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

As a current student of the University

[el3mentary]

This is excellent news

Re:As a current student of the University

[Alarash]

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...

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:As a current student of the University

[Z00L00K]

So up to 10Tbps for the backbone if the factor is applicable to the backbone speed of 100Gbps. That's actually good news for video streaming.

And with that speed home - well, it would be a complete overkill since I'm satisfied with my 100Mbps.

But on the other hand - I do have friends that would love to transfer terabytes over (under?) the Atlantic Ocean of data on a regular basis.

Re:As a current student of the University

[mjwx]

As most people have said, it's not the backhaul that's the issue, it's the last mile.

In the end, it's the last mile that needs to be upgraded to fibre. Copper technologies are simply not good enough, especially on regular phone lines as most of the world has no access to HFC.

However the problem you have is that no private entity is willing to do it, with the long term scope of such a project and when a government does it they get bashed relentlessly by people who have no understanding of the technologies involved.

Re:As a current student of the University

[Cryacin]

I do have friends that would love to transfer terabytes over (under?) the Atlantic Ocean of data on a regular basis.

Yaay! Backup ping pong.

Re:As a current student of the University

[SomeKDEUser]

And independently of the tech issues, you don't want a last mile for-profit monopoly. At least if the gov owns the last mile, they can enforce competition between providers by ensuring fair access.

Re:As a current student of the University

[zach_the_lizard]

If you're worried about governments meddling with the Internet now, wait until they own the last mile. I bet the RIAA and MPAA are salivating at the possibility.

Re:As a current student of the University

[SomeKDEUser]

No I'm actually worried that the gov is not meddling enough. I believe that allowing private local monopolies to exist is the sign of a gov gone AWOL. And if you think that the *AA would be happy at the idea that there would be a great number of ISPs each with different policies, you are sorely mistaken.

Basically, ISPs can get away with caps, prioritising content, filtering traffic, because there is not enough competition. Who picks the ISP for mom and pop? the local geek. If he has choice, do you think the *AA-friendly ISP gets chosen?

How do you ensure the existence of a wealth of ISP? Easy: force the network owners to sell bandwidth wholesale with no strings attached. Then there will be competition to create the network, and competition between the ISPs for customers. This is how it works pretty much everywhere but the US and Canada. And guess who has the worse Internet (and telecom in general) of the developed world?

You believe in markets? So do I. You believe the market exists spontaneously and without (sometimes extensive) regulation? If so, I have a bridge on Valles Marineris to sell you.

Re:As a current student of the University

[zach_the_lizard]

Government can get away with all of that and much, much more. It may even be captured by private companies for their own purposes. See AT&T for such an example of what can happen.

Re:As a current student of the University

[SomeKDEUser]

Yes but in the end, you vote for the government. Corporations are accountable to none but their shareholders. And even then, not so much. So on one hand you have a solution that works imperfectly (it can only work as well as the effort people put into making elected officials accountable) and on the other hand a solution which can never work (a monopoly on a critical resource is a hell of a lot of power for anyone to wield that has profit as his only motive).

People get the government they deserve at least in the medium term. If you vote for people based on the fact that they sound like they believe in lies you would like to be true, you are responsible.

Re:As a current student of the University

[thogard]

The problem is most home fiber isn't point to point on pairs, its shared with between 32 and 1000+ people on a bi-directional fiber. This is causing problems with the higher speed PON versions since you have to coordinate the talk times of all the end points and you have to leave a quiet time between talk and listen phases so that you don't blind the receivers. A 1kbit packet on a 10 gig fiber takes up about an inch which means if you want to fill up a 10 gig back channel form a number home homes, you have to know how many inches each link is, coordinate the time to about a 1/100 of a nanosecond and then make sure they all talk at just the right time. Our best cheapish consumer clocks are based on GPS and they only know their internal time in the range of about 50 to 90 nanoseconds. 90 ns is about 135k worth of data that can be stepped on. Off the shelf point to point fiber has increase about 20,000 times in 40 years. Shared Passive Optical networks are 40 times faster in the lab today than they were 20 years ago.

Re:As a current student of the University

[Kjella]

Our best cheapish consumer clocks are based on GPS and they only know their internal time in the range of about 50 to 90 nanoseconds.

