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Wired and Wireless At the Same High Speed
Roland Piquepaille writes "The next generation of optical networks needed to satisfy our appetite for bandwidth is currently under development. And researchers from Georgia Tech have built a new architecture which delivers super-broadband wired and wireless service simultaneously. This hybrid system 'could allow dual wired/wireless transmission up to 100 times faster than current networks.' In fact, this optical-wireless network can carry as many as 32 different channels, each providing 2.5 gigabit-per-second service to your home or your office. And companies such as NEC and BellSouth are already working on such hybrid optical-wireless communications networks."
Is this going to be the successor to Intel's somewhat vapourware "WiMAX" project - or is it this in all but name?
My UID is prime. Is yours?
At first I was confused, because the article seemed to be talking about internet access. But then I noticed that Bell South was one of the sponsors. So, welcome to the future of the internet as envisioned by Bell South.
So if this new technology is going to be 100 times faster on both mediums why are they planning to use wires at all?
Maybe it's because the wireless solution will suck so many frequency bands that it can't unleash it's full power unless you are living in a really remote area where other APs are quite unlikely.
I don't read replies by ACs.
isn't this providing media interoperability at the wrong layer?
the framing and termination guts of the wireless transceiver aren't all that expensive. there are already perfectly good layer 2 and 3 approaches to the problem of distributing the same content over wireless and wired networks'
Won't more critical technologies limit how fast we can transmit data, such as switch fabrics?
To effectively use incredibly fast end-user technologies, some absolutely incredible switches and routers would need to be designed, otherwise all this is for nothing. I mean 2.5 Gb per port on a 24-port switch would require a 60 Gb backplane - way higher than anything available today.
And as someone who managed a medium-ish sized network (250+), we currently find that setting a lot of peripheral users to 10-full gives much better performance than setting them to 100-full, simply because our switching fabric - coupled with the number of users - can handle this a lot better.
So although this is possible, wouldn't it be more suited to backbones, rather than having a client-heavy network?
YAY!!! Faster pr0n!!!
Can it run a Beowulf Cluster of Soviet Russian... ah fuck it
lemme guess; the maximum speed can only be reached if there's only 1 wireless user, in other cases the wired users will alway have faster speeds than the wireless ones.
If from my guess it's clear that I have no clue as to why you'd want to split the same signal into both wireless and wired components, given that the recievers' responses will only be available on their respective mediums then I suppose you could argue that I don't get it.
Did anyone else see the picture in that first link and think "Hey, what's that dude doing behind my desk???"
I could care less how fast the speed is. 192kpbs is currently how fast the fastest multiplayer game operates. I care about latency. Fix that problem and we'll talk.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
screw bandwith it's fast enough as it is, bring the price down instead. And if you need to enhance stuff, just work to bring latency down, i want to play Virtua Fighter 5 online damnit
If this were to actually work and be rolled out(said with a GIANT grain of salt), what traveler in an airport with their laptop has that kind of HD space? I'm assuming if you're going to have a connection that fast, it would be to watch HD movies and things of that nature. Laptop HDs aren't cheap, and is there truly a large scale need for something like that?
This article has been submitted by Roland Piquepaille, proceed to the linked articles with extreme caution!
Given there will be bottlenecks but I want them far away from me. I am sick of the last mile to my house being the bottleneck, move it somewhere else for a while, somewhere where it can be more easily updated.
Now, once we have a wire to my house capable of some outrageous speed go ahead and restrict it to match your network speed as long as that excess capacity is kept in reserve for future improvements. This seems to me a more sensible way of engineering the network, the most expensive upgrades (last mile) should be done right once and let the rest of the network catch up after many incremental updates.
The speed of light isn't good enough for you?
Will non-supercomputer users even be able to take advantage of that much dataflow? I can't imagine even being able to write all of that out to a HD, much less the overhead required for packet management.
One link to Wonald's ZDnet blog, 6 links from there to his link farm, with up to 10 links per page to other Wonald blogs. Remind me again how much Wonald pays Slashdot for his slashverts?
Fark had this up before slashdot. http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink =1964850>
Oh, the massive bandwidth is pretty amazing, too.
anywhere but in America. I want a 100 Mbps data line like the Swedes get for 70 euros a month. I'd also like a cell phone that doesn't suck... but those are available in Korea, not here. America: the world's technological backwater.
This sounds like free space optics, which in bad weather is only reliable over short distances. This could very well be interesting technology, but my enthusiasm will remain subdued until I hear how well it performs through, say, several hundred meters of thick fog.
