Slashdot Mirror
Photonic Switching to Boost Internet Speeds
Da Massive writes "Researchers at the University of Sydney have developed technology that could boost the throughput of existing networks 100-fold without costing the consumer any more, and it's all thanks to a scratch on a piece of glass.
After four years of development, University of Sydney scientists say the Internet is set to become, on average, 60 times faster than existing networks.
According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University's School of Physics, the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world."
Ha! The technology might not cost much more, but ISP's will milk consumers for all they're worth.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
yer right!
"without costing the consumer any more"
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
after reading the prices on Telstras new iPhone plans i needed a good laugh
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Speed of light, anyone?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
welcome our photonic switching internet overlords
"... this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity.
I guess accurate reckoning was no requirement to be a part of the team...
I love it how in these news snippets there is never any explanation of the technology, but long descriptions about the wonderful changes it will do to the world.
Now I will get 60x's the cap space, and I was worried I would have to cut back on my porn.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
kudos to CUDOS
Unless he is offering ponies with it. Ponies with wings!!!!!!!
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
That's all very well and good, but the last mile over here is over copper and based on the inaction of the TelCo, and the lack of REAL competition, will remain copper for another 100 years. So no matter how fast the IP packet takes to get to the exchange, it will be slowed down.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
users to access pornography at a speed previously only dreamed of!
I thought this paragraph was a doozer:
"This circuit uses the 'scratch' as a guide or a switching path for information - like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity."
Am I missing something? A picosecond to switch tracks implies a million billion times per second. A million times per second is a snails pace. And then they refer to terrabit capacity? Everything seems to be off by orders of magnitude all over the place...
or does this article leave everyone else a little hungry in the "details" department? How does this mean "almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world...?" How will it not cost the consumer more? I feel like there's a story about breakthrough Tb switching tech every six months, and we haven't seen any of them deliver on these kinds of promises. They make it sound like you can just drop some glass in your existing switches and they magically become superpowered, whereas clearly if the technology ever actually matures to market we would be paying out the ass for these optics-enhanced switches and routers.
except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times
I think this should be (million x million)
To get to the more remote areas of Australia, sheep stations, mines etc., we will be retaining the same media delivery, but at a much slower rate, dictated by how fast Larry can turn his flashlight on and off...
Task Mangler
In all seriousness... Did anyone else notice how the article goes from picosecond switching of this device to switching "a million times" in one second? When did science redefine micro- and pico-? And the public demands "instant" web gratification? Somehow I don't buy into that either. Fast, sure, even to the point of nearly instant, but I doubt anyone cares whether a web page loads in 0.001 seconds versus 0.1. Think bigger, people - there's more to the Internet than just web pages, and there's far more to the web than just static load-it-once content. Think Youtube on steroids (and anti-psychotics, please!), VoIP that doesn't fail under heavy load (where QoS isn't practiced), faster data delivery for SETI/Folding/etc.. Hell, getting certain ISP's to give up on throttling while giving everyone a generic 20/5 or similar connection, without them bitching about network load, would be nice.
(And did anyone else notice Slashdot's first-paragraph-break bug just got worse?)
I wasn't sure which to go with, so i'll give you both at once. Behold:
CUDOS: Helping you reach your artificial bandwidth cap just that little bit quicker.
and...
TERRABIT PORN! I'll need another tube of KY... Hell, make it a catering vat.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I'm currently using 10Base2 coax to interconnect my VAX systems and PCs together in my basement. Do you mean to tell me that there is the potential to have something like a GIGABIT network in my house?!?! That would be cool... a gigabit hub or maybe a gigabit switch. I know, I know...I'm talking foolish and a gigabit switch would probably be $50,000 or some other, but I can dream can't I?
And the public demands "instant" web gratification?
Read radical news here
since they managed to teleport a photon a while ago.
Read radical news here
Like:
What exactly do you mean by scratch?
How does it switch?
What wavelengths and materials does it work best with?
How long to market?
If this is a "photonic IC" how long until we can buy photonic logic units?
