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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."
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?
So, welcome to the future of the internet as envisioned by Bell South.
You mean AT&T. Or whoever buys them out.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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" I want a 100 Mbps data line like the Swedes get for 70 euros a month."
For what? Are the Swedes hitting sites that come anywhere close to that kind of speed?
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Imagine you get the full data rate before it rains, but when it rains, you're left with just 1/8 of the promised data rate because when it rains, the wireless signal is weakened and causes and physical layer of the network to switch to a more error-resilient physical profile (lower data rate but longer range). Irritating, isn't it?
w00t
Because the capacity of optical fiber is so high, this optical-wireless network
Well, except the new free space optics solution -- which isn't new per se, companies have had niche products for years -- isn't constrained in an optical fiber which would prevent interference. Instead it uses free space, and this immediately limits your bandwidth as you ultimately have to share it with people nearby you or nearby the other end of the air interface.