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Intel Connects PCs To Devices Using Light
CWmike writes "Intel is working on a new optical interconnect that could possibly link mobile devices to displays and storage up to 100 meters away. The optical interconnect technology, Light Peak, could communicate data between systems and devices associated with PCs at speeds of up to 10Gbits/sec., said David Perlmutter, vice president and general manager of Intel's mobility group. The technology uses light to speed up data transmission between mobile devices and connected devices like storage, networking and audio devices, the company said. The technology could help transfer a full-length Blu-ray movie in less than 30 seconds, says a post on Intel's site. Light Peak can run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling mobile devices to perform tasks over multiple connected devices at the same time. 'Optical technology also allows for smaller connectors and longer, thinner, and more flexible cables than currently possible,' according to the Intel entry. It could also lead to thinner and fewer connectors on mobile devices, Perlmutter said."
.........fiber? :)
Is this just cheap components for Fiber? 100 meters is pretty far, I am guessing that this could have networking uses beyond ripping media to external drives.
What I've wanted for some time is a universal standard of structured cabling: I'd run a "bus" cable round the house, and in each room or termination point I'd have a box that allowed me to run different signals and different protocols over that bus - audio, HD video, ethernet, etc. No more running new cable runs each time I wanted to add a phone point, or an extra network socket. If this provides a way of doing this over a universal optical bus, then count me in...
So do I. It's called a "Blu-ray disc".
Anyway, when did "full-length Blu-ray movie" become a unit of data? What happed to the traditonal "Library of Congress" measure?
Having RTFA I am still at a loss to see how this differs from current 10Gb/s fibre optics. Is it just that they've given it a new name, as that's all that I can get out of the article.
I've always known that it's easier to connect my devices with light than with the lights off. Can't see the port otherwise.
My webcomic
Who would think to use Electromagnetic energy to transfer information! Maybe the new WiFi will use light so we can get these faster speeds.
I'd be interested in the cabling and connectors. 10Gb/s over fiber is certainly good, and would have a variety of fun uses; but is hardly groundbreaking, you've been able to get 10Gb over fiber for a while now.
To be putting it in consumer electronics, though, you pretty much have to make the cabling and connectors quite durable and generally idiot proof. This hasn't, historically, been the first set of attributes you associate with optical fiber(it's a hell of a lot more durable than you'd expect a tiny thread of glass to be; but you have to care about turn radius, and dust and stuff getting on the connectors, and whatnot). Either Intel is just handwaving, or they actually think that they've got a set of mechanical designs that'll let fiber be as robust as USB, and still work despite accumulations of pocket lint, and people rolling over cables with chairs, and stuff getting bent in laptop bags, and whatnot.
Bright idea.
and 10 gigabit Ethernet is an existing standard, also handles "multiple protocols simultaneously," and depending on the PHY, can go much farther than 100 meters.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
1) The article is about a cable.
2) You probably don't have a 10Gb/s cable
3) You certainly don't have a 100m long 10Gb/s cable.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Can anyone enlighten me as to which part of this story is meant to be news?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's done over a cable - something the summary and most articles I've seen on it has failed to make apparent.
I did wonder about its usefulness myself, though. Why would I need to connect my iPhone to five different things at once? I rareky even need to connect my laptop to more than one or two things at a time.
Then I gave it some more thought and it occurred to me: at some point in the not-too-distant future smartphones will have the capabilities of today's laptops in terms of computing power and storage. You're unlikely to use that much power on the go, and you're hampered by the small screen and keyboard. But, for at least a segment of the population, you'll be able to dock your supersmartphone much like you can dock a laptop today. The dock will connect to a larger monitor, perhaps a keyboard and mouse (though those may be wireless direct to the phone), network, optical drive, offline storage, printer, and other peripherals. Your smartphone would be the computing guts of a much broader and capable system.
But the docking connectors on dock-able laptops are enormous compared to the size of a smartphone. Having a single, small, optically-based connector that can connect your phone to all those other devices will be key to this paradigm.
That is, of course, unless wireless technologies completely supplant wired connections for peripherals.
Source: http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm - interesting facts
I'm confused as to how useful this is - can someone convert blu-ray movies to libraries of congress for me?