Seems to me that one of the sponsors of this tech is Bell, and aren't they the ones that want to charge us for guaranteed latency, or lack there of? With all that bandwidth, that makes charging extra for low latency a case of banditry, doesn't it? Perhaps that is what Bell is all about anyway. On the other hand, I thought part of the reason for a tiered Internet service was to pay for all the infrastructure that is currently built? Now they are building 100x infrastructure with the money they are already overcharging from users, and only to overcharge them for content they don't want or need in the future?
Sure, I'm not Mr. Optimistic here, but just who the hell is paying for this infrastructure? Already I only want 35% of the content I have to pay for, and none of what I pay for has the latency that I would like to have. The money vs. service issue is all out of whack here. I don't care if its wireless or wired personally, if they could just get the service right in the first place, it would be nice.
Bundled cable, ISP, and VoIP... this is starting to sound like the beginnings of Cable Operators part two. I just know that they need all the bandwidth to support the DRM content that nobody wants to pay for, never mind watch. All I need is DRM'd reruns of "I love Lucy" on my telephone bill to make the world a perfect place again.
There is simply way too much HYPE in the technology sector these days. God forbid any of them think of providing good service before figuring out how to sell me 2 terabits of bandwidth to watch reruns with.
I'm not feeling very enthused about ISPs and content industries right now...
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Not if it's bouncing off a satellite in geosynchronous orbit!
http://outcampaign.org/
Wimax is for city-sized networks. I wouldn't expect this new technology to work well over long distances or in bad weather; one of the articles indicated they were using milimeter-wavelength frequencies, which puts it somewhere around 100Ghz, which is stopped by water vapor. Wimax uses much lower frequencies (with correspondingly lower data throughput) that can (to some limited extend) go around corners and penetrate fog and rain.
can you even imagine a connection that fast? you could download whole operating systems in seconds, download an mp3 before you can snap your fingers, download the latest installment of- porn in the city: shirley and tom have a 43 sum, faster than you can say, at thanksgiving when my family is done eating they grab there twinkies and say ahhhhhhhhh
~FFTL4LIFE~
...torrents?
Someone ping me when...
1: Realtec has a $19.99 add on card with technology
or
2: It automatically comes with my next motherboard purchase
Untill that time, I'm plenty fine with the 6mbits/sec that I'm currently getting from the my internet provider.
BBH
I notice in the various threads most seem to miss the point. This new tech is not being designed for exterior out in the weather use. It's for inside buidlings, where either a wired plug or a wireless solution is required on a varied ad hoc basis. If you go to the actual gatech news release it lists such things as airport lounges, business conferences, etc. When you have a fluctuating clientelle, you have a certain number of hard wired in points for day to day use for the normal employees with fixed workstations, then you have wireless for when you get a crowd and your peak users expand to a huge number-you'll be able to handle them without any additional effort or expense of additional hardware, once the original is installed, and everyone will still get jam up good throughput. Very little "slashdot effect" in other words.
And the way they do it is much cheaper than what is out there now.
I do this already: caffeine + sleeping pills. Add motion sickness pills to smooth out the ups and downs, for a more sideways effect. Don't try to phone Jesus Christ when your cat starts meowing out of the wrong end.
The only way I can think of is to use an array of trapped Entangled photons, that can be switched at either end. That would remove the largest bottleneck in latency between major sites, e.g. ISP to data centre where the game servers are located. And in theory playing on the other side of the world could be as fast as playing within the same country.
Going off on a tangent, does anyone know if there's a way to detect these photons compared to non-entangled ones? I only ask because surely for SETI, it would make sense to be looking for something that can provide instant communication?
Ummm... as far as I know, even with entangled photons, you cannot transfer information faster than the speed of light. Now, that method may speed up the transfer by a very small amount, but most lag is created by switches and routers, not the time it takes for a signal to go through the cable (at least, as long as you are not going across an ocean or bouncing off a satellite).
Centralization breaks the internet.
Ah, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense...
...
If your house isn't the bottleneck, than as soon as the "bottleneck" is removed by upgrades, then what eventually becomes your house? [Hint: it will be last to receive the upgrades]
Which is cheaper? 1) Install fiber to 100 existing homes [requiring digging,etc]? 2) Upgrading the line that runs between a neighborhood and another station, ONCE?
What if it isn't even fiber? What if it just means replacing a device near each customer versus replacing equipment on the main lines between subdivisions? Imagine the labor required...
And in a neighborhood of 100, what if only 20 houses are even using the service at a level where upgrades would benfit them? Is it cost-effective to upgrade the whole neighborhood? Maybe in the long run, but they have shareholders and quarterly earnings reports to worry about... Telecom companies are going to want to do things as cheaply as possible...
Besides, we likely either talking about the PHONE company or the CABLE company.... So discussing sensibility is just plain silly.
