Exabit Transmission Speeds May Be Possible

adeelarshad82 writes "Scientists at UC Berkeley were able to shrink a graphene optical modulator down to 25 square microns in size (small enough to include in silicon circuitry) and were able to modulate it at a speed of 1GHz. The researchers say that modulation speeds of up to 500GHz are theoretically possible. According to the research, due to the high modulation speeds, a graphene modulator can transmit a huge amount of data using spectral bandwidth that conventional modulators can only dream of. Professor Xiang Zhang, in an attempt to boil his group's new findings into consumer-speak, puts it this way: 'If graphene modulators can actually operate at 500GHz, we could soon see networks that are capable of petabit or exabit transmission speeds, rather than megabits and gigabits.'"

Comments

Technology for reaching volume caps in less time

[Anonymous Coward]

See you next month.

Pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see the point unless we also get processing speeds able to keep up with the data.
And specially storage speeds. SSDs don't cut it.

Re:Pointless?

[Nukedoom]

Just like airplanes, telephones, and cars. All of them. Completely. Pointless.

Re:Pointless?

[somersault]

Duh

Re:Pointless?

[sortius_nod]

I have no idea why people come to slashdot just to post as an AC and denounce every new bit of technology.

Luddites are alive and well in the 21st century, it's just amazing how much effort goes into it these days.

Re:Pointless?

[Lord Bitman]

With transmissions speeds that fast, processing and storage can both be dumped on someone else without worrying about filling the pipe.

Re:Pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont think that these links are intended for pc switches that you connect your server to.
But it will most likley be used for backbones. ok so one pc with a ssd wont come close to filing this link. but a data center with 1000 servers.

We dont have a direct line from every server to every client so we need to bundle the data from many clients to many servers with one link.

Re:Pointless?

[AlecC]

Many systems connected to many systems. It doesn't have to be to/from a single CPU or storage device. You can put your datacentre where it is most efficient in energy or cooling terms, but have it appear to be where you want it operationally. Or you can aggregate datacentres scattered across the globe into a unified system, load sharing as the peak load moves round the globe. It makes the physical attributes of "the cloud" more possible.

Re:Pointless?

[SuricouRaven]

Because you've got to move data around on chips faster to achieve those faster processing speeds.

Re:Pointless?

[errandum]

You beat me to it :P

Damn you!

Re:Pointless?

[vlm]

And specially storage speeds. SSDs don't cut it.

Oh of course they do. You just have to use more than one, in parallel / striping mode. Think of a "real" NAS or an IBM DASD with dozens of drives in parallel.

Probably this will be used mostly for DWDM style stunts... Find the fastest system and its press release. Insert two in a box twice as big. Issue press release to the mass media, and sadly, /., reporting "new world record of twice the libraries of congress per second". The general public responds with "who cares" because that kind of press release is issued seemingly daily or weekly because its so easy to put more copies in a box or a rack or a couple racks. The techies respond with "who cares" because solving the power and thermal problems of "put two in a box instead of one" isn't very impressive, and its about as dumb as putting two AM radios in a box and calling it "AM stereo".

Re:Pointless?

[Flyerman]

Considering the speed of tech, it requires a lot of effort. When you carry a mobile multifunction computer in your pocket, it's a little hard to denounce progress.

Re:Pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see the point unless we also get processing speeds able to keep up with the data.
And specially storage speeds. SSDs don't cut it.

The point? Backbone routers and switches. ISP's love density, and many would jump at the chance to consolidate several OC192's on a single interface. Using something like MPLS to reduce processor load would make it a pretty good solution.

Keep in mind, however, that this is at least a decade down the road and it's not likely anybody will actually achieve full theoretical speeds. Right now ISP's are starting to test the waters of the 10gig interfaces, but to be blunt even 100gig interfaces aren't going to be coming along very soon. Which is really too bad, since the biggest problem with the internet right now is a lack of backbone capacity at reasonable prices.

Re:Pointless?

[athlon02]

Uhmm, need I point out the obvious? ... 1 Exabit/sec / 100,000,000 users = 10 Terabit/sec bandwidth per user. Yes, I know there's overhead, distribution across large distances, etc, etc that would lower the realistic bandwidth. But, it means each user could still have a crazy amount of bandwidth.

Re:Pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what, exactly, does this "progress" enable you to do? You still need to eat, sleep and wear clothes... None of