Slashdot Mirror
IBM Debuts Optical Transceiver Chipset
IBM debuted a new optical transceiver chipset today that researchers within the company promise will allow users to download data eight times faster than current technology. IBM cited the rising demand for digital media such as movies as the driving force behind the new technology. "IBM says it can meet that need, building its new chipset by making an optical transceiver with standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, and combining that with optical components crafted from exotic materials such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. The resulting package is just 3.25mm by 5.25mm in size, small enough to be integrated onto a printed circuit board."
If you want to see what it looks like, it was already featured here. The thing's damn small...
will allow users to download data eight times faster than current
using the awesome power of slashdot it'll be possible to bring down servers at eight times the speed!
On a slightly serious note.. try asking your ISP what their contention ratio is, and their actual bandwidth at their peering points. chances are they won't tell you much detail. In practise they depend on their subscribers not trying to all max out their lines at once which is why P2P is hated by ISPs. Except for the really big companies, many organisations are probably not hosted or colocated with more than 10Mb/s or 100Mb/s anyway due to cost.
Hardly. Practically every device that communicates wirelessly at microwave frequencies has GaAs amplifiers. This includes most cell phones and wireless cards.