What you describe is similar to the old 10base5 (thicknet) Ethernet. Structured cabling uses a star topology.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You could call it "S/PDIF"...
Hang on, are there cables or are there not? If this is wire-less (something like IR) and reliable then that sounds like quite a big achievement, if not then it just sounds like fibre optics with a bit of a twist. I can't tell from the description or the article whether this new "Light Peak" is a system over wires (at which point why trumpet the mobile applications?) or some big jump in wireless peripheral connection.
Pretty interesting stuff from a layman's point of view. Does this mean that eventually my internet connection will get faster (because it's really slow these days) and I'll be able to enjoy DubLi.com without having to wait too long?
Yes I do, and Yes I do.
I have a bundle of at least 16 100Gb/s cables that run over 2Km. the only thing not letting my fiber optic cable run 160Gb/sec is the transceivers at each end are too low of quality to do so. so we live with 2 paltry 100Bt fibers a couple are used for video, and the rest are dark for future use.
This cable was laid 5 years ago way before Intel decided to discover fiber optics.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Is it just that they've given it a new name, as that's all that I can get out of the article.
So the non-article-reading crowd wins again. I gathered this much from the summary.
Benchmarks dude, I would like to know what you are running to take a 25gb dvd into your pc using ANY cable (usb, firewire...) I would like to see that happen in 30 seconds...pls show me the proof.
Well, the title was not very helpful - it came from the first of the linked articles. The second was a bit more informative but still quite vague.
The interesting thing here seems to be that they're planning to tunnel multiple protocols over the optical link. So you might be hanging monitors, USB devices, SATA drives, whatever off this link. It'd be a bridge that could tunnel your device connections to somewhere quite physically distant, using only a single cable. One assumes (maybe this is a big assumption) that an important part of the effort is in getting hardware that can efficiently do the encapsulation / decapsulation of the various device protocols. I'm not entirely sure why you couldn't do this over a 10Gb ethernet link, with some kind of protocol for tunneling over ethernet. I'd speculate that it'd make the controller chips more expensive if you did this but I really don't know. Everything is guesswork anyhow, until they give us more information.
The main thing I can see this being useful for is stuff like blade desktops - the real computer you're using as your desktop is just a blade server in a chilled room, with sysadmins leaving it regular sacrificial offerings for optimal uptime. The monitor, USB devices, everything would then be connected to the blade desktop by a single optical cable. Only one slim cable to route for each desktop, everything runs over it so the "desktop" can still have functional USB ports etc. Having an optical cable seems like it would be ideal for that kind of scenario. The ultimate thin client. If you have multiple Light Peak ports on a single blade then perhaps you could get multiple virtual machines to drive separate workstations, making your datacentre density even higher.
Other stuff it might be interesting for is some kind of cheap (?) high speed networking, home media servers, low cost SAN hardware, etc. Depending on how they do it of course. But if they made it generic enough it would be really interesting for a lot of applications that are now priced out of the reach of individuals and probably also small businesses.
The article is scarce on information. I agree with all the others who've said that this seems like they re-invented fiber. I'm guessing since they mentioned mobile devices that this is really a low-power, low-cost fiber transmitter that they're talking about. Current electro-optical transceivers at 10gbps are pretty large in form factor and suck up a lot of power (~300mW) which would be inappropriate for mobile devices.
perhaps your 5 digit uid has blinded you
1000Bt is enough TODAY
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
A 10Gbps link should roughly be able to do that.
Getting the data fast enough off the DVD might be an issue, not to mention getting storage that can write fast enough.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Current consumer cables can be kicked around the floor, dropped in water, and not have the terminating ends covered with protective caps when not in use ....and still the connectors perform their intended function. Welcome to an all-new tech support hell calls on all the stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H inventive methods consumers find to destroy fiber connectors. The company which provides the cables for this venture should probably use a pricing model which includes a 50% failure rate in the first 6 months for all optic cables. Good luck.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
We have had IEEE 802.3ae for six years now. What's the benefit over your run-of-the-mill 10 Gbps Ethernet?
Transfer a full-length Blu-ray movie in less than 30 seconds?
