100 Gbps Via Ethernet

Doc Ruby writes, "As reported at GigaOM, 'Infinera has bonded 10 parallel 10 Gb/s channels into one logical flow while maintaining packet ordering at the receiver,' bridging 100-Gbps ethernet over 10 10-Gbps optical WAN links. Infinera's press release is here. Further from GigaOM: 'The experimental system was set up between Tampa, Florida and Houston, Texas, and back again. A 100 GbE signal was spliced into ten 10 Gb/s streams using an Infinera-proposed specification for 100GbE across multiple links. The splicing of the signal is based on a packet-reordering algorithm developed at [UC] Santa Cruz. This algorithm preserves packet order even as individual flows are striped across multiple wavelengths.' We're all going to want our share of these 100Gbps networks. The current network retailers, mainly cable and DSL dealers, still haven't brought even 10Mbps to most homes, though they're now bringing fiber to the premises to some rich/lucky customers. Are they laying fiber that will bring them to Tbps, or will that stuff clog the way to getting these speeds ourselves?" Rumors say that what runs over Verizon's FiOS is ATM, to support their aspirations for triple-play.

Comments

100 GBPS

[Intron]

Why should I have to wait 5 seconds to download a movie. Don't they have anything faster?

Re:100 GBPS

[Firehed]

5 seconds at 100Gbps? How high-def is your pr0n?

Re:100 GBPS

[UnknowingFool]

Kids! Back in my day we have to wake up at 4am in the morning to collect firewood to send out smoke signals. If you were lucky you would have 8 bits out bit by noon. And those were the good days when some script kiddie didn't try to r00t our fires. You'll take your 100GPS and like it. Now, get off my lawn!

Re:100 GBPS

[`Sean]

Man...and I thought I had it rough having to rely on RFC 2549.

Re:100 GBPS

[kfg]

Smoke? Luxury!

In my day we had to throw bits of shit at each other.

That's right, monkeys invented digital communications. Insert your Al Gore joke here:

KFG

Re:100 GBPS

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I used to work at the phone company as a bit ejaculator. My record was 6 bits in one day. The person you wanted to talk to had to be 6 feet away or less.

Re:100 GBPS

[networkBoy]

Hey in my day you had to be within 4 feet and 4 bits was the max.... wait a second there...

Hey you youngin's are weak! in my day we could whack out one full EBDIC character a day and at a range of 10 feet, so there!

Rich?

[syrinx]

FIOS is cheaper than cable internet here, if you can get it. Just stick with "lucky", unless you're going to say anyone with broadband is "rich".

I live in a condo, so no luck for me though.

Re:Rich?

[Jim_Maryland]

Recently switched to FIOS myself and I'm saving compared to my Comcast bill.

$117 Comcast (Digital Cable without any of the premium channels, broadband at 7 Mbps (although never actually saw rates near that))
$69 Verizon FIOS (Digital TV without any of the premium channels, broadband at 5 Mbps (actually saw rates exceeding that but generally very close to the advertised speed))

Since Verizon FIOS was available in the area (Maryland), Comcast has been pretty heavily advertising their bundle for new customers where you get the Digital Cable ($33), VoIP ($33), and Broadband ($33). Unfortunately that appears to be a one year deal compared to Verizon FIOS which doesn't appear to have plans to jump up after the initial year (hopefully I didn't miss some small print).

FYI - Using SunRocket as my VoIP with the monthly cost under $17 so the Comcast package isn't an option for me.

Bad idea for the home network...

[__aaclcg7560]

Couldn't they come up with a single 100Gb cable specification? The last thing I need is ten cables running from each computer into a monster hub. I shouldn't be turning my home into a cable closet! :P

Re:Bad idea for the home network...

[QuantumRiff]

It is one cable. They split the signal out to the single fiber cable using different wavelenghts. (ie, colors) and run 10 wavelengths over the same cable, at 10Gbs each. For simplicity sake, picture it as 10Gb/s with a red laser, 10Gb/s with a Blue laser, 10Gb/s with a green one... and so on.

