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100-Petabit Internet Backbone Coming Into View
lostinbrave notes laboratory work that could lead to long-haul network cables capable of exceeding 100 Petabits per second.kilometer. "Alcatel-Lucent said that scientists at Bell Labs have set an optical transmission record that could deliver data about 10 times faster than current undersea cables, resulting in speeds of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer. This translates to the equivalent of about 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer, or sending about 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago. ... The transmissions were not just faster, they were accomplished over a network whose repeaters are 20 percent farther apart than commonly maintained in such networks, which could decrease the costs of deploying such a network."
Great, all my pr0m will have online mirror backups.
http://www.michel.eti.br
No, it means that it takes longer to transmit information over large distances because of this little thing, which people tend to forget about; no matter how much information you can send at one time, you'll still have some lag which you must take into account so YES, there is such a term as "bits/second/kilometer". It takes the light over 8 minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun in void. In other materials it would take even longer, because light does not have infinite speed. There is a deceleration you have to take into account.
It is solved, it's just that USA is held back by a braindead telecom-structure, this is political barrier not a technological one.
Here in Norway, I've got 4-5 different technologies to choose from, that all trump what you've got. First there's ADSL and ADSL2, the former ain't much better than what you've got, stopping at around 2M/512kbit, but ADSL2 is available up to something like 10M/1M, which is already a significant improvement.
With similar speed, there's mobile broadband, 2-3Mbps download and 500kbps upload, it's got worse latency though so no good for gaming. (but nice in working also when you're traveling)
Then there's internet-over-coax, i.e. alongside cable-tv, this offers speeds up to 50Mbps, though the most popular offering is 3.5 or 7Mbps.
And if none of that will satisfy you, get fibre-to-the-basement with physical capacity for several Gbit/s, but actually offering internet-speeds of up to 100M/100M (i.e. symetrical) to private homes at the moment, the lack of higher speeds offerings if from lack of demand though, not because of any technological restrictions on the last mile.
Most people settle for something in the 3M to 10M range, though, I've got fibre, and that's the most popular solution, but even a 2-nerd household like mine don't really have a reason for more than 25M/25M, so that's what we have.
The same technologies would work fine in USA too -- if only the political barriers of the entrenched telecom-monopolies where removed.