From what to what?
Really? The article positions this as a consumer technology. What is there in the consumer space that can either supply or store bits fast enough to keep up with this? Even enterprise-class storage would sweat to keep up with this.
Laboratory conditions used to create the marketing specs don't count.
Why hasn't some enterprising inventor come up with a cable/connector that combines optical (for data) and copper (for power) in a single cable?
Probably wouldn't be great for long distances, but I could imagine something like that having some advantages for replacing USB and ethernet w/PoE (at least in a home or office setting).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
The library of Congress contains over 10 terabytes of information (a 1 with 13 zeroes after it). If you used Light Peak technology operating at 10 billion bits per second it would take you only 17 minutes to transfer the complete library of Congress.
If you can transfer 1 LoC in 17 minutes, then you can transfer 0.000108243216 LoCs per second.
Since the Blu-Ray movies can be transferred in less than 30 seconds, the size of the Blu-Ray movie is anywhere from 0.000108243216 LoCs, or (30 * 0.000108243216), that is, 0.09417159792 libraries of congress.
I think they got their bits and bytes mixed up. 10^13 bytes = 8*10^13 bits = 8000 seconds (2h13m) at 10^10 bits per second.
1 LOC is 2000 BRM.
The speed is 50 libraries of congress per microfortnight.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Lightning generally enters a building in one of two ways. Either it enters through the power grid or through the phone lines (I suppose it would be possible to enter through cable lines as well but I have never heard of this happening.) Since phone lines aren't often connected directly to computers anymore, lightning entering this way will kill your DSL modem rather then your computer. Generally lightning doesn't find it's way through the DSL modem and in to your NIC. Nowadays the most common way for lightning to kill a computer is through the power grid. Since photovoltaic cells have not progressed to the point where we can get grid power over fiber optics, this tech won't do anything to alleviate the problem.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
Since Blu-Ray refers to a disc medium, once the "full-length Blu-Ray movie" is no longer on the physical disc, but on a "light pipe," how is it a Blu-Ray movie anymore?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Never really thought about it 'til now but -- why isn't there a consumer-level optical PHY already??.
The only thing close to a technological limitation that I can imagine would have to be the modem silicon
Benchmarks dude, I would like to know what you are running to take a 25gb dvd into your pc using ANY cable (usb, firewire...) I would like to see that happen in 30 seconds...pls show me the proof.
I can do it in 5 seconds, without a cable! It's a special technology called "DVD tray" :)
Heh... I would say someone using a supercomputer cluster in an RF-hostile environment for now. I'm not wholly sure where Light Peak's supposed to take things outside of that, though. They're working on 40Gbit and 100Gbit interconnect for clusters, etc. right now and 10Gbit is in ATCA blade server cages right now as the fabric interconnect. Perhaps there's higher signalling rates more readily possible than with copper on this- or perhaps there's less of a distance problem with it like there is with 10G Ethernet.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
OMG! You can use light to transmit data over a cable? That's freaking crazy!! Wow.
What's next? Some way to switch circuits without using tubes or relays? Yeah -- like that would ever happen.
Actually, if you do your cabling right, yes you can. Ethernet's got distance limitations- fiber has less of one. Power can be ran the same distances if you pair it up around the fiber and make it part of a special connector... Moreover, the crowd they're tailoring this to doesn't care as much about power concerns over the interconnect. They want reliability, ease of cabling, distance, and overall speed- and they're not wanting to dangle all sorts of things like people do with USB stuff.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Wish i had mod points...this is exactly what i thought.
You can backup your dvd unto your pc in 5 seconds with dvd tray.
I have never heard of that, are you understanding what I am asking?
Backing up an actually dvd (all its info) from the disc to your hdd, so that after
you can actually watch the dvd on your pc's drive WITHOUT having the dvd in the dvdvrom.
I have never heard of such a benchmark.
That's exactly why I said what I said, this does not exist yet...the combo of technology to allow for this to happen at 5 seconds as the person claims to be able to do, is impossible right now,
maybe in the near future....
... in 1979 10base5 cost $thousands per node. In the mid-90's, a 100Mb switch port cost a thousand. In the early '90's, 1000baseT switch ports cost ~$300 each.
