UK Research Aims For 100x Speedup In Fiber-Based Broadband

Mark.JUK writes "The UK governments Minister for Science, David Willetts, has awarded £7.2 million to help support the University of Southampton's newly rebuilt Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) and the development ('Photonics HyperHighway') of new technologies that would be capable of making broadband internet access over fibre optic cables 100 times faster than today." What would you like to do with 100 times your own current network speed?

Comments

Nothing really.

[Kjella]

What would you like to do with 100 times your own current network speed?

That would give me >2Gbit/s actual. I could stream what like 40 blurays simultaniously? Don't need it. Can't really imagine anyone who does, really. And I'd probably still be downloading from torrents because the TV/movie execs won't offer it here, no netflix, no hulu, no TV shows or movies on iTunes.

And for most things like series I follow my computer could just download it encrypted the night before in maximum quality, then deliver the key at release time. Bandwidth is really not a problem, at least the pirates seem able to deliver so it's strange if a big company couldn't. Sure I'd still take more if I could but it's no longer a bit deal. Before this is I had 2 Mbit down and that was horrible.

Re:Nothing really.

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you like to do with 100 times your own current network speed?

That would give me >2Gbit/s actual. I could stream what like 40 blurays simultaniously? Don't need it. Can't really imagine anyone who does, really. And I'd probably still be downloading from torrents because the TV/movie execs won't offer it here, no netflix, no hulu, no TV shows or movies on iTunes.

And for most things like series I follow my computer could just download it encrypted the night before in maximum quality, then deliver the key at release time. Bandwidth is really not a problem, at least the pirates seem able to deliver so it's strange if a big company couldn't. Sure I'd still take more if I could but it's no longer a bit deal. Before this is I had 2 Mbit down and that was horrible.

If there is one thing I've learned about computing technology is to never assume what you have, or will have is too much. I'm sure in 1980 a 20 megabit connection would have seemed ridiculous, now I wish I had one to play onLive. A 2gigabit connection seems ridiculous but there will be applications that can use it all (holograms perhaps).

Holograms?

[vrmlguy]

Just a few hours ago, /. had this story: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2222246/A-Kinect-Princess-Leia-Hologram-In-Realtime. If you follow a few links, you eventually arrive at http://www.media.mit.edu/spi/M2.html, where you will find these bits of information:

The resulting image is horizontal parallax only (HPO), with video resolution in the vertical direction, and holographic resolution in the horizontal direction.

and

The Holovideo Cheops system provides six synchronized frame buffers to drive our 256Kx144 display

I infer that holographic resolution takes 1,000 times the bandwidth of conventional video. So, yeah, I think I can think of ways to use this much bandwidth at home.

Re:As a current student of the University

[Anonymous Coward]

As of today, the fastest fiber NICs run at 100 Gbps (not a typo). I'm pretty sure the big Network Equipment Manufacturers (Cisco, Juniper, Broadcom et al.) are investing more than £7.2M in R&D to develop this too, so I'm kind of mixed. Also, most Carriers and ISP core networks still run on aggregated 10 Gbps, sometimes 40 Gbps, and none (as far as I know) run at 100 Gbps. So the "capacity crunch" they talk about is mostly due to a lack of investment from the companies...

I think L3 runs 100Gbps. The MLXe has 100Gbps line cards and aggregated 40Gbps is quite common on the backhaul networks. As most people have said, it's not the backhaul that's the issue, it's the last mile. Research into higher speeds over copper twinax is what we really need. I can't see any telco putting fibre to the door unless they are forced to, or it's a new build. Copper is going to be here for a very longtime, so let's get that sorted soon. Most Network analysts expect the traffic loads to explode in 2011/12 with double the amount of traffic in 2009/10, most of it driven by serving rich content (IPTV, streaming video etc.) so these very dense backbone are needed, but industry is already doing research in that dept.

Re:Download more and more

[AmiMoJo]

Video on demand like YouTube and iplayer are driving bandwidth requirements up, not pirates.