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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."

20 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. "transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:"transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds"? by whathappenedtomonday · · Score: 5, Funny

      I guess it means that pr0n fuels innovation once again.

      --
      I hope I didn't brain my damage.
    2. Re:"transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds"? by romka1 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
    3. Re:"transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds"? by Freexe · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
    4. Re:"transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds"? by InvalidError · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  2. Maximum transmission units by totallygeek · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  3. Cool, but... by Sigmund+Dali · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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. Re:Cool, but... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

    2. Re:Cool, but... by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  4. that's nothing. by Enjoi · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 :)

    1. Re:that's nothing. by SamSim · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  5. Where's the beef? by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  6. I dont trust this by Psionicist · · Score: 5, Insightful


    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.

  7. 2 hr movie in 0.5s by Gja · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  8. 3 minutes by dada21 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Why? by Quixote · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)?

  10. Mabey by then I could get DSL in my area. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Mabey by then I could get DSL in my area.

  11. Re:It's not that much data. by InvalidError · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  12. oooow, by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 4, Funny

    0.5 seconds? But I want it now!

  13. Not as fast as the Italians by MacFreek · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 :-)