Will this work with SOS (Silicon On Sapphire) technologies?
But the insightful article cleared them all up. Psyche! No it didn't. I learned that apparently a scratch can act as a waveguide of some kind that switches very rapidly. I know that the average reader doesn't have a PhD in photonics, but come on!
The paper will probably show up on their publications page soon. I don't think that the top link is about this new photonic switch, because 160Gbps isn't exactly 100x the speed of exiting 10Gbps fiber systems, but I'm not sure.
You can already buy a gigagibt hub for about £30 and and the adapters and PCI adapters are less than £10. Not sure about VAX though.
Trek monster: The internet is for (vr) porn, the internet is for (vr) porn!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"This circuit uses the 'scratch' as a guide or a switching path for information - like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity"
A picosecond is one trillionth (10 -12 ) of a second, or one millionth of a microsecond.
davecb5620@gmail.com
This article really doesn't say a lot of anything, except that fiber optics can automagically increase their speed 60 fold, which sounds, to say the least, suspect.
I'm no physicist, but I'd say we need at least a little more than this to merit a slashdot.
What department at the University of Syndney?
CUDOS? Must be an affirming place to work... Who's your department head?
Stuart Smalley? Do people like you?
Speed and more speed...Speed isn't giving us freedom anytime soon.
We need to invent a non blockable way of communicating before the governments of the world unite in locking internet.
Someone go invent an x-ray connection, or something.
Please get your sarcasm-meter changed, it appears that the results of parent post did not register properly
How is that not going to cost the consumer more?
Six months from now I'll probably need one of those scratched fiber switches right in my living room just to keep up with all the other ppl on Counterstrike.
So is that error-free as in, a lot fewer dropped packets via pixie dust, or error-free as in it's so fast that you don't notice the dropped packets? I have a feeling if lightning hits the "magic glass" router, it will still screw up just like the current ones do when lightning hits them.
stuff |
Unfortunately the article is a bit low on details and even on their site I didn't find much info. If I understand well they developed a fast optical switch. But how will this be controlled? And how can this increase fiber optic speeds 100 fold, when fiber throughput is limited anyway by e.g. PMD (polarisation mode dispersion). Does anyone know more about this?
...to CUDOS?
This is great for the rest of the world where the technology will be implemented. Here in the States, the mega-elite who stand to lose billions if they lose control of the throttled internet will suppress this somehow. America, the most powerful throttled (health care and internet) country in the world.
A conventional electronics packet switch is a store-and-forward device. It receives (at least the header parts of) a given packet, stores the data, decodes it, decides what outgoing ports the packet needs to be re-transmitted upon, composes a new header part, and re-transmits the entire packet on the outgoing port. This means that the packet itself must be buffered, and there is necessarily an overhead latency of many bits (at least the length of the header of the packet) between the input bitstream and the output bitstream.
In an optical switch, the optical data is split, so that a duplicate optical pattern goes down two paths simultaneously. One path is basically a many-turns coil of optical fibre, so that it will take a few picoseconds for the carrier-light to transit the length of this coil.
The other optical path goes immediately into a detector and optical logic switcher (if I may coin a new term, "optonics", if you will indulge me), so that the header information is decoded and an optical switch is set to the correct output leg, and a new header is composed and transmitted, just in time for the slightly-delayed carrier-light of the main bulk of the packet to arrive from out of the coiled length and be appended to the outgoing header.
The technology requires fine-tuning of the length of the coil of optical fibre to match the switching latency of the header/decoder/re-generator part.
The entire latency of the packet's transit through the entire optical switch is of the order of one sixtieth of the latency of the highest-performance conventional electronics switches.
Neat innovative new technology brought to you from Oz. Now that is really going to surprise a few arrogant yanks when they eventually figure it out, is it not?
I corrected the typo in this summary. See following:
"Researchers at the University of Sydney have developed technology that could boost the throughput of existing networks by 100-fold without costing the provider any more, but consumers can expect to continue to deal with unpublished usage caps and limited bandwidth. It is all thanks to a scratch on a piece of glass. After four years of development, University of Sydney scientists say the Internet is set to become on average 60 times faster than existing networks. According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University's School of Physics, the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world."