Today, 1000baseT is included on $500 laptops, and you can get a 5 port 1000baseT switch for $25. If you think similar things won't happen with 10G, you're wrong.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
...unless, of course, you take into account that S/PDIF is a protocol (like TCP, IP och Ethernet) that has nothing to do with the medium on which it's transmitted. You could have two monkeys yanking a rope (which does seem to be the case for the main internet-bearing lines accross the Atlantic from time to time) transmitting TCP/IP-packets between eachother.
Holy shit, you are right. I think if they are going to be on top of the latest "scientific standards" it would behoove them to figure out the basics. Talk about running before you walk...
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Quit introducing accuracy into this discussion!
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
I wondered how long a "full length Blu-Ray movie" is? Is it, like, just under 100 metres so it fits in the cable? Or is it 3 km, so that you have to drag that 100m cable for 30 seconds at 1 m/s to transfer it?
All these new units of measurement get me really confused.
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
I used to manage an electronic repair store, let me assure you lightning does enter on the cable line, I have seen many TV's fried this way.
A Smith & Wesson beats four aces -- Murphy's Law of Poker
dust and stuff getting on the connectors, and whatnot .. and still work despite accumulations of pocket lint
Although this isn't mentioned specifically in the video, it appears as if the transceiver is meant to be permanently attached to the fiber. This would be the easiest solution to the lint issue, plus it would eliminate the complexity of making good optical connections. Essentially, I think they intend to have the transceivers molded into both ends of the fiber and it would probably look just like an USB cable to the average user, only with fiber running end-to-end, rather than copper. Of course, I'm not sure USB can reach 10 Gbs, so it probably would have a different type of electrical connection to the host PC.
I think the key innovation here is that they can have a short, high-speed electrical connection between the PC and the transceiver, and a large arbitrarily long fiber link between the transceivers themselves.
Do not stare into cable with remaining eye.
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Hahaha... you're right. They must have used a float to calculate this... damn those Intel rounding errors!
Intel, try googling before you run: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=10+terabytes+%2F+10000000000+bps
There were serial connections before USB, but USB was still groundbreaking technology. Intel is working on optical connections for consumer devices. That means it's going to be cheap, simple and robust or it's going to fail. Doesn't sound like needing expensive splicing hardware and using fragile glas fibers to me. POF (Plastic Optical Fiber) kits are already on the market in the form of Ethernet transceivers, but they don't go beyond 100Mbps and are mostly niche products. If Intel has created a system where the transceiver components are small and cheap enough to put them into portable devices, while pushing the data rate up significantly, then this has USB killer written all over it.
Intel has been involved in fibre for fibre's entire history.
They have done optical RnD for a very long time.
I can't imagine why you have 2Km of fibre in your house.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nothing new here
I have a bundle of at least 16 100Gb/s cables that run over 2Km. the only thing not letting my fiber optic cable run 160Gb/sec is the transceivers at each end are too low of quality to do so. so we live with 2 paltry 100Bt fibers a couple are used for video, and the rest are dark for future use.
FTFA These are cable inside your computer.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Yes, infrared is, in a way, the same thing, but the main difference, is speed. IrDA has been around for, what, a decade or longer? But, it's not 10 Gb/s.
Engineers can't design for the present, lest their products be obsolete-on-arrival. It's not unreasonable to think that storage and bus speeds will get faster, as will the speed of hard drives (SSDs are already increasing disk storage performance, though, granted, not many people have those, *yet*). If we are using optical externally to increase data transfer, there's no reason to think this tech won't be applied *internally* to allow the Mobo to send data to your SSD (or whatever other storage device tech comes out which replaces current HDD and SSD tech).
So, if this will support 10Gb/s on arrival (and one can suppose, based upon past experience with technology, that if the 'first generation' of this tech is 10Gbit/s, through refinement, they can scale that up faster over time - just like IDE and SCSI got much faster over the course of their lifespans), then this is probably a good candidate to push us forward for another 10 years, or maybe longer.
