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Terabit-Per-Second Class Connections over FTTH
Big Fat Dave writes "Thanks to research from Japan's Tohoku University, an article at Tech.co.uk wonders if someday the megabit and gigabit classes of net connections will join kilobits in the 'antique tech' bin. By doing some advanced mathematics and 'tweaking' existing network protocols, researchers may be able to enable standard fiber-optic cables to carry data at hundreds of terabits per second. 'At that speed, full movies could be downloaded almost instantaneously in their hundreds. At the heart of the development is a technique already used in some digital TV tuners and wireless data connections called quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). One glance at the Wikipedia explanation shows that it's no easy science, but the basics of QAM in this scenario require a stable wavelength for data transmission. As the radio spectrum provides this, QAM-based methods work fine for some wireless protocols, however the nature of the optical spectrum means this has not been the case for fibre-optic cables ... until now.'"
...someone in MPAA just shat himself.
>No "PC"s on "backbones" I think.
Then no terabit connection for you. I dont care how fast the backbone is. Where I live the last-mile technology is DSL which for my location maxes out at 1.5mbps.
I think the "OMG LOOK HOW FAST TIS IS" kiddie-mentality of movies-per-second ignores the whole issue of last-mile distribution. And PC buses. And practility. And economics.
Youd think slashdot would have better things to post than PR releases.
Fastest backbone router that I know of is the Cisco CRS-1. It can scale to a system capacity of 92 Tbps in total, using 72 42U rack units as one large router. Still, the fastest interfaces on that machine is OC-768 at roughly 40 Gbps.
I found a fast warez site: http://warez.it.kth.se
Actually, this opens up some interesting possibilities for people like the RIAA and MPAA. When you can download a whole CD or DVD in seconds, there's no longer much point to someone who's system is connected, in having physical media, or even a copy of the media, on their own machine. Whatever type of business model they'd wind up with could take that into account, and they could come up with a Netflix-type model, or something new and appropriate to the new reality (when have they ever done THAT, though?) - pay $x/mo, or $x/mo/bitrate/resolution, or whatever. The online rental business could be huge.
... or not, your choice of colour, and a big honkin' net connection. Lots of RAM and a SSD boot drive, and something (magnetic card, keyfob, whatever, or nothing - just swipe your retina across a scanner or something) you can take with you to plug into whatever other machines you use to let that machine know it's you and to configure to your preferences. And nothing more. No moving parts other than the keyswitches and GP/CPU fan.
There's also the benefit of being able to do real-time offsite storage. The people who would care about needing massive amount of storage for their movie collection - no longer need to store their movies locally. Your whole machine could wind up being nothing more than an online access point with it being customized to be the HCI that you prefer: curvy keyboard (w/ or w/o lights) or not, big-ass widescreen display
This is the kind of technology advancement that can change almost everything in its field if enough people with vision can take advantage of it and work together to make it seamless.
Please let's not start that debate again. I know it started a long time ago with "no one needs an abacus, who's going to count over ten?" but please no more debating on what's sufficient and what's not as far as computing, etc. It comes up everytime there is talk of major increases in x aspect of computing. We don't need anymore of it.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
Are you aware that "radio waves" and "light rays" are fundamentally the same thing?
<Massive generalization> anything we have worked out how to do "with radio" is something that there is no fundamentally intrinsic reason why we should not (one day) be able to work out how to do "with light"</Massive Generalization> (and don't bother saying things like passing 'radio" through a sheet of cardboard which obviously blocks "light" - I'm talking about *uses* ie modulation/signalling techniques, not "modifying the laws of physics" issues)
Or do you think that a 1kHz audio wave is in some *magic* way fundamentally and intrinsically different from a 5kHz audio wave? or a 25kHz wave?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Probably because you haven't seen a Juniper T1600. It has 2.5x the per-slot bandwidth of the CRS-1. The Cisco marketing literature may go to 92tbps, but I challenge you to show me a production CRS multishelf system with more than one fabric shelf. Once T1600 modules are available for the TX Matrix the system will provide 6.4tbps in two and a half racks, using far less power than the equivalent real estate worth of CRS hardware (2.4tbps max), at about the same cost. BTW a fully configured 72-rack CRS-1 would require about .8 megawatts of power and belch about 2.5 million BTUs of heat per hour...
Erm, not that that's a biased viewpoint or anything (heh)...
Anyway, IMHO far more important to router scalability is the per-slot and per-watt bandwidth, not how many systems you can chain together (as long as you can chain some reasonably useful number, but I don't see a need for more than 8 chassis in a system). The CRS-1 won't be able to handle 100gE without a system-wide fabric upgrade or double-width cards or something. The T1600 (and for that matter, the Foundry NetIron X series, though not in the same class of capabilities or scalability as the Juniper) will be able to slot in 8 100gE linecards the day they're available.