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Where's Our Terabit Ethernet?
carusoj writes "Five years ago, we were talking about using Terabit Ethernet in 2008. Those plans have been pushed back a bit, but Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe this week is starting to throw around a new date for Terabit Ethernet: 2015. He's also suggesting that this be done in a non-standard way, at least at first, saying it's an opportunity to "break loose from the stranglehold of standards and move into some fun new technologies.""
I'd like to see the internet held together by his fun new technologies. See how well machines communicate without basic protocols.
we LOVE our standards. Without standards, where would we be?
K, just RTFA, and let me save the rest of you folks the suspense: There isn't one. It's a blurb about breaking standards and terabit ethernet. The slashdot summary just about nailed it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
One terrabit per second is roughly:
6 x as fast as 32-bit 2.8GHz HyperTransport
16 x as fast as x16 PCIe 2.0
60 x as fast as 20GFC fibre channel
400 x as fast as SATA-300
700 uncompressed 1080p HDTV streams (24bpp, 30fps)
15 million telephone calls
Other than the LHC, who the hells needs that kind of bandwidth?
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For those of you playing at home, a TB is a lot more than you can ever use in a million years...unless you link off the pirate bay, then it's not quite enough.
Um, they just made an announcement that they reached 16Tbits/sec on Wednesday, sheesh. Use the bandwidth you have for something useful.
Like porn?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
.. a technology that lets homes receive fast internet no matter where they are. My area's not cabled up, and thanks to me being too far from the exchange.. I just live in a normal street .. I can't reliably get more than 512KB a second. Fix that, and you'd be laughing. Powerline networking, maybe?
"He's also suggesting that this be done in a non-standard way"
No, he suggested that five years ago
We don't yet have the technology described (wave division multiplexing) in our homes because very, very few of us want to bother with fiber in our homes at all.
You can push an amazing amount of data over glass, no one would claim otherwise. You can't, however, drape it across the floor and up the stairs to your switch for a quick LAN connection... Not only does terminating a fiber suck, the first time the dog steps on that little yellow wire, end of connection. By contrast, I've used Cat5 as a structural material (tied a PC to a hook on the ceiling with it) WHILE USING IT for data.
So no, we won't see terabit ethernet anytime soon, unless someone figures out a way to push it over copper.
7 years is a long time.
Seven years is the blink of an eye, kid.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Has this guy done anything relevant in the past couple of decades? Here's a choice quote of his:
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Metcalfe is also known for his harsh criticism of open source software, and Linux in particular, predicting that the latter would be obliterated after Microsoft released Windows 2000: Just because he did something really cool 35 years ago doesn't make him an expert on related matters now.
In a way it can be tweaked a bit, and that has caused a confusion among those that aren't well into the technological difference between Baud (modulation changes per second) and BPS (bits per second).
Anyway - The classical phone modems can have a speed up to 56kbps, but effectively they stay at 28 to 33kbps. And that on a line that actually only provides 3kHz bandwidth. The trick is that in the 3KHz bandwidth you can have a carrier with less than 3000 modulation changes per second, often 2400. In each modulation change you not only have one bit transferred, but multiple bits. This is achieved by having a variation in both phase and amplitude of the signal.
So to utilize the cabling at the extreme speeds that a terabit Ethernet is you may have to resort to the same technique.
There have also been other techniques in use like using multiple carrier frequencies, like what the Telebit Trailblazer modems did. That technology was very resilient to interference compared to the CCITT standards, but it had other disadvantages instead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Who says the CPU has to handle all the load.
You can design your hardware so the CPU only gets interrupted when it needs to.
If you have a smart front-end processor, you can have the front-end processor bundle up IP- or insert-your-own-protocol packets and send them to the CPU as needed. Heck, if it's really smart it can even handle entire TCP streams on its own. Imagine only interrupting the CPU when it had the results of an entire HTTP GET request in hand. Or imagine downloading your favorite movie and having the front-end processor do all the work, shoving the data to RAM directly and alerting the CPU every MB or so.
Hmm, come to think of it, didn't the Internet begin with front-end processors or dedicated devices the size of a large refrigerator?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So, 5 years ago, Tb-E was 5 years away, and now its 7 years away. So by 2015, it should be about 10 years away, and by 2025 it should be about 14 years away, etc.
Wikipedia says: "10 Gigabit Ethernet abandons half duplex links and repeaters (and the CSMA/CD that goes with them) in favor of a system of purely full duplex links connected by switches as was already the normal practice with gigabit Ethernet."
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Forget terabit ethernet. I will settle for full, actual 1Mbps (10,100, 1000, etc.) speed for both transmit and receive. Even on my home network, I rarely get full %100 utilization on my LAN. Some PC's are linux, some are Windows. Neither machine ever really reaches its full potential. I looked at other networks as well, even my work LAN, and they have similar issues. I am not a network guru and don't want to spend the time tweaking and configuring. The damn Gbps NIC and network drive I bought should just plug and go and I expect to see speeds reasonably close to 1Gbps, but nope. I see like 1% utilization. Seriously, lets make current technology work as advertised before we start claiming super-fast speeds on other vapor-ware technology. Please?
I humbly submit that the R&D money that could have increased the upper boundary of Ethernet speeds was spent to bring wireless to the masses. Five years ago, if you'd told me WiFi would now be a year away from nominal speeds of 250Mb/s I might have thought you were talking about prototypes. The dorms where I was a tech had just finished upgrading from 10Mb/s to 100Mb/s Ethernet. The few laptops that were sold with external wireless cards had nominal speeds of 10Mb/s. But now we have 802.11g and next year we should have 802.11n on the store shelves.
I think we've gained much more by pushing out the median speed of wireless than we could have gained from pushing out the marginal speed of twisted pair.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
Seven years is closer to 25 million blinks. Which is about 115 days with our eyes in the process of blinking.
Does this mean that four percent of our lives pass in the blink of an eye?