Siemens Reaches 107 Gbps Data Transfer Record

prostoalex writes "Reuters is reporting on Siemens engineers reaching 107 Gbps data transmission record over a fiberoptic cable, and expects the technology to be on the market within a few years: "The test, 2.5 times faster than a previous maximum transmission performance per channel, was done in cooperation with Germany's Micram Microelectronic, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications and Eindhoven Technical University of the Netherlands.""

Comments

The problem is...

[TrisexualPuppy]

And everywhere, lonely geeks rejoice at the decreased download time for the favorite pr0n!

This will not matter much, at least on the individual's machine. Most hard disk drives transfer on the order of 25MB/s. This fiber transfer is applicable only for supercomputing links and Internet backbones. Good luck finding a 107000000kbps stream ;)

Re:The problem is...

[Barny]

Yes it will actually, this is a bigger pipe, and since the internet is a series of pipes..

But really, if an Aussie ISP (internode for instance) has just upgraded from 3Gb/s to around 6Gb/s, how much would it benefit them if they could just sell off most of the fibre they are using currently and just run one at 107Gb/s?

As for 25MB/s, a newer HDD will easily reach around 40-50MB/s, added with the popularity of NAS and small raid systems most good PCs can suck almost 70MB/s (560Mb/s).

Of course, with Australian broadband being lucky to get (until just recently) above 1.5Mb/s this is rather moot.

Re:The problem is...

[NerveGas]

Most hard disk drives transfer on the order of 25MB/s

Maybe you should upgrade that machine you bought four years ago. :-)

A lot of drives today can write at twice that speed, and read even faster. I've got an external firewire 800 drive (a single drive, not one of the RAIDs-in-a-box setups) that can write at a little over 60 MB/s. Your point is, of course, still valid... few users are even able to make use of a gigabit - or sometimes even half of that.

Re:The problem is...

[DAldredge]

My year old SATA Maxtor 7L300S0 can sustain ~ 50 megabytes / sec averaged over the entire surface of the disk. Don't speak again on this subject until you learn more about it.

See also

[Sampizcat]

See also
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,20 961327%5E15306,00.html

107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s

[the_REAL_sam]

I really don't know why they express download speeds in such an outlandish way. End users do not "gigabits" ...gigglebits, maybe, but not gigabits... for anything, they use kB, MB, & GB.

107Gb/s = "107 gigabits per second"
13,696 MB/s = "13,696 megabytes per second"
13.375 GB/s = "13.375 gigabytes per second"

Source:
http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/?input_amount=107&i nput_units=gigabits&notation=legacy

Divide by 8 to get the number that makes sense. The "little b" stands for bits, and there are 8 bits per byte; the "big B" stands for byte.

1B = 8b.

The byte is the amount of data you could store on a single coin if you had a code worked out placing it either heads up or heads down. Ones and zero's.

Source:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29130 :-)

Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s

[TopSpin]

End users do not

End users routinely use multiples of bits per second. Some examples; modems 1200/2400/9600/56k b/s, SATA 1.5/3.0 Gb/s, USB 480 Mb/s, Firewire 400/800 Mb/s, Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mb/s, 802.11b 11 Mb/s, etc.

Using bytes introduces too much ambiguity when discussing line capacity. In real communications bytes are often encoded (8B/10B) or are accompanied by (a possibly configurable number of) error correction bits. Higher level protocols add effectively arbitrary amounts of overhead. People who sell capacity aren't going to attempt to promise some number of JPEGs/s via HTTP; they can't know how your use case will actually perform. Siemens labs are certainly not going to deviate from the well characterized and correct practice when promoting their latest work.

It is convenient to convert between line rates and amounts of storage. An easy rule of thumb; 1Gb/s is good for about 100MiB/s. The math says more MiB/s, but usually the people who have to care are dealing with protocols that rob ~15% of this capacity for framing, error correction, security, etc. 1Gb/s -> 100MiB/s errors on the safe side.

Re:How viable is it over longer distances?

[3.14159265]

The bitrate ("speed") is always the same, no matter the distance. What changes is the bit error rate, which is proportional to the distance. For this particular test they defined a certain bit error rate as acceptable (don't really know which, 10^-15, 10^-16?) and when they say they did 107Gbps over 100km it means they've got the signal on the other side with a bit error rate low or equal to the defined one. When the bit error rate it just too high, you need to electrically regenerate the signal, which is almost like having a "normal" receiver and a "normal" transmitter (i.e. a diode and a laser, more or less) back-to-back. Sometimes you don't need to regenerate, but just need to give the signal a boost, in which case you'll set up some optical amplifiers along the way. Fun stuff really, specially when you get to the part if you want to boost up the signal in one direction of the fiber then you shoot a high power laser in the other direction.

Re:Hooray!

[Jello B.]

About 110 Metallica discographies per second, according to a torrent I found, which lists it at 973 megabytes. That should be a new file transfer measurement. Md/s.

Re:Children of lock-in.

[ahillen]

I assume that's related to the institute that gave us the "proprietary" MP3?

Well, if you want to call an MPEG-Standard "lock-in". I'm sure most users don't feel very "locked-in", it is probably the most widely supported digital audio standard, I would say. Sure, it is proprietary, and you have to pay license fees, but at least anyone can use it who wants it.

Nevertheless, you are wrong. It is not the same institute that gave you MP3. That was the Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen (http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/index.html). This is the Heinrich-Hertz-Institute in Berlin (http://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/english/). There are about 60 institutes of the Fraunhofer Society in Germany (http://www.fraunhofer.de/fhg/EN/profile/index.jsp ), with widely varying research topics. More info as usual on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_Society).

Re:How viable is it over longer distances?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay there seems to be some misinformation that I must correct here.

Distance is very very important in fibre systems. Distance causes attenuation (which affects the signal-to-noise ratio), polarisation mode dispertion, chromatic dispertion etc. All of these have a detrimental affect to the bit-error-rate at the reciever. All must be compensated for along the way. With long reach systems, intermediary nodes are required to regenerate the signal, amplify it, re-shape it, re-time it etc. In addition, lengths of special fibre may be used to compensate for the dispersion introduced by the channel (called, wait-for-it dispersion-compensating fibre).

And data does indeed travel at the speed of light, but this is slightly misleading - the speed of light in glass is less than it is in air.

Re:What OS?

[RAMMS EIN]

NetBSD was used to set a lot of transfer speed records. See, for example, this story on BSD News.