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UK Researches Future 10Gbps Broadband Technology
MJackson writes "The UK Technology Strategy Board, an executive non-departmental public body established by the UK Government in 2007 and sponsored by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, has invested £1M into over a dozen research projects for the development of ULTRA Fast up to 10Gbps broadband technologies. The ultimate aim, the development of pan-European Ultra Fast Broadband, could give EU companies a massive competitive advantage on a global scale."
I'm from the US. Can I at least have 100Mbps to my house please? Kthxbye.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
Please keep me UPDATED on this TECHNOLOGY. It seems to be very PROMISING. I would be ULTRA happy if I had access to 10Gbps!
(sorry, I have that disease which makes it IMPOSSIBLE to modulate the volume of my TYPING)
that can handle that as well :)
o and the rest of the bottlenecks sorted on the internet
also no *aa people so I can dload stuff for free..
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
we drop "bits per secons" marketing and start using well... you know, bytes?
10gbps per second, yeah sure right. We are talking about the same country? England? Land of BT and shite infrastructure.
I'm sure they will be able to offer up to 10gbps as long as you are within 300ft of the node, but at 301ft it will most likely drop down to 1.7mbps.
If you want to come to a country that has an even worse data/phone infrastructure than the US, all you have to do is catch a plane to jolly ol' England.
After living in this country for 3 years, all I have to say is that there is a special place in hell, right next to the people that sexually molest hamsters, for all employees of BT.
I'm sure they will be able to offer up to 10gbps as long as you are within 300ft of the node, but at 301ft it will most likely drop down to 1.7mbps. If you want to come to a country that has an even worse data/phone infrastructure than the US, all you have to do is catch a plane to jolly ol' England.
After living in this country for 3 years, all I have to say is that there is a special place in hell, right next to the people that sexually molest hamsters, for all employees of BT.
Its Orwellian, isn't it?
We have a Department of Culture, Media and Sport. What the hell is that? Now we turn out to have a Technology Strategy Board (TSB), whatever that is.
Not only that, we seem to have these things called "executive non-departmental public bod[ies] (NDPB)", which this Board is an example of. What the hell are they? And also we now have a Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). When did that spring into being, and what the hell does it do on Tuesdays?
We also have numerous 'Partnerships", which are not elected, but have some role in local government, with boundaries that do not coincide with any other local government agencies or elected bodies. We have County Councils. Then we have District Councils under them. Then we have Town, City or Borough or Parish councils. We spend a fortune on coordinating all their activities, or more usually on failing to coordinate them. They all raise taxes of course. We have Regional Development Agencies, which then give some of the taxes back in response to applications for grants which usually run to 40-50 pages submitted in ten copies.
What we have here is the view that the state should have a role in everything that anyone does. And so we construct these government agencies, or government funded agencies, which have a nominal remit to make everyone follow a party line. And we also have the view that if you cannot change what a department does, fine, change its name. Then no-one will have a clue what it is supposed to be doing.
For example, do you have any idea at all what exactly "English Heritage" is? What "Natural England" is?
No, thought not. Neither does anyone else. But you are paying for them. This is called 'investing in our great public services'. Orwell would be proud of his foresight.
Meanwhile, what we are not spending our money on. If you think your child will have Downs syndrome, you may decide to have amniocentesis. This has an associated death rate. So, in the national health service, which we have no choice about being in, they give a test for Downs with a high false positive rate, rather than multiple tests with low false positive rates. This results in excessive numbers of amniocentesis tests, which in turn results in miscarriages. Because 'investing in our great public services' rises to all these departments and executive non-departmental public bodies, it will not rise to doing reliable tests for Downs. And so we have lots of miserable ladies all going through totally unecessary miscarriages in order to fund these quasi or real governmental bodies, and their pensions, to fall all over each other and get in each others, and our, way.
Its a sick country.
Again, the meme is presented that ultra-fast broadband leads to competitive advantage.
Is this a genuine proposition? Can it lend competitive advantage to one power bloc over another on a global scale? Probably not. Everyone is as smart as everyone else and the technology platform is relatively "flat". Throughout history, we have noticed that when something is discovered, it is often discovered almost simultaneously in multiple centres. If competitive advantage lasts only a short time, what kind of "advantage" is it?
