Slashdot Mirror
New Data Transmission Speed Record
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmag is reporting that a team of German and Japanese scientists have collaborated to shatter the world record for data transmission speed. From the article: "By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower."
Precisely why I read slashdot and fark, but not digg.
Slashdot has the non-time sensitive, most interesting news - with insightful or interesting comments.
Fark has the time sensitive or humorous news, with clever or funny comments.
Digg is somewhere in the middle, with the immature comments or spam I can find in an AIM chat room if I need it.
into the real world, right? Why are they developing nuclear pebble bed reactors in laboratories, when I can't buy one at the 7-11 yet?
One reason is because it's serial data generally, and you don't know exactly how many of those bits are going to be data.. (you could have start or stop bits, etc)... but I don't know the details of that, so I'll just mention my other possible reason.
It's that throughput is generally what actually matters when sending data. In other words, that how much actual payload is being send, minus any overhead. If you've got a decent amount of overhead, your actual throughput might be a bit less. So it makes more sense to talk about bandwidth in bits per second, so as not to confuse it with actual throughput.
The target use for something like this is Internet backbone traffic, so the question is whether Cisco will be able to deliver a router that will keep the line busy. Cisco's web site says "the innovative 12000 Terabit System scales to 5 Terabits (Tbps) per second ".
Research scientists are always ahead of the "real world". This has always been, always will be. You can view their work as creating ideas, innovations and technologies. Once these ideas have been published, it is the industry's work to pick them up and transform them into something commercially usable. Yes, there is a lot of research projects that can be viewed as useless, but, you should see it as a brainstorming of new technologies. Not all will end up in something revolutionary, but it may incite new ideas and/or bring new products or ways of doing things in the "real world".
DrkBr