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Siemens Reaches 107 Gbps Data Transfer Record

Posted by samzenpus on from the greased-lightning dept.

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.""

7 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. The problem is... by TrisexualPuppy · · Score: 4, Informative
    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 ;)
    1. Re:The problem is... by Barny · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      ...
      /me sighs
    2. Re:The problem is... by NerveGas · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
    3. Re:The problem is... by DAldredge · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  2. See also by Sampizcat · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  3. Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by 3.14159265 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Children of lock-in. by ahillen · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).