8Gbps is required for VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry). Multiples of 10Gbps trunks are required for large Internet exchanges, datacentres etc. What is the killer application that mandates 10Gbps on a wide scale? Even 1080p video is only around 3Gbps. Are we suddenly talking about multiple HD streams batting their way around teh interwebs to consumers?
We are starting to move into uncharted territory by discussing these kinds of capacity at the network edge. Small amounts of megabits are relatively easy to handle at the consumer level. Drop a 1Gbps trunk on the floor and you have a major problem. Putting 10Gbps to the edge makes the network more "nervous" and much harder to maintain and control.
While full service delivery over Active Ethernet has scaled up incredibly well to the point where it is now accepted at corporate mission-critical level, do we have the necessary capability to design, deploy and maintain networks at the proposed capacities?
At a technical level, Bandwidth Delay Product will kill your throughput over anything but short distances. You probably reach a point of diminishing returns where 10Gbps is enough for metro and national connections, but beyond that it is trunked and we know how to do that.
So if it isn't competitive advantage and it isn't enabling consumer-level killer applications, then what is it? Are we getting to the point where we need to start thinking about massive high-speed interconnectivity in a totally new way? That it isn't just to enable commerce or competition or local or global advantage, but that it in fact is something much more valuable? Global self-awareness, anyone?
Majority of internet traffic is P2P. Who is going to use all the bandwidth when P2P will be blocked? This seriously concerns me, because I am doing a PhD in optical communications and I wonder if there will be market for the stuff I will develop during my PhD work.
I was thinking about starting running an ISP and include in the price of bandwidth unlimited music and video download. The money would go to the artists according to download statistics, but I do not think that the b-tards from media companies would even give me a license.
Tech like this will help content delivery over one connection. Everyone in the house can watch HD streams at the same time, other services like phones, power meters, video conferencing etc can easily use up bandwidth like this. It is a HUGE pipe when it comes to current consumer tech but it will help tech of tomorrow...
> "could give EU companies a massive competitive advantage on a global scale"
Indeed. Which is why they have invested the vast sum of 1 MEEEEEEEEELION dollars.
Clearly, forwarding the Departmental Press Release your boss insisted on issuing to SlashDot has paid dividends!
Knowing how the UK government (and certain ISPs) think, I am concerned that the might use higher speeds to leverage people into more intrusion on their private communications. Virgin currently offer the fastest broadband and they are notorious.
Also, there is a difference between what a UK ISP sells you as a high speed connection and what you actually get. The ISPs spat the dummy out not so long ago about how IPlayer was 'ruining' the Internet because *gasp* people were actually starting to use the bandwidth they had paid for. Just because you've got a bazillion gigabits between your house and the ISP, doesn't mean the ISP is planning to support that at its end. They might well be counting on you buying an uberfast connection just to show off then not using it.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Isn't 10Gb internet access going to further increase the technical requirements for implementing the kinds of surveillance and recording systems the UK government wants? If you think that the associated complexity and costs of their current & proposed systems are extreme already, just imagine if everyone's access were to get 5000x faster!
Maybe they'll have to give it up. I suppose we can only hope!
-- "Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all."
1 Million GBP
Aside from this looking like Mr Ombasa's email to me saying that his grandfather had died, we have this little symbol to denote this. It's above the 3, and looks like this. £. You can use £ if you have some weird furrin keyboard.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Competitive advantage on a global scale could be much more easily achieved by patent and copyright reform. Furthermore there should be a rule that all results from publicly funded research (even if only partially funded) are made publicly available.
Faster internet is nice but it won't help the economy if the relevant information is locked up legally!
It's now well known that Gordon Brown is totally indecisive and unable to make important decisions. As a result we have lots of initiatives to spend a little money to be seen to be "doing something". We have silly little uneconomic feeder schemes on solar and wind power, a fiddly little car scrappage scheme, endless talking about ID cards - but at the end of the day it's all fluff, and Brown is just working on the basis that the Conservatives will inherit the resulting mess and get the blame for dealing with it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You can't use it for anything! Online gaming doesn't use so much bandwidth. The slowest part of browsing web or email is quite often the connection on the other side. At every turn someone is trying to place a cap on the byte count and everything people download is suspect.