Signals actually travel slightly faster in a copper coax than they do in a glass fiber, I've been told. So, while the bandwidth is impressive, your ping times are going to increase by a few nanoseconds...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How long does it take to transfer the blu-ray disc 100m if I toss it like a frisbee?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
As opposed to USB 3, which is...Intel's (and other consortium members) version of USB 3.
That may be so Cable Guy, but if they ever figure out the "conversion issue" they'll be able to transport more than Blu-ray movies. You'll finally be able to say those words you've been longing for: "Beam me up Scotty". Quit hampering forward progress .... now where's my iPod cabl.... oops.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
10G supports optical PHY.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
because unlike most slashdotters. I go outside and have a job. I have 2KM of fiber connecting two locations that I am in charge of.
and they have NOT been there from the beginning. Corning was. and a Corning rep demoed this new "fancy" tech 4 years ago at CEDIA.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Infrared *is* light, you know...
Technically, any wireless link uses photons (of too low wavelength to be considered light though :) ).
Paul B.
Data centers would really benefit from this.
Replacing Huge bundles of cable that needs to be electrically shielded with ODN (Optical Data Network) cabling.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I thought one of the limitations with using optical fibres is that they aren't very bendy. Certainly not as bendy as, say, a soft ethernet cable. For my 90 degree wire bundles, will they work at all?
Or did they somehow invent super-flexi fibres?
Its the PCjr keyboard incident all over again... the nightmares!!! The sore arms trying to align it...
Seriously tho, why not just enhance bluetooth instead? Its here, its now..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why the heck would you want a cable to be named Sony/Philips Digital Interface? Shouldn't that be IDIFC in that case?
You could have two monkeys yanking a rope (which does seem to be the case for the main internet-bearing lines accross the Atlantic from time to time) transmitting TCP/IP-packets between eachother....
I have a semi-serious question: Suppose you set up two robots to be 'monkeys' pulling on a rope stretching across the Atlantic, what would the ping time be? Would the other end of the rope start moving faster/slower than a signal going over a cable?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You would have a p-wave traveling over the rope. Guessing from the equation[1] for the speed of a p-wave, the speed of your signal will be pretty low. You would probably be measuring ping times in hours instead of milliseconds.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-wave
The FDIV bug lives on?
And if you overclock your Wii using the new "LightPeak TM" technology, you can finally have "real" light sabers for wii users to play/fight with!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
AT&T was also there back in 67-8. At that time it wasn't fiber optics it was sending signals via lasers. The problem with sending signals via laser was atmospheric interference, which was taken care of by sending the signal through a glass fiber.
How do I know this? I was at a demonstration at my junior high school by a guy from AT&T when it was THE phone company. This was, of course back in the 67-8 school year.
AG
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
it's Intel's version of USB 3
Well, why not? A second look might not be a bad thing. But only if it doesn't lead down a blind alley in the way that Firewire did. If Apple goes down this path as the article suggests, and uses Light Peak as its only interface, it would be buying trouble. Having only grudgingly been forgiven for leaving customers with Firewire devices in the lurch (with their smaller laptops) in favour of a de facto standard USB 2.0, telling them that they can no longer use their iPod or USB HDD will go down like a lead balloon.
In that sense, it would make more sense for Apple to throw in its lot with USB 3.0. At least a Type A plug will still fit in the hole, even if it is only at 480Mb/s.
what if the rope was completely non-elastic, weightless, and standed completely near the oceans surface (meaning the rope was following the earth's curvature), and the ocean and wind were completely calm around the length of the rope?
sky HD+ does has e-net just not on yet. You may get direct tv stuff like pc play back, vod, mvr, soon.
Such an object can not exist according to the special theory of relativity. Also see the Ehrenfest paradox.
1394/Firewire is wonderful; the only downside is that it lacks the wonderful driver classifications (and support) that USB has.
As far as I am concerned, if Apple designed the basics again as they did with firewire and intel adds the driver support that USB has it'll be a win-win situation.
PLUGS:
I just hope that Apple designs the plugs because USB plugs always have been stupid!
