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Irish Gov't Invests In Color-Coded Fiber Optics
c0mpliant writes "The Irish government has invested a further €5 million, after already having invested €5 million one year ago, in a new system of fiber optics which heralds an era of virtualization of fiber networks, using color coding to enable multiple fiber providers to serve businesses and homes, often on a single strand of fiber. The technology, which has already sparked interest from companies such as BT and IBM, is already in its first phase and boasts an impressive 2.5 terabytes capacity, double the capacity of the London phone system. The company behind the technology, Intune Technology, is comprised of a group of ex-UCD photonics researchers and has been around since 1999 and are based in Dublin. The project is set to be completed by 2020."
They are going to be quite interesting colours, indeed. Fashionable, I presume.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Meh, my hard drive can store almost that much already.
It really is about time the irish government invested in improving connectivity. we are so far behind the average we may aswell be hand delivering packets.
Maybe now i can get an affordable internet connection.
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
I assume that by 'colour coding' what the summary actually means is Frequency Division Multiplexing, which isn't exactly new.
Reading TFA it looks to me like a situation of "we've 'invented' this amazing technology, give us money". That may be unfair I admit. What IS interesting is the idea of the fibre being shared by competing telcos. Has that been done before?
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
and quite happy about this
but people here (mostly USasians :D) need to know that Ireland had the most expensive bank bailout in world per head of population, almost 10x your mess
and probably the most incompetent and corrupt government in western world, who are now running a deficit of 20% of GDP which would make the Greeks look good
and we will be paying for this for many generations :(
this is a coloured lining on a gray cloud :(
Whiskey was invented to prevent the irish from ruling the world
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
As far as I can tell this is just a standard implementation of the well known technology known as wavelength-division multiplexing. And calling it "color coding" makes me, as an Engineer, cringe. I am sure it's nice for Ireland to get a new core network, but how this is news for Slashdot is way beyond me...
Network virtualization is just used as a buzzword here. There is good work being done in the network virtualization field (See for example http://www.geni.net/ and http://www.fp7-federica.eu/ but as far as I can tell these guys are not doing anything revolutionary.
Here's a Presentation from April with some detail. There's more to this than just regular WDM.
They could just talk to Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, or any other major network infra provider and get DWDM (read "extra colors") capability rolled into their switch. It would probably cost 5m Euro, but the tech already exists (and has since the mid 70's).
Intune Networks (...) has developed a technology that can enable a single strand of fibre to move from carrying one signal from one operator to carrying data from 80 telecoms and TV companies all at once."
Do they mean they have "invented" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing? I'm puzzled.
Yes, but being 2.5 TB/sec it will be only for a second.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
oh for God's Sake...
This is something I've been pondering for a while, why don't we have color coded streets in our biggest cities so that navigation would be easier for us Human Beings ? Human Beings understand colors and places, and can put those two together in their little memories (brains they call them) and can use that information to easily assosiate things with other things, thus remembering for example that Main Street is blue and takes me to the Green Zone, and throught that I have to take the pink road, turn left and then follow the yellow lines, and boom, I'm at the Market Zone.
Human Beings are so simple. I wish our Systems were too.
GeoKone.NET
We've seen your world, yer welcome to it.
Another thing for the Catholics & Prods to argue over. Who gets the green wires...
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Wavelengths, we're pretty much always talking near-infrared. The most often used wavelength range is the so-called C-band (1530–1565 nm). This is mainly because this is where Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers work, which are necessary to create very long links without repeaters (also this is where the absorption minimum of fibres is). Less common is the L-band 1565-1625 nm. There's also the O and E band this are AFAIK mainly legacy bands which were used at the beginning of fibre optic communications. (Dense) Wavelength division multiplexing WDM/DWDM systems have channel spacings of 100 or 50 GHz bandwidth, i.e. ~1 or 0.5 nm at 1550 nm (look up ITU grid for more info). Today they usually carry 10 Gb/s data, however more and more 40 Gb/s and the next standard is 100 Gb/s (this actually uses multi-level phase and amplitude coding). About the pushing microwaves over optic lines, that's not really desired, absorption is too high, you also need diameters on the scale of a wavelength (depending on your index contrast) and finally you would not gain much, the bandwidth of your channels depends on your carrier frequency at microwave wavelengths the carrrier frequency is a couple of 100 GHz max. so that's the full bandwidth you get. compared to the C-band which contains about 70 channels at 100 GHz bandwidth each. So really no point.
so the irish are asserting that there are financial benefits in adapting this prismatic fibre optic technology?
in other words, there is a pot of gold, at the end of the rainbow?
where did the irish get such an idea?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it