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Terabit Ethernet Inches Closer To Reality
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Australia, Denmark, and China have combined efforts to show the feasibility of terabit-per-second Ethernet over fiber-optic cables. The solution involves a photonic chip that uses laser light for switching signals, and a form of the exotic material type, chalcogenide, or arsenic trisulfide."
I suppose you forgot about internet back bone links. Terabit Ethernet should hopefully enable Tier 1 ISP's to provide really fat pipes to ISP's so we can finally get more bandwidth. The bigger the backbones the faster our broadband can be. Well at least that's my fantasy. 100mbit boradband should be cake walk with tubes that fat.
Okay, I'm the author of the Ars Technica piece, and that make me laugh.
Talking to the researcher, Eggleton, made my head slightly explode, because he's looking 5 to 20 years into the future with the research he's on top of today.
But they have practical devices that show that the stuff can be hand-built, and that's what blows my mind.
The future isn't in plastics -- it's in glass!
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Being someone who works at a porn company with multiple dedicated lines buried under the ocean, I can say this is very true. We test all the equipment we have to the limits.
I worked for a lot of mom and pop companies that thought they had problems.
We are pretty much a dedicated Foundry and Cisco debugging team.
When a single server gets over 10,000 hits a second (yes, second, not minute) - it tends to stress your equipment.
Times that by a few hundred servers and you get the idea.
I used to deal with simple PHP and Apache issues before. Performance? Was never an issue.
Now half our stuff is written in heavily optimized C, our kernels are heavily tweaked and even Squid isn't fast enough to keep up.
We even have our own custom caching software.