But why would you need to keep track of time as such? If you send a ping through the cable and back all modems can calculate ticks from the central and count ticks until the next sync. I figure the clock that drives my 3+ GHz processor has sub-nanosecond accuracy and putting one of those in a fiber optic modem doesn't sound unreasonable. My back-of-the-napkin protocol design would be:

1) Modem listens for clock ping-pong, finds delay in ticks
2) The central will for each cycle reserve a few time slots for new devices
3) Modem calculates central time and sends introduction in one of these slots with delay from central and checksum, which can collide but normally won't. If so the checksum will fail and they'll try again next cycle.
4) Central assigns modem a device id and starts assigning time slots. Since they know the delay of each modem they can make sure they don't collide. If they get crosstalk because one device has clock drift they can increase buffers on both sides for that one device.

I figure even with 1000 hosts you can afford to do this often, like once a second. It'll still be billions of ticks.between each sync. I'm probably missing something here, because this doesn't seem like that hard a problem.

Re:As a current student of the University

[mjwx]

If you're worried about governments meddling with the Internet now, wait until they own the last mile.

If it weren't for the Australian government fixing wholesale prices, there would be nothing but a for-profit monopoly on the last mile in Australia.

You're making it seem as if private entities will never abuse a monopoly yet a government always will. What colour is the sky on your planet.

I bet the RIAA and MPAA are salivating at the possibility.

And what exactly is stopping a private entity from doing just that?

Competition, sorry buddy but that doesn't exist on the last mile in either of our nations unless you have four different pairs of copper running into your house, one from each telco.

I know it will be a hell of a lot harder for a monitoring organisation to get through governmental bureaucracy then it is for them to pay off the telco monopoly to look the other way. Hell, the telco would even cooperate, they want the big downloaders gone so they can keep overselling their infrastructure with fake "unlimited" promises.

Download more and more

[SquirrelDeth]

Linux iso's.

Re:Download more and more

[mangu]

I'd rather download better quality Linux isos. I think if I could get 720p Linux isos that would be great, but not every Linux iso is available at that resolution. Some are ripped from VHS and others from TV, I usually avoid those.

Re:Download more and more

[AmiMoJo]

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

Re:Download more and more

[tlund]

Videos from HDTV are 720p

Or 720i. or 1080p. or 1080i.

Re:Download more and more

[tlund]

You are indeed correct sir.

Re:Download more and more

[McTickles]

That's why the BBC should pay you to watch their programmes on iPlayer :D so you can afford the bandwidth

Re:Download more and more

[commodore6502]

>>>Some are ripped from VHS and others from TV, I usually avoid those.

Videos from modern TV are 720p or 1080i, and far superior to VHS. I too avoid VHS but would happily accept a TV rip in high definition.

If I had 100x my current connection, it would be 70,000 kbit/s (70 Mbps). I would be doing exactly the same thing I'm doing now (watching television, youtube, and listening to radio). So basically: I don't need it.
.

>>>the fastest fiber NICs run at 100 Gbps

Wouldn't the bottleneck be the internet itself? The various servers between you and the website wouldn't be able to run that fast.

What I would like to do with 100x's the bandwidth.

[sixthousand]

Pay 100x's less.

Re:Socialist Gov't = Funding for Broadband Researc

[Adambomb]

Wrong nation dude.

The what now?

[tlund]

The current commercially available (more or less) technology does 100Gbit/s over fiber.

I tired to read the article to find out what they where really talking about .. but .. I can't find anything. Anywhere. Can anyone supply a URL for the actual original source for this "article"?

Re:The what now?

[jimmydevice]

Hypernet? Supernet? Zoomnet? Zapnet?, Turbonet? Jetnet? Speednet?, Superdupernet? Superhyperturbozoomspeed.net? Ack!

Re:The what now?

[s0litaire]

More like:
Photonic
Optimised
Resolution
Networks

or PORN for short...

Re:The what now?

[Alphathon]

Superhyperturbozoomspeed.net? Nah, they've gotta go with Compuglobalhypermeganet.

Re:The what now?

[yahwotqa]

...and to think it all began with Sneakernet.

Porn.

[Grapplebeam]

So much porn. I'd be downloading about one hundred times more than I do now.

Don't need it, have enough speed.

[gweihir]

Lets face it, even rampart copyright infringement is not enough to fill 10Gbps to the home (yes, fiber to the home is 100Mbps here and so is cable modem, at least for downstream). Unless the UK has really, really slow fiber and has not figured out others do it better already? Who know. Who cares.