Heh like this will ever see homes

[Durrok]

Hell, why give us even 10MB w/o paying out the arse for it when you have people paying $40/month just for 3MB/512K?

If anything like this ever came out it would probably be shared (obviously) and beyond the standard monthly fee there would be a per MB charge as well.
God I hate USA's internet :|

Re:Heh like this will ever see homes

[aetherworld]

God I hate USA's internet :|

Hrhr, that was fun :D

I'm paying 65 euro (=83US$) a month for 2mbit/512kbit ADSL. And that's with 15GB/month download limit (although fair use, which means they turn it off at 50gb). And that's the cheapest option. And btw, I live in a city -.-

GigE

[bhima]

I'd be happy with something between GigE and 10GigE... seems like they do all of this wonderful shit for the top tiers while the rest of the world gets by with 'fast Ethernet' or GigE at best.

Worse the prices beyond GigE are nothing short of heart stopping.

Whoa.

[Wrexs0ul]

Buddy, your 62.5 Gigabyte movies are some hardcore HD.

Re:Whoa.

[ebob9]

Well, thats closer, but I think in reality it would be a bit smaller.

So, you did 10 (Gbit/sec) * 8 (bits per byte) * 5 (seconds) = 62.5 Gbytes.

The 10Gb links are Ethernet links. Lets also assume HTTP is the transfer method, just to make it 'easy'. We could use FTP which is UDP but then we'd have to account for the TCP Control connection in the traffic. Heck, Lets even assume nice jumbo frames with a 9000 MTU. Also, lets assume the video is 'optimally' compressed.

Ethernet header = 14 bytes
IP header = 20 bytes
TCP Header = 20 bytes

14+20+20 = 54 bytes out of every 9000 transfered for header information.

On top of this, there will be HTTP headers at the start of the request, but since they are only transfered at the start (not every packet), lets factor them out as miniscule.

So, basically 62.5 is the maximum theoretical data of the circuits. 62.5Gbytes /9000 * 54 = 375Mbytes of packet overhead.

The Maximum possible transfered in 5 seconds would be 62.5Gbytes - 375Mbytes = 62.125Gbytes.

TCP-PR = neat stuff

[neuro.slug]

Here's a link to the paper (PDF) on the packet reordering if you're interested. Being a former banana slug, I was very interested to see this research coming out of UCSC. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy whenever something theory-based is actually implemented.

Yeah.

[Spazntwich]

Ass to mouth is probably a good guess for what runs over Verizon's FIOS pipes.

Certainly welcome in the data centre world

[anticypher]

This is a natural progression of ethernet speeds. 10GigE switches are getting to the price point now that we are installing them everywhere. I even had a 10GigE switch on my home fibre for a week of testing, but slashdot just doesn't load any faster.

All the broadband providers are moving to larger pipes now, with GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) going in everywhere, as consumers are clamoring for more than ADSL2+ speeds (24Mbps down, 2Mbps up) in city centres. I'm designing the back end of a GPON network, where every neighborhood gets 2.5Gig down, 1 Gig up, shared between 16 residences. Of course, there is going to be more than just internet on pipes that big, quadruple play to start, and as new services become available even more bandwidth will be needed. Once you start piling up the 10GigE connections, it will be nice to have a working trunk/etherchannel/bonding solution for those long hauls between data centres.

the AC

FTP uses UDP?

[yabos]

Not according to the almighty wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ftp

Fiber's still the wave of the future

[Manchot]

Let's face it, for long-term benefit, fiber's still the way to go. Though still mostly in the research and development mode, there are companies who can make complete wavelength-division multiplexed optical systems on a chip. Some of them can send and receive 40 Gb/s on 40 different channels. Do the math. That's 1.6 Tb/s per fiber. If you have a bundle of 100 fibers, you're starting to push petabits per second. Also, keep in mind that the main limiting factor for optical data transmission rates is the electrical speed of the transistors at both ends, not the fiber itself. As transistor speeds improve, the maximum data transfer rate per channel will improve. The maximum data transmission rate of copper, on the other hand, is pretty much fixed by the fermionic nature of electrons.

