Researchers Transmit Optical Data at 16.4 Tbps 2550km

Stony Stevenson writes "The goal of 100 Gbps Ethernet transmission is closer to reality with the announcement Wednesday that Alcatel-Lucent researchers have recorded an optical transmission record along with three photonic integrated circuits. Carried out by researchers in Bell Labs in Villarceaux, France, the successful transmission of 16.4 Tbps of optical data over 2,550 km was assisted by Alcatel's Thales' III-V Lab and Kylia, an optical solution company. The researchers utilized 164 wavelength-division multiplexed channels modulated at 100-Gbps in the effort."

Comments

Make it Short and Fast and Snappy

[Doc Ruby]

Why do we need 100Gbps-e to arrive across 2550Km before it's "reality"? All I want is 100Gbps-e over maybe 100m, or even 10-30m to start. Since there's no other local interconnect faster than 10Gbps-e, I'd even settle for 100Gbps-e across 1m, for interconnecting in my rack without changing my software that all depends on ethernet between hosts.

What's surprising is that I can get 10Gbps-e for something like $50, but nothing faster for any higher price (except multiple 10G-e cards). AFAICT, there's nothing in the engineering pipeline, like the usual faster interconnects for supercomputers that can be ported to PC buses the way SCSI and optical ethernet (etc) were. Everyone's waiting on 100Gbps-e.

I know that the parties funding the 100Gbps-e research are telcos like Alcatel, which have WAN requirements for thousand-Km hops, and governments encouraging the industry at the top end. But broadband projects around the world are planning to roll out 1Gbps and even 15Gbps fiber to the home, which would completely saturate a 100Gbps trunk after much shorter neighborhood distance to a hub than 2500Km, even in the most rural areas. But what about all the LAN vendors, which have a real market for 100Gbps-e with only a few dozen or hundred meters required between nodes?

Can't we just declare success and start buying some fast ethernet without having to satisfy the telcos' 10 year plans, too?