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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.""

32 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Hooray! by PixieDust · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    1. Re:Hooray! by poopdeville · · Score: 3, Funny

      107 Gb/s sounds like a lot. How much is that in Metallica discographies/s?

      --
      After all, I am strangely colored.
    2. Re:Hooray! by Jello+B. · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Hooray! by 42Penguins · · Score: 2, Funny

      Not to be confused with MD/s, Megadeths per second, a much smaller unit.

  2. 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.

    4. Re:The problem is... by TheSkyIsPurple · · Score: 2

      He did say "on the order of"... so unless you've got a disk pushing 250MBps or 2500MBps, I wouldn't nitpick too much.

      That fiber is pushing several orders of magnitude more data per second

    5. Re:The problem is... by bdonalds · · Score: 2, Funny
      Yeah, but this is getting up there with your frontside bus bandwidth.

      Aren't you listening? This technology allow you to download more porn, which increases the width of your frontside bus!
      --
      The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life. -FZ
  3. See also by Sampizcat · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  4. Fiber is Great but quite expensive still by vg30e · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder if we will get higher speeds on copper or maybe just cheaper fiber interface cards. Fiber optic networking technology has always been fast, but I guess due to production quantities, it never seems to be as cheap to implement even in a Data center environment. I wonder if we will ever get to see fiber optic network interfaces that are close in price to the copper ones.

    We run multiple cat6 cables as trunk links between our switches just because there are more ports to do so and it is cheaper to do those runs.

  5. And Windows Still Takes... by sycodon · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...fifteen looong seconds to list the contents of a folder.

    --
    When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    1. Re:And Windows Still Takes... by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 3, Funny

      Oh like you could even find batteries for that flashlight in fifteen seconds...

  6. How viable is it over longer distances? by presentt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    From the article:

    sent it over a single optical fiber channel in a 100 mile-long (161-kilometre) U.S. network

    After 100 miles, how much does the throughput degrade? The technology might be limited if, after 200, 500, or even 1000 miles, its speed drops significantly. Or does it reach a hub of some sort that re-sends the signal every 100 miles? I should admit now that I'm not very familiar with how large telecom networks are set up.

    --
    I decided to stop stealing cynical quotes to use as a signature line.
    1. Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by MrJynxx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Telecom companies dont' usually have fiber that long because of the risk of breaks and really costly repair processes, it's not because of degradation. Also the distance doesn't really matter(remember, how do you think the contients are connected? single link fiber), because if it's a good cable the data should travel at the speed of light. It depends on the recieving ends how fast your can process it.

      Also the infrastructure for telecom is quite large, you'd be surprised how much stuff is running underground.

    2. Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by ZX3+Junglist · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This figure of 100mi is actually quite good,
      a general standard in the industry is in the order of 30mi of fiber before signal regeneration is necessary. This is a main reason why the US is not very well suited to fiber octics transmissions in the way a smaller countries like germany or netherlands are. It's not the cost of running fiber, but the cost of maintaining sites and equipment to provide a long distance (cross-country?) signal.

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

      sigh... of course they usually have fiber, that's the only way you've got to carry those kind of bitrates! What do you think Verizon and AT&T are getting? CAT5e?
      sigh... of course the distance matters, the higher the span length the higher the attenuation and dispersion!
      sigh... if they say they can do 107Gb/s that's because they can fire up the laser on one side and get it with an acceptable bit error rate at the other side. These tests are not based on sending something to /dev/null!

    4. 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.

    5. Re:How viable is it over longer distances? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  7. So, if Microsoft Zune uses this technology... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Then Steve Ballmer can say something like "I can squirt Siemens"

  8. Re:Excellent, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    If sun would shine and it wasn't cloudy, this could be a warm day. I bet you didn't know that. Now, mod me insightful.

  9. Tacky joke... by nick_davison · · Score: 5, Funny

    Record?

    Given the amount of information DNA encodes... that there's, what, a complete set in every single sperm?... I think my Siemen can squirt more than 107Gbps of data per second down "a series of interconnected pipes" than their Siemens can.

    Of course, that's of minimal practical use as a) Those are burst figures, I'm damned if I can sustain them and b) I read Slashdot which means my odds of finding a compatible interface are pretty minimal.

    1. Re:Tacky joke... by alanwj · · Score: 3, Funny

      Given the amount of information DNA encodes... that there's, what, a complete set in every single sperm?... I think my Siemen can squirt more than 107Gbps of data per second down "a series of interconnected pipes" than their Siemens can. The bandwidth of a penis is estimated at 15,600 tb/s.
  10. Re:Thats nothing by Adeptus_Luminati · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... Imagine the Blue-ray version! /// ...Imagine the dual-sided Blue-ray version! /// ...Imagine a bewolf.. no wait that doesn't apply, unless it's in Russia.

    --
    No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
  11. That's a lot of DVDs by ksw2 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Siemens said in a statement it had processed data using exclusively electrical means at 107 gigabits per second -- roughly two full DVDs per second [...]

    Damn, I can barely keep up with the 5 DVDs at a time I get from Netflix.

  12. 107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by the_REAL_sam · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 :-)

    --
    "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
    1. Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by TopSpin · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
    2. Re:107Gb/s = 13,696 MB/s = 13.375 GB/s by Hes+Nikke · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

      almost

      The bit 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. A byte would therefore need 8 coins.
      --
      Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
  13. 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).

  14. Technology anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why do I see no post above my threshold about:
    fast photodiodes
    fast multiplexers
    GaAs-transistors
    fibre amplifiers (this is for the post about connecting continents)
    ?

    They say they do it electrically, so they need to have a photodiode with 200 GHz bandwidht,
    compare that with the diode in your DVD!

  15. Re:What OS? by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Informative

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

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.