I for one (IFO) think that the use of (TUO) a three or four letter acronym (TFLA) makes the post much easier to read (ETR)
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
If this is long term development, like they are starting to work on the fundamental theoretical stuff now so it can be implemented in 10, 15, 20 years or something, then I can see the use. After all, there is very well the possibility that in the not too distant future there will be a use for this kind of bandwidth. For one, as nice as high def is, it clearly isn't fooling anyone in to thinking it's real. That's the ultimate goal: A picture so real you can't tell the difference. Well that'll need a lot more resolution in all definitions (higher pixel count, better colour depth, more frames, etc). There's also the issue of purchasing software online. Getting increasingly popular. It'd be nice to have the downloads happen much faster though. A modern game on a 10mbit line can take a couple hours to download. Minutes, or seconds of download time would be better, and future games will only get larger.
So, in the timescale of a couple decades, I could see this starting to be useful.
However, if they are talking about rolling this out next year, then yes, it is just so much fluff. There's not the bandwidth further up the chain to support it in any meaningful capacity, nor for that matter can your computer even make use of it. Currently, gig ethernet is pushing the limits of what consumer disks can handle. A good, modern 7200rpm drive can sustain somewhere in the realm of 100Mbytes/second on sequential data. Thus even with various network overhead, GigE is enough to slam that. So 10 times that to the desktop won't get you shit, assuming you even had a 10gig network card.
Basically I think it is smart to look to the future with broadband technologies, because new apps will continue to need more bandwidth. When computers first came about, the idea of even needing 10mbits to a house was ludicrous. After all, how could you possibly need those kinds of speeds for text? Now it is around what you want to get a good, fast experience with all the rich media out there. So that trend will continue.
However I also think it is stupid to try and push amazing speeds to the house right now, since invariably you end up starved for bandwidth further up and thus it is nothing more than marketing fluff. That's been my experience with some of the ultra-high bandwidth services offered in places like Japan. They sound good on paper, but more or less it's a giant WAN so you never get anywhere near the speed your connection is in theory.
If this really proves to be useful, do they really think they will have this speed to themselves for any substantial period of time? DARPA-sponsored universities and firms, Cisco, AT&T, and many other U.S. entities are probably working on the same thing.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Details of the projects funded are available at:
http://www.innovateuk.org/_assets/pdf/press-releases/photonics%20pr%20finalrev%2014may09%20-%20mb%20(2).pdf
Yet another "strategy board" to waste huge chunks of our money to sit around and pretend to work, under the guise of helping. Do we really believe amazing advances are going to come of this, or are we all just going to have forgotten about this a few years from now when some or other new "strategic initiative" is launched, while we fall further behind the East? Leave the money in the hands of the companies who stand to benefit from this, and set up true free market competition - if it's really good for the companies, they will not only do it themselves, but spend the money far more efficiently, because unlike these bureaucrats, they aren't assured of a future salary regardless of whether or not they produce anything at all. That's basically how we got ahead in the first place.
can we first get cheap/commodity 10Gbps **LANs** please?
Having 10Gbps broadband will be cute 'n all, but useless if my PC only uses 1Gbps...
There must be an UK's government importance why there's a research to find 10Gbps Broadband Technology.
> "the UK Government...has invested £1M into over a dozen research projects for the
> development of...up to 10Gbps broadband technologies.
Cisco CEO Dr. Evil: Oh no! One million pounds. Our corporation cannot afford that kind of competition.
Number Two: Actually, sir, last year we invested over $9 billion alone in R&D.
Cisco CEO Dr. Evil: $9 billion, huh?
Number Two: Yes.
Cisco CEO Dr. Evil: Well, I see. In the future, could somebody tell me these things? I'm the boss. Need the info.
> "The ultimate aim, the development of pan-European Ultra Fast Broadband, could
> give EU companies a massive competitive advantage on a global scale."
For about two weeks.
Maybe.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.