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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
"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.
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.
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.
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
lively.com might even feel faster with this new switching technology!
Bearded Dragon
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.
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.
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 |
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?
It obviously hasn't occurred to anyone else so I'll say it.
Firstly you don't want a 50% duty cycle on a data switch. That would basically scatter your bits all over the world. You want to switch, then send some bits. So switching in a picosecond doesn't mean you'll switch *every* picosecond.
Secondly, maybe it takes the picosecond switch a microsecond to recover before it can switch again.
Or it may just be a bad piece of journalism.
BTW a picosecond is a million millionth of a second not a million billionth of a second. The latter is a femtosecond. It goes milli, micro, nano, pico, femto. pico = 10^-12. You can see how easy it is to be off by 3 orders of magnitude, then ... ;)
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
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
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