Re:Don't need it, have enough speed.

[jimmypw]

It so will when it's 5000:1 contention. After all the speeds upped why can't the contention ratio be upped too.

Re:Don't need it, have enough speed.

[neokushan]

The UK has 100Mbit in some parts of the country and 50Mbit in a good chunk of the rest of it.

Re:Don't need it, have enough speed.

[jimicus]

Fibre to the home is very rare here in the UK. The incumbent telco (who still own much of the infrastructure, despite no longer being a monopoly) is rolling out FTTC, though their first priority is towns that already have cable.

Widespread FTTH is something I don't see happening for at least 10 years here.

Re:Don't need it, have enough speed.

[flurdy]

Like 640Kb, its not enough: With SuperHD (UHDTV) in 3D simultaneously streaming to my lounge, kitchen, both kids' bedroom, my 10 tuner PVR, and neighbourhood CCTv then 10Gbps is not enough. With one UHDTV stream in 2D already at 600Mbps then the 10Gbps bandwidth will soon be flooded.

Add my 6x2m live 3D streaming view over the Amalfi coast then I really need that 1TB bandwidth. (a never-going-to-happen idea I once had with http://anyview.org/

Considering the time this super Fibre network's research, commercialisation/productation(is that a word) an final rollout of required fibre and routers, it is going to be years before this becomes a reality. Probably in time for when we actually will have consumer UHDTV available....

(A BBC video on SuperHD.)

(I replied to this once already, but I wasn't logged in, and cant find it so perhaps it was not posted correctly and anyway someone has already made the same comment I said that someone once said 640Kb was enough. )

Re:Don't need it, have enough speed.

[Jorth]

I wish I lived in your UK not my UK... I live in the centre of a small city in the midlands, yes city, and I get 8mb you got 3-4 miles away from me to the outskirts and you will get 1-2mbit if you are lucky.

backbone only

[tlund]

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

Upgrading the speed of the fiber backbone does not mean an automatic speed increase in your broadband connection. It has nothing to do with ADSL or Cablemodems.

Re:backbone only

[vrmlguy]

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

Upgrading the speed of the fiber backbone does not mean an automatic speed increase in your broadband connection. It has nothing to do with ADSL or Cablemodems.

Haven't you ever heard of fiber to the home? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x

Re:backbone only

[tlund]

Sure, but in most places where there is FTTx, the actual connection into the apartment is cat5 copper cable. Sure, there are a lot of places where the actual fiber goes into your house and there is a 10 or 100Mbit FXTX converter, but it is way more common to have a switch somewhere in the basement and then cat5 to the apartments. Those cables run gigabit Ethernet fine, but nothing more.

Re:backbone only

[vrmlguy]

Apartments mess up the definitions a bit, but fiber to the curb generally means that the fiber is terminated away from the living space (generally in a distribution cabinet within 300 meters of your building), fiber to the home means it's terminated at boundary of the living space, such as a box on the outside wall of a home. It may be more common to have a switch somewhere in the basement and then cat5 to the endpoints, but there nothing preventing you from running fiber as well. I've worked at a place that ran fiber all the way to the cubicle. The desktop PCs all had fiber NICs, but laptop users had to settle for using converter boxes. (WiFi only became popular after I left, so I'm not sure what they use today.)

Re:What I would like to do with 100x's the bandwid

[anomaly256]

Be amazed at my whopping 100mbit connection

It's the UK

[mozumder]

so shouldn't it be fibre? =^)

With speed like that...

[Sam Rodgers]

I would spread the good word that people can increase their endurance with huge savings on enlargment pills!

The problem is not the backbone

[Casandro]

The technologies available for backbones already are fast enough for the next decade or so. The main problem is the 'last mile'. However once everybody has fibre to their homes, there might be some bottlenecks on the backbone. I estimate this to be the case once everybody has a gigabit connection at home. Today you can, with off the shelf parts, transmit about a terabit per second over a single fibre. A typical exchange would be connected to it's neighbours with hundreds of fibres, but serve only a few thousand households.

However it is important to do basic research. Eventually we are going to need that kind of technology. Just perhaps not within the next decade.

Re:The problem is not the backbone

[jimmypw]

The technologies available for backbones already are fast enough for the next decade or so....

That's a really bad attitude to have. Progression doesn't just happen it has to be worked for. Sometime it's easy sometimes its very hard. You never know until you start.

