV box.

3 minutes

[dada21]

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.

Re:3 minutes

[Dirtside]

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.

Municipal Wifi isn't intended to compete with free-market alternatives. It's a social service; a way to make sure that everyone can get cheap Internet access. It may not be especially fast, but there's nothing preventing you from buying faster wired (or even wireless) access.

Fast, but maybe needed

[Mostly a lurker]

If one thinks of streaming full size movies on demand to homes, even assuming 100% use of bandwidth (impossible) infrastructure able to transfer a two hour movie in 0.5 seconds would only support 14,400 concurrent users. By 2010, the demands per user may even be higher with the need to serve up virtual reality type applications.

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?

3Ms - 3Ts

[suitti]

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.

Why?

[Quixote]

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)?

Journalism has Crashed and Burned

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Terabit transmission is nothing new

[raurublock]

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.

Mabey by then I could get DSL in my area.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mabey by then I could get DSL in my area.

oooow,

[Dr. Spork]

0.5 seconds? But I want it now!

whats the point here?

[Rooked_One]

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.

Re:whats the point here?

[Nintendork]

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.

Re:more importantly

[Universal Indicator]

I'm waiting for Vivid Entertainment's new line: Slutty Bandwidth Chokers Volumes 1-90. The box tagline could read "Come on baby, I want to suck your bandwidth!"

The 'No Shit' Minute of the Month

[heinousjay]

Face it, telcos are in it to make money, not serve the public interest.

Are you expecting a capitalist to argue against this statement? There's not really a lot to face, here.

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 :-)

Not useful

[salmonz]

We don't even use the fibre we have available today. So what's the point?