Oh, and addition to the obvious typo in the article, I fixed an incorrect its/it's situation.
But seriously - when have advances in the internet infrastructure benefited the customer's bottom line in recent years? As it is fibre is supposed to be available to every address in the US but the telcos pocketed the grants and fees without providing what they were contractually obligated to -- AND consumer costs have increased.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Throughput != Latency
It has always amused me how commonly businesses play fast and loose with the meaning of the word 'speed' when it comes to internet connections. Yes, higher bandwidth will result in a 'faster' internet experience, but the data is not actually getting to you any faster - you're simply getting more of it at a time, so the webpage/download whatever completes in s shorter space of time.
You can drive faster than a truck, but if you're delivering more than your vehicle can carry, that slow ass truck is still going to complete the delivery in less time.
Argh, pet peeve, bad car analogy and all, brought about by years of listening to online gamers brag about how they've got the fastest connection and then crying when it makes no difference to thier gaming experience.
Anyway, the article is a bit light on details - can't quite make out if they're talking about increased bandwidth or increasing routing efficiency.
cause, you know, they've got a fan and plastic shrouding - sort of like red paint makes a car go faster.
This has been around since at least October 2005. A slightly better article that contains a little more information (albeit its still kinda vauge) is here
It's the Tabernacle from Zardoz!
All that means is that you'll hit your monthly caps in three days instead of four...
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
I am guessing that it is all still a bit secrety, but basically the technology will allow optical network switches instead of electronical.
Optical circuits.
"The scratched glass we've developed is actually a photonic integrated circuit," Eggleton said.
"This circuit uses the 'scratch' as a guide or a switching path for information - like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity."
An initial demonstration proved it possible to achieve speeds 60 times faster than existing local networks.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world
of what this guy's smokin?
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
I'm sure that I'm missing something really important, but I seem to remember Agilent Technologies announced a photonic switch all the way back in Y2K...
their own dog food, took my browser over 3 minutes to load Techworlds page.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Well, I see that the Aquinas Protocol is finally about to be in place.
I'm a doctor, not an ISP.
Darn, the technology's moving backwards In 2005 they promised 1000 times the bandwidth.
http://www.scienceinpublic.com/2005/cudos.htm
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
--Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It sounds like they're is bit-interleaving multiple data streams onto one faster data stream. It's bit-level time-division multiplexing, like the 16 voice channels on a T1 line. That's useful for pumping more data through expensive long-haul fibers like undersea cables, and thus a good project for Australia. It's a better way to make a big pipe, but it doesn't do anything for switching and routing.
There's interest in building a pure photonic router, but this isn't it. Not yet.
...but to take advantage of this, doesn't it mean that the ultimate end user and wherever they are connecting to both need to be on optical networks, end to end? Like, how much difference would this be anyway on my copper dialup connection, or even folks on copper dsl or copper cable? Will my modern full bloat AJAX page I am trying to view go from a minute and half to kinda sorta almost load, to a minute and 29.999999 seconds instead? And my ISP bill and phone line bill go up several bucks apiece to achieve such a "new speed increase"?
I have photonic switches all over my home and office!
the article which made me ask myself if the author and/or the editor knew WTF the press release was about.
Come back when you've learned the difference between nano (millionth) and pico (billionth or 1,000th of a millionth.)
This is the problem when 'soit disant' journalists aren't.
I'll believe a hacker any day before a journalist who can't get the facts straight.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
that statement has to be qualified.
300,000 KPS in a vacuum or...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I have tested this on my car. I scratched my windshield and now can Photonic Drive. My car is not any faster but when the light hits the scratches its very groovy in a photonic way...
... without costing the consumer any more
... I think it will cost the consumer more. A lot more.
Oh
At least here in the U.S. I'm sure our Asian friends will enjoy their new hundred gigabit connections.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...CUDOS goes to them.