Re:The problem is not the backbone

[denis-The-menace]

Here in Canada and the states, taxpayers provided the right of way for the wires and paid for most of the "last mile" lines to the homes.
Now the ISPs, that are also cable/phone/content providers, want control everything.
The REAL solution is:
1-not to have Content and Delivery be owned by the same company
2-the home owner or the City/Tounship/county own the "last mile" connection. In fact I recommend the home owner own the "last mile" connection because government is likely to be bought sooner or later.

Re:The problem is not the backbone

[DaveGod]

The technologies available for backbones already are fast enough for the next decade or so. The main problem is the 'last mile'.

I have 20mbit ("up to 24mbit") ADSL in the UK. However the only times I have noticed the bandwidth being fully utilised is when downloading from a specific Ubuntu mirror, iPlayer and occasionally when downloading from MS. Otherwise frankly I consider 8mbit a good source. This is irrespective of time of day.

Hardly an empirical study, but the only conclusion I can draw is that in practice the home-to-cabinet is far from being the bottleneck for me, and for people with even bog-standard connections even a small improvement will quickly be met with bottlenecks elsewhere.

Also, bear in mind the government is throwing £830m at upgrading "the last mile" by 2015, including quite a lot of FTTH.

Regardless, on the backbone scale economics are important. Even if you were right that existing technology may be able to provide the capacity for the next decade, the cost is at least as important.

Not forgetting that it takes a long time to go from starting the research to installing the finished product. Research is done today for tomorrow.

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?

Two chicks at the same time.

Re:Nothing really.

[jimmydevice]

You can't get that continuous bandwidth unless the servers you hit can spool it out at that rate,
and all the pipes between you and your host are fat and empty.
Until the whole infrastructure steps up to the high-bandwidth plate, you can expect slow and slower
downloads while netflix and other parasites sop up the free bandwidth.

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).

Re:Nothing really.

[Alef]

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.

Well, not today maybe. But this technology isn't meant for current bandwidth uses.

Think of it like this: If the technology was readily available and cheap, why would I not want watch streamed movies in UHDTV resolution on a 100 inch 3D display at 100 Hz refresh rate? A single such stream would require bandwidth in the range of Gbit/s.

Do I need it? No. But then I don't really need bluray quality either.

Re:Nothing really.

[ShakaUVM]

>>Don't need it. Can't really imagine anyone who does, really.

Dude, think about how many simultaneous Quakeworld clients you could run at once!

Re:Nothing really.

[misexistentialist]

Right now your connection is under threat from bandwidth caps and prioritization because more people are using the internet for more than checking email. An improvement that will restore the bandwidth used to bandwidth sold ratio is in fact pretty urgent.

Re:Nothing really.

[Openstandards.net]

In a household with 5 TVs running, and IP replacing traditional cable TV, you'd want to support 5 1080p+ broadcasts with 7 channel audio at once just to support your TV needs. Throw in new HD web cams and video conferencing, which you may want to have 10+ going at a time in your house for various reasons, and I can imagine using it all. In any case, I don't look at it that way. The way I see it, most of us don't have enough. I'd be afraid to stream more than one HD movie at a time in my household. So, the best benefit would be removing all of today's real limitations. The question is whether or not the economies of scale would be worth it. At a minimum, it should eliminate the need for tiered pricing and eliminate all excuses to oppose net neutrality. What if we could offer this high speed to every citizen for only $99/mo? How about upload limits? They are pretty severe today. This could permit every citizen to become a net broadcaster and host any web site or service they want, including hosting videos.

Re:Nothing really.

[Kjella]

Think of it like this: If the technology was readily available and cheap, why would I not want watch streamed movies in UHDTV resolution on a 100 inch 3D display at 100 Hz refresh rate? A single such stream would require bandwidth in the range of Gbit/s.

Well, we had 1600x1200 monitors back in the 1990s then we ran into pretty much a full stop, except for a few exotic 30" monitors and some specialty 2160p monitors for medical/military purposes. Oh and we added widescreen but most of those lost 120 pixels of horizontal resolution as well so 1920x1080 ~= 1600x1200.

I mean when I in 2011 can't get a better monitor than that, which I'm sure is due to lack of demand and not a technical limitation then what hope is there of UHDTV? Or even QHDTV, when it seems we can't see it staring at a monitor half a meter away? I predict to be an old, old man before UHDTV is common if ever.

