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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.
"... 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...
Disregard that, I suck cocks - err the article was talking about throughput not speed of transfer.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
You can blame me. I voted for CUDOS
rewriting history since 2109
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.
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.
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 |
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 ... ;)
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
Someone go invent an x-ray connection, or something.
I think the governments will see right through that plan.
Since the title says 'switching', I'm guessing it's routing efficiency. I've not RTFA but I'm planning to in a minute if that makes things any better ;)
Totally agree with you about the latency thing. I was reading reviews of Battlefield Bad Company for the PS3 the other day, someone has said "this game has no lag!". While the server/client communication may be more efficient than other similar online games, there's no way it will have 'no' lag (which I would equate to latency). And in fact, when I've been playing it myself some games have had some serious lag anyway, which I doubt was my own connection as connecting to a new server tends to sort out the problem. I seem to get a lot of dropped packets on some servers as my character actually drifts backwards :s
Most people just don't know what they're talking about when it comes to things like networking, but they'll try to pretend they do*. What else is new..
* that's what I do anyway \o/ these suckers are paying me to administrate their network and I have no idea what a subnet mask looks like, or why a subnet would even want to hide its identity
which is totally what she said
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