Not that firewire is a whole lot better-- but I for one hate this A/B plug insanity that we must deal with. I only want 2 kinds of plugs-- ones without copper(power) and ones with copper. No mini plugs or new mini standards later. Also, there is no reason these connectors can not be extremely small and work no matter how you rotate them into the socket. A variation on a headphone plug would be circular... In fact, if one was smart they would take one of those AC/DC power adapter plugs and run the optical down the center of it-- consumers could use an AC/DC adapter for charging-- resulting in 1 kind of socket in devices that handles charging, power, and data. Naturally, I'm assuming 1 optical cable; ideally you'd want 2 which would make it harder to make such a plug as small or round.
DRIVERS:
classes-- basing them on USB is a good idea; however:
I'd like to see the classes expanded - especially for mice - where there is a little room for these fancy products that add just 1 more button or another scroll wheel. Hardware makers are horrible at drivers and the better the classification system the less troubles consumers will have. Oh, a standard class for SERIAL and PARALLEL devices would be greatly appreciated! Especially for industrial uses-- we still run industry on serial and parallel.
Actually, a driver sub-classing system for drivers could be quite handy-- often we see devices that go slightly outside its class so it then must have a whole driver when its core functionality could have been handled without a driver... some get around this already but many devices do not. We need to encourage devices to comply with the closest standard class driver and then "subclass" it for their extensions. Properly implemented, this would result in more stable drivers because the OS would handle aspects of the standard class or at least provide the source code for the standard class driver (MS.) Ideally, the standard driver could be in kernel and the "subclass" would be in user space (I'm thinking of those hard disks with backup buttons or those DVD library systems... and Mac OS X which has split-space-drivers already.)
POWER:
Everybody has run into the power limits on firewire AND especially USB. If any power is to be provided, it should be done CORRECTLY this time. I can't believe 1394 didn't have enough to drive a HD when it was planned for disks. USB was hacked up so its understandable it has no real power. If we are going to bother to run copper then we should get some SERIOUS power down those wires for a change. So it adds some cost; you think buying power bricks is cheap? you think those things save power?? My computer's supply is much better than a cheapo power brick that constantly draws power; I leave my computer on all the time but those bricks are not. It would actually be GREEN to cut out the power bricks and run a HD from the connector. Oh, it would be nice to have an powerless version of the cable if I am going to network or hook a computer to some future TV; but also because long runs of low voltage will cost me more power than running from a power brick. Now, to get more bang out of our copper - I don't think it would be so horrible to go to 12V or higher-- many devices already must step down voltage. USB's 5V is just too low; it does however do a nice job at "tracking" power load.
The world needs a DC power standard for small devices desperately and the closest we've got is crappy USB and google's work for a DC power standard. Sure, I'm not saying it should handle 500W computers; although, if you think about it-- (dare i say it) a larger class of cable could power such devices.
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You do realize spdif is only a protocal and exists in multiple forms, including optical as well as coaxial (there are even rare forms that use BNC or XLR, similar to SMPTE) , and only accounts for 2 data streams (generally audio). If you were going down that path the least you could have said is ADAT - at least that accounts for 8 streams instead of 2.
For lack of a better signature...
Then you have 2Km of fiber connecting two separate commercial locations - the article is referring to consumer products. Your argument isn't even relevant to the topic at hand.
For lack of a better signature...
How about distributing the 25GB image accross 10 MLC SSD drives in a RAID 0 configuration and connecting them all to the computer via SATAII into a SAS card with 3 SAS-4xSATA adapters. With 10 drives, each distributed piece would be 2.5 GB, which should take about 12.5 seconds to transfer if each drive has a transfer speed of around 200MBps, followed by whatever amount of processing time was needed for the file to be rebuilt. It may be cumbersome and require a thick bundle of cables, but it is possible. Here's a similar experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs
For lack of a better signature...
You can't be using raid based drive technology for this discussion, as we are talking about most home users that have computers downloading from the internet some torrent, we are not talking about a setup with commercial like configurations and hardware.
My point was that as I know it, it is impossible with whatever technology you want to use to transfer from one drive to another drive using firewire, internet, ethernet, or usb, or even ram flash drives
to transfer a 25gb in 30 seconds...it just doesn't exist , maybe for the military, but even then I would say top notch DoD or NSA, not your regular bestbuy!!!