Re:Nothing really.

[Khyber]

'I could stream what like 40 blurays simultaniously? Don't need it."

I have one program that would bring such a connection to it's fucking knees in less than five minutes.

Camfrog.

Let me see what you're doing with over 1,000 simultaneous client connections and streaming 100 webcam streams per client.

And now that program has HD camera streaming.

Bluray, LMFAO. Do you even know how to consume bandwidth like a professional?

Re:Nothing really.

[starakurva]

Mod parent UP! Don't you get it? +6 !!!

Re:Nothing really.

[Alef]

To be fair, during that period there has been a transition from CRT monitors to flat panel displays, and if I recall correctly 1280x1024 was essentially the "default" flat panel screen resolution only five years ago or so. I think price is still the limiting factor for screen resolution, though. More pixels means lower production yield, and hence a more expensive product, and resolution isn't that important (albeit nice). But prices have been dropping quite significantly during recent years, so I wouldn't be surprised if higher resolution monitors will be getting more common.

Re:Nothing really.

[Alef]

But prices have been dropping quite significantly during recent years, so I wouldn't be surprised if higher resolution monitors will be getting more common.

To quantify this a bit: A little more than five years ago, I payed approximately €750 for my current 20" 1680x1050 monitor. I just checked what screens the same supplier holds today, and for roughly the same amount of money (€800) I can now get a 27" 2560x1440 monitor. On the lower end, a 23" 2048x1152 screen costs about €300.

True Worldwide Roaming

[sirlark]

I'd set up my home desktop so that I could use any device I own, or anyone else owns that I might borrow or use, to log in to my own account on my own machine at local desktop speeds...

Re:True Worldwide Roaming

[Vegemeister]

Bandwidth != latency.

Re:True Worldwide Roaming

[sirlark]

Bandwidth != latency.

True, but scrolling through a pdf using X/shh or rdp is still ridiculously slow, not to mention watching full motion video or playing a game. These are not latency issues, they are bandwidth issues.

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:Holograms?

[smallfries]

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.

I observe that your calculation is wrong, and from that I infer that you don't know what infer means / how to use it correctly.

I calculate that conventional video has 1920x1080 or roughly 2M pixels vs 256Kx144 or about 36.8M pixels, or about 20 times greater bandwidth, not about 1000.

Re:Holograms?

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

You may infer and calculate correctly, but the given numbers are unlikely, 144 vertical pixels? That would be more like a ribbon. It's probably more like 256K x 144K, in that case it would be a factor of 18K larger.

Re:Holograms?

[smallfries]

I thought that sounded a bit weird but the image in the article looked like some bizarre stretched scanline. Just so long as it wouldn't be 1000x bigger then it's fine :)

Re:Holograms?

[TheLink]

Maybe the hologram only works for left-right, and not up-down.

Re:Holograms?

[vrmlguy]

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.

I observe that your calculation is wrong, and from that I infer that you don't know what infer means / how to use it correctly.

I calculate that conventional video has 1920x1080 or roughly 2M pixels vs 256Kx144 or about 36.8M pixels, or about 20 times greater bandwidth, not about 1000.

Calculations are easy, but you made some incorrect assumptions in yours, namely that the Holovideo Cheops system provides an image similar to 1080p HD television. Please refer to my first quote, "The resulting image is horizontal parallax only (HPO), with video resolution in the vertical direction, and holographic resolution in the horizontal direction." The display isn't conventional video, but has only 144 vertical scan lines. The article doesn't say, but I'm guessing that the screen's aspect ratio is square. In that case, I can calculate that HPO holographic resolution requires 1.778K bits of data for each bit of vertical video resolution. Note that a 4x3 aspect ratio would mean that there are 1.334K HPO bits for each vertical bit, and 16x9 would mean a ratio of exactly 1K. The good news is that it's a raw data stream. I'd expect that a future Holographic Picture Experts Group would devise a compression algorithm at least as good as the current MPEG standards, but I don't know how much better; I'm assuming that my hypothetical HPEG will compress it's raw stream no more than twice as well as MPEG.

Re:Holograms?

[smallfries]

I didn't actually make any assumptions - I simply took yours, hence the quotes. Fair is fair, I've gone and checked the article to see what they actually said:

Each horizontal line of the display is
256-thousand pixels of holographic fringe pattern translating to 36Mbytes of
information per frame

Which is almost exactly what I said. Conventional TV is 1080p as I pointed out above and the ratio between the two is about 20:1 (assuming compression works equally well on both sources).