Personally, I think we're getting to the point where any increases in bandwidth are going to be largely unnecessary. There is talk of TV over DSL... Technical challenges make this largely unfeasible. Business and legal challenges make this extremely difficult. It seems like a whole lot of effort to find another way to stream crappy shows & services over a different set of wires.
Most users don't really need the full bandwith availabe in their DSL/cable modems... I think they just thing that "high-speed" internet is really fast because they are using a connection with ~50ms latency versus 200-500ms latency (dial-up modem).
I don't see how video telephony is ever going to take off really big. (Relatively few people use webcams extensively). There are social advantages to not being *visible* to the remote party (such as when one is not dressed, clean shaven, tired, etc).
Audio? Well, there is plenty of bandwith available currently for that. I think it will be long time before we see streaming "5.1" surround sound audio, and even longer before it is cheap [due to economic reasons]. I suspect even this wouldn't require much more bandwidth due to the correlation among the channels.
So why again should every house get the latest and greatest connection, **right now**? To me, I don't see any reason.
It will take another 40 years before that high speed network will be available in the good ol USA
Meanwhile, Japan is getting 100Mbits/sec at $30/month
So by 2.5Gbps, they mean down right? And upload is obviously limited to 100mbit... er... what... the internet doesn't really work that way after all?
IBM has promised us something even greater. They are calling it "Token-Ring".
Start buying your tokens on EBay now. You can never have too many!
.
- aqk
F U
Someone to discover a way to take advantage of duality of light and start transmitting internets wirelessly through light waves...
If you go all the way up to 60 you hit a band which is absorbed by oxygen molecules. Signals don't go very far.
Before then you're in a range that the military has used, at least experimentally, to image runways when landing in fog.
Think short ranges (1 km for sure), shorter in humid environments, and a relatively benign interference environment since there are so few natural sources in that range and it's so easy to make a small highly directional antenna.
People have only been holding off on deployments because the equipment was still loaded with unaffordable amounts of early adopter tax.
It's too bad that the paper isn't available online, because it would be interesting to read the source documents. Descriptions of technical papers intended for general audiences often lose quite a bit in translation. As an example, it's hard to tell what the article means by "100 times faster than existing networks," as an earlier poster pointed out (I'd guess the comparison is to gigabit ethernet, as 2.5 x 32 = 80, which is sort of like 100). Researchers always know their subject better than reviewers, so summary articles can often be unintentionally misleading.
I'd also like to point out that Bell's sponsorship probably has little to do with the type of content that can be transmitted over this medium. University researchers certainly like to partner with corporations (money is scarce in academia), but Bell likely has little to do with the research itself. Typically companies merely want to have a stake in promising new technologies. OFC/NFOEC does appear to be a conference geared towards both researchers and businesspeople, so partnerships might be closer.
One aspect of the article that I find confusing is that its examples of wireless devices are PDAs and cellphones. Wireless on those devices is most useful when it is available everywhere; I want broadband speeds anywhere I can use my phone. But the wireless network described seems to be site-local. The bandwidth improvement is wonderful, but the lead-off example is perhaps confusing.
I am not an engineer, but... For new areas, the price of laying in copper or optical cable is about the same (about 1500 dollars). In fiber optics, the speed could be 1Gb, in copper, about 24Mbit (currently?). Now, why would a phone company still make all the new areas with copper instead of fiber optics? Equipment might be more expensive for optics but still...
Not if it's bouncing off a satellite in geosynchronous orbit!
Which no internet links the average consumer will use does, it adds a 280ms hop. The main overcomable problem is the time taken to convert light to electricity, switch, and convert back to light. Switches that use mirrors and can switch light directly will save time.
I'm having a hard time seeing the point of it. Do you want to be able to unplug your computer from a wired network, and still have it communicate? Or, do you want to be able to plug your laptop into a wired network and have no interruption of data communications? While this technology would seem to accomplish a seemless switch between the two, I don't know that such a goal is something that the marketplace of ideas is looking for. It is intriguing, but I'm not sure that its something people are looking for, although it would be convenient for the ineveitable dead spots in any wireless deployment. It'd be cool for that.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Or Tolkien-Ring. It's even more fantastic.
I didn't care about the story, but it was submitted by Roland Piquepaille and I came in here to read the fighting over him, all his submissions, etc. And there's almost nothing here. Where is all the anger today? Slashdot, you disappoint me...
That's funny -- the first thing I always do when a Roland story comes up is search the comments for instances of "Roland." I do the same thing when someone misuses "begs the question" in an article summary. It's like watching a train wreck, you know? You just can't turn away.
Latency in non-overloaded devices is a function of the speed of light. Perhaps you can tell us how to transmit information faster than light.
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1925.txt is an important read.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.