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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?
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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.
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?
Can it run a Beowulf Cluster of Soviet Russian... ah fuck 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.
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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.
Pure line-of-sight and signals at those frequencies are absorbed by all sorts of things including tree leaves (of all things). You need a really straight shot from transmitter-to-receiver. You also cannot run a great deal of power at those frequencies which can affect range. We play around with gigahertz range transceiving in ham radio and there are a lot of variables to take into consideration. I imagine they have so far tested it mostly in fairly ideal conditions(?). Erick KE3PB
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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?
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...
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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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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.