Oversell it

[Reed Solomon]

I'm Speaking as the president of your ISP.

What would I do with 100x more?

[mpetch]

Well clearly what would happen is that I'd run up my usage charges beyond my unlimited data plan (with a 20G limit) and then pay the ISP through the nose much faster than I could ever conceive of before!

Re:What would I do with 100x more?

[Vegemeister]

20G in a month? You poor bastard. I used 40G yesterday.

100 times what I'm already getting?

[nOw2]

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

Shit man, I'd be able to watch videos off YouTube!

In nearly a year and half, my local BT exchange has been congested. "Virtual paths: red". I went from November to January last year at 300Kbits/s on an 8Mbit ADSL line. This month it's been 700Kbits/s. Yet if I wake up at 5am, I have 7.1Mbit/s and can watch two HD streams off iPlayer.

Re:100 times what I'm already getting?

[Kosi]

Why don't you switch to an ISP who delivers what he's getting paid for? Or at least reduce the monthly payment to 1/8th, if you can live with that little bandwidth.

Re:100 times what I'm already getting?

[nOw2]

BT infrastructure monopoly. I can choose whatever ISP I want but the local exchange will remain the bottleneck. That's why the increasing capacity of the local loop is such a wasteful, hateful subject for me. I connect to the exchange at the maximum possible ADSL sync and receive the maximum theoretical throughput only as long as I am browsing at 5am.

Re:100 times what I'm already getting?

[Kosi]

As long as you don't get them where it hurts (money) they will not change anything. You should amount some proof that they don't deliver what they get paid for, and reduce your monthly fee according to what bandwidth they really deliver. If they lose money, they suddenly have an interest in forcing BT to upgrade the line.

I don't know how it's in GB (I guess BT is British Telecom), but here in Germany there are some (bigger) ISPs who have more interconnect places than others. Maybe a little research which ISP has the best interconnect in your area can help (if you haven't already done that).

*duh*

[RenHoek]

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

Download porn a 100x faster? Why is this even a question?!?

More Information

[oggiejnr]

There is slightly more information in the grant overview from EPSRC http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/I01196X/1 although it is quite light of specifics.
The proposal appears to be usual blend of new modulation techniques, all optical switching and the usual "green" nonsense which is required to get anything approved these days.

Re:More Information

[adamGX]

EPSRC grant forms are very heavily constrained on the amount of space you have to work with on the form hence the lack of detail here.

Re:What I would like to do with 100x's the bandwid

[jimmydevice]

I would kill for 10 X 45Kb low end DSL for what i'm paying for a 45Kb dial up at $35 a month ( phone+ISP)
The centuryel broadband is a joke, I was told by a sprint (before the buyout) in 2000 that hi-speed was coming, in 4 years.
Later it was "real soon now", By the time I get dsl, I will be pushing up worms.
Thieves and scum and you and me are paying for their fat bonus.

100 Gbps?

[Meneth]

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

Not much. My local network is already faster than my hard drives. However, this could be very useful for the fiber networks that make up the Internet.

Re:100 Gbps?

[Khyber]

LMFAO.

RAID-0 and short-stroke to the outside of the platters.

You could smash 20Gbps easily.

How much backbone is still unused?

[Anonymous Coward]

At one point, during the dot com boom, fiber was way overbuilt. Something like 90% of it was unlit. I wonder how much that is still true. I wonder how much fiber has been abandoned and will never be used.

One of the problems, here in Canada anyway, is that the big ISPs have a lock on the market and have no incentive to improve the service. In fact, they have a reason to keep the service crappy. Shaw, Rogers and Bell sell satellite/cable TV that they want you to buy. Good internet, where you can get streaming TV, cuts into that market.

Stories about things like improved bandwidth just put up my blood pressure 'cause it's not going to happen any time soon around here.

The Next Generation

[athe!st]

Stream 3d porn to my holodeck

hit your download usage limit as fast as possible

[duguk]

And the ISPs just want you to be able to hit your download usage limit as fast as possible.

Hit my monthly acceptable usage cap in under a day

[Anonymous Coward]

Faster connections are great, but until the ISPs sort out their infrastructure and business models to let us use it, it's completely pointless.

