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.

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:Download more and more

[AmiMoJo]

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