Re:Fiber's still the wave of the future

[iWill]

This (Infinera) is the company that makes complete wavelength-division multiplexed optical systems on a chip. They have demonstrated 40 Gbps x 40 channels = 1.6Tbps in development and currently have many 10 Gbps x 10 channel networks deployed by companies such as Level 3 (which first came online in 2004.) Also, the limiting factor in single optical channel transmission is not the transistors at each end. The real problem is the laser modulation at the transmitter as well as the response of the photdetector at the receiver. GaAs or InP transistor circuits at either end are more than capable of handling speeds in excess of 40Gbps if the laser generation/detection ever gets there.

Why stop there?

[tringstad]

'Infinera has bonded 10 parallel 10 Gb/s channels into one logical flow while maintaining packet ordering at the receiver,' bridging 100-Gbps ethernet over 10 10-Gbps optical WAN links.

So what's preventing them from taking 10 of these newly created 100GbE channels, applying the same technique, and producing 1TbE?

-Tommy

Re:Why stop there?

[TeknoHog]

It's all about bandwidth, which is not the same thing as date rate. Unfortunately there's a huge marketroid conspiracy trying to teach us otherwise.

Data rate (in bps) is proportional to bandwidth (in Hz). The factor between them depends on the modulation and coding schemes, which in turn are limited by the signal/noise ratio of the medium. Anyway, the system of light sources, fiber, and receivers has a certain limited bandwidth. For example, if you're using visible light from about 400 to 750 THz, you have a bandwidth of 350 THz, assuming the fiber works across the whole spectrum.

For a naive example, imagine that it takes 35 THz of bandwidth to achieve 10 Gbps over a certain fiber. Then you can have a maximum of 10 of these channels using visible light, if you shift the center (carrier) frequencies accordingly (i.e. different colors) to avoid channel overlap.

For another explanation, imagine using a single frequency of light to send information. As soon as you start switching it on and off, you're introducing other frequencies; the spectrum gets wider, the faster you switch (see also: Fourier transform). So, if you try to use zillion distinct colors to get zillion channels, they will start to overlap at some point if you try to send any information.

Re: not so whoa

[indigoid]

Increasing the bandwidth beyond a surprisingly small figure does not (automatically) improve noticeably the RTT. This is clearly demonstrated in one of the utterly wonderful Stevens books, though I forget which. Most likely one of the three TCP/IP Illustrated volumes.

Ultimately the limiting factors are (a) the transceivers terminating each segment, (b) software, and (c) the speed of light. It sounds like these guys have put their work into (b).

Re:American internet is worse than third world.

[Overzeetop]

Yeah, but Sweden has less than a third of the population of California (20 people/km^2, vs 84 people/km^2), and California is only the 12th densest state. In fact, Sweden is less dense than 32 of the 50 states. So how come we don't have 20MB connections for $15 in those states? Lord knows the big telcos don't bother to serve most of the outlying regions, so we know they already cherry pick the population centers.

It's good old protection. Contracts with towns for exclusive cable rights, and a lack of any meaningful oversight of the telco networks means no competition. And no competition in a corporate setting means high prices. It has nothing to do with population density.

Average density is a meaningless figure.

[Kadin2048]

While I'm not disagreeing with you that many municipalities in the U.S. are effectively corrupt, and have entered into exclusivity deals with cable and telcos that are holding back service deployments, I think that the population density figures that you're using are misleading.

Just taking a country's or state's population and dividing it by its area doesn't give much of a meaningful figure of population density. People don't obey the Ideal Gas Law and just spread out evenly over an area. If that was true, then each person in Canada would be sitting in the middle of a miles-wide patch of empty space. People choose to live in high-density areas, and at least in my experience, this trend is stronger in colder climates.