Unless you want to be charged per GB that is. And I certainly don't.

We want I/O speed boost

[dogganos]

...not network!!! Who needs more that 1Gbps?????

Depends what it costs

[petes_PoV]

Since my current connection is 15MBit/s and only costs me a few £'s (british pounds) a month, I can say that I'm quite content with that. If the cost of a 100x faster connection was 100x more - or even 10x more, then the answer would almost certainly be "no thanks" If it was an extra quid or two then yes, OK, I'll take it. However I'm under no illusions that having a 1GBit/s connection to my home is pretty worthless if the source is still only running at 1MBit/s.

Re:Depends what it costs

[McTickles]

I found UK connections to be outrageously expensive for what you get, but hey im just french...

Speed?

[j0el]

Is it pedantic to point out that speed and bandwidth are different?

Doesn't matter

[brunes69]

With UBB in Canada coming down thanks to the CRTC, increased speed is irrelevant. Hell I have 25 Mbit now with only a 125 GB cap - I can download my whole cap in under 11 hours.

Until broadband is unmetered the raw speed is becoming irrelevant since you will be unable to use it for anything it demands.

Wrong end

[Charliemopps]

The problem isn't the local loop, its the ISP. Figure out how to get them to feed my neighborhood with more than 2 T1s and maybe we'll be getting somewhere.

Downloading my complete steam library

[mrcvp]

of 230 games in about half an hour.

Eh.

[John Hasler]

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

Nothing different.

Re:hit your download usage limit as fast as possib

[Jane_Dozey]

What are you talking about? Nearly every single provider has unlimited download offers. They're not usually too expensive either. This is been the case for many years.

Heck, I can't remember the last time I went to someone's house and they had a limit.

Re:hit your download usage limit as fast as possib

[alexandre_ganso]

AFAIK download limits are mostly for 3g connections.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never seen the moronic spelling of "a lot" coupled with the retarded use of the apostrophe "s". I think we've hit rock bottom, folks.

Finally

[HamSammy]

I'd have my old connection speed back and hopefully my packet loss issues would be gone. When you live in cheap college apartments with included internet, you really get what you pay for.

If your included internet is by Airwave Networks, be ready to run or open your wallet. Seriously, any latency-critical applications like online games are completely unusable for me.

Re:hit your download usage limit as fast as possib

[Rising Ape]

There are a fair few unlimited, or at least "unlimited for practical purposes" ISPs available. Sky or Be, for example. I downloaded 200 GB one month, no problems.

The limited ones are generally the ones that use BT's backhaul from the exchange rather than doing their own (LLU), because BT charge a very high per-Mbps rate. Even then, it's enough for gaming.

What is "100 times faster than today."

[vlm]

What is "100 times faster than today."?

Everyone above so far is assuming they mean the latest vaporware from Cisco / Juniper / etc. You have to realize these are businessmen and journalists. They are probably talking about fully depreciated 100 megabit FDDI or 17 megaBYTE fiber escon when they say "today". In that case, with 10gig-E links I think I would be doing ... exactly what I'm doing now?

Less than $20M, lame! ;)

[__aailob1448]

Raw fiber to the home has enormous implications we are not capable of imagining.

  Wiring efforts should accelerate and government regulation should be copied from countries like Sweden, Japan and South Korea to ensure maximum bandwidth and minimum latency, worldwide.

It just makes sense. There cannot be a long-term loss in this investment. Lay fiber everywhere. Construct a fractal grid-net over the planet and get as close as possible to the speed of light. between any 2 given points.

  Everybody is in favor of it. What follows will be free sound/video calls and videoconferencing across computers and smart-phones. Inevitably.

What will also follow is distributed computing, as latencies grow lower. As reliability increases, more efficient ways to treat data will emerge, which will greatly increase efficiency. The positive pressure of multi-coring our way forward under the GHz limits will increase the importance of distributed code (but for how long?) so we basically need a very fast, very reliable internet to use our cpu cycles more efficiently.

Probably preaching to the choir here...

Re:Less than $20M, lame! ;)

[__aailob1448]

Oh, and if the current SSD trends continue, we will inevitably purge our boxes of magnetic disks completely.

The coding revolution is bound to slowly follow, as drives reach GBps and millions of random iops and SSD closes in on RAM, the AI will awake. That's when we all defeat it and enslave the robots. SWEET SWEET ROBOSLAVERY!