So Sweden might have a low population density, but that doesn't really say anything about how tightly people are "clumped." I'm not sure what kind of measurement you'd need in order to compare that, but it needs to be something that gives you an idea of how much area is inhabited at various densities. Not just urban development, but small towns and villages that are clustered with lots of space in between. I have a feeling that Sweden, if you looked at it from that kind of analysis perspective, would probably be a lot closer to Canada (low overall density but much of the population concentrated) than a suburban-sprawl area like California or most of the East Coast (the "Boston-Atlanta Metro Area" as Gibson once predicted).

The failure of broadband in the U.S. should go principally to local governments and their shortsighted dealmaking, but the geography and urbanization here doesn't help at all, and neither does the way telecommunications are regulated at the Federal level (more corruption/influence, no doubt).

what's so special (besides the speed)?

[Creepy]

The idea of packet order guarantee and ethernet are pretty much mutually exclusive, and upon further review (reading the fa), it reassembles out-of-order packets pretty much just like TCP. About the only new thing is the out-of-order disassembly and assembly and the overall speed. It still has the same flaws as Ethernet, which is that it really is only about 80-85% efficient - after that you would be better off with a Token Ring or other managed protocol (token rings are excellent for saturated networks but poor for low saturated networks).

Sigh - and the poster seems to think ATM is a good protocol, but ATM is a terrible protocol, especially for data, but even for voice it's mediocre. It was designed for voice conversations over high noise lines with significant data loss (copper) and predominantly used over low noise high speed lines with almost no loss (fiber). Its advantage is standard packet length (53 bytes) and speed. Worst disadvantage - almost 10% overhead (5 bytes of every 53, or ~9.4%). ATM also has no guarantee of sort order or collision avoidance (since it's asynchronous) so in practices it can be really bad. Incidentally, my networking class voted this the worst protocol back in 1996, but expected it to succeed mainly because of telecoms pushing it.

Re:FIOS in Maryland

[ScentCone]

So, while I don't know if Verizon is bundling the service to consumers, Verizon is certainly bundling the services to the Counties, since Verizon already has whatever permissions it needs for internet and voice services.

My Mom (in Montgomery County) has FIOS up to her house for data. It's fast. She's using Comcast for cable TV. She called Verizon about switching over to them for 'cable' service so she could bundle that, and her copper land line all together. They said "Sure! we'll have someone out to talk to you about that tomorrow morning!" She asked me to stop by just in case there were going to be "any of those techie issues."

Well, there was. The "issue" was that Verizon's cable service was actually an affiliate sale of DishNetwork (or was it DirecTV?), and there on the lawn was a guy ready to bolt a dish to the side of her house. And it was a 2-year commitment! I'll allow for 10% of Mom not knowing what she was doing on the phone with Verizon, and 90% Extremely Sleazy Customer Service Tactics. Incredible. So, with the guy standing there, screwgun in hand, I called Verizon, who told be that it was "too late" to cancel the "order" but that in 24 months, we could switch over to FIOS TV, which would surely be available by then. We told them that it was also too late for the lawyer's phone to stop ringing, and presto the installer (who spoke no English!) was getting a cell call, and he had the dish packed back up and in his van before we got into our second cup of coffee. Beware the cable/FIOS state of flux in Maryland, especially Montgomery County. Of course, you also have RCN as another option.

Re:Reminded me of my modem days

[Amouth]

it was called shotgunning.. it was a hack on how ISDN did it with multi chanels.. it worked aslong as your isp supported it and you had the phone lines.. i know because i used to do 3 of them for a total of a 156k (52k*3) - never got 56k on any of the damn lines.

bonneded DSL was neet too but required all your lines to be F1 pairs and they had to go to the same DSLAM, better to use the F1 pair as either a T1/fractional Frame or PRI - but they charge good money for that.