That's good for the ISP's but...

[S.O.B.]

Great, now I can reach my 25GB cap 100 times faster.

Re:Socialist Gov't = Funding for Broadband Researc

[Patch86]

Er, it's the UK, and David Willetts is a Conservative Party politician (and a relatively small-statist one).

Funding public-good university research is a widely accepted role of government in the UK. Usually it's dealt with via the Research Councils rather than directly via a ministry, but it's not that unusual.

Important research, but it won't help me

[Chonnawonga]

Speed is all well and good, but it's not my main bottleneck anymore. You could make my connection 100x faster tomorrow, and it would only be frustrating because of my bandwidth cap. With that faster connection, I could hit my monthly cap within 5 minutes instead of 8 hours!

Re:hit your download usage limit as fast as possib

[duguk]

What are you talking about? Nearly every single provider has unlimited download offers. * Fair Usage Policy Applies, maximum 1MB/month download.

FTFY.

Re:hit your download usage limit as fast as possib

[duguk]

There are a fair few unlimited, or at least "unlimited for practical purposes" ISPs available. Sky or Be, for example. I downloaded 200 GB one month, no problems.

The limited ones are generally the ones that use BT's backhaul from the exchange rather than doing their own (LLU), because BT charge a very high per-Mbps rate. Even then, it's enough for gaming.

You're right - but unfortunately something like only half of the lines are LLU.
That leaves half the population using BT's exchange, and are limited - usually to an unknown amount.

Somewhere between 50GB/mo and 100GB/mo depending on contention, and are then restricted down to 500kbps, relentlessly complained at, or paying an extortionate rate for downloads, like myself.

Almost everyone has a Fair Usage Policy - the few exceptions are Sky, Be* and Virgin - but only then through LLU.
They won't always tell you that you can't get LLU and won't be limited. (Personal experience with Be* there)

My god...

[odirex]

it's full of porn.

in what direction?

[stefaanh]

It would be great if the confort that comes with that speed would also be for individually produced content, and not only for community consumed content.
Participation is what makes the internet great, let's keep it this way.

One Use - A Personal Cloud

[careysub]

How about a single "desktop" computing environment accessible from anywhere on any piece of hardware and OS?

This is hardly a new idea, and the current idea of "the cloud" is an implementation of this idea dependent on a service provider and its data center to host it. But with very high speed transmission the complete current state of a computing environment running on a VM could be synced in real-time with other copies elsewhere through a peer-to-peer arrangement. No service providers (other than the Internet infrastructure) required. With VMs this could be any type of computing environment running on any other OS/hardware anywhere.

Now none of the elements of this scheme are really new, and with various restrictions schemes like this can be implemented now, but with the extremely high transmission rates in TFA essentially all of the bottlenecks and limitations would disappear and it would create the appearance of a single "local" computing resource.

ORC?

[Dails]

Eventually this will be replaced with the even faster Ultimate Research United Kingdom-Holland Advancement Initiative (URUK-HAI).

Fix latency

[E-Prime]

Wait for the same to happen to latency - having a highway for a bicycle isn't getting me there any faster.

What *would* you do?

[Phopojijo]

The same as I am now -- because the Canadian ISPs wouldn't pass that increase in infrastructure to the consumers.

Re:hit your download usage limit as fast as possib

[tehcyder]

Most UK providers are fine as long as you're not downloading large "Linux ISOs" 24/7

100x what's available today?

[IrquiM]

Yes please! I can only get 400mbps full duplex! 40gbps would be a lot more fun, although, 2.5x is more than enough for me with the current set up! 10gbps hardware is too expensive...

100 times more speed for fibre.

[lsatenstein]

While the speed to the individual subscriber would probably not change, the benefit would be that the effects of contention and on capacity limitations would diminish. Transatlantic cables, in fibre would handle 100x traffic, making for a truly global interconnection.

I'm about to find out, upload anyway

[Nukenbar]

I currently have Time Warner Cable's Road Runner cable internet service. I am scheduled to get Verizon Fios 35/35 service next week. While the download speeds are at least comparable within an order of magnitude, the upload speed should go from ~400kb/s to 35mb/s. I don't currently upload much other than torrents and normal web uploads like pictures, but I can envision myself taking advantage of other things on the internet that I normally have not done. I'm think just off the top of my head I think I might try one of these cloud backup services and streaming more video to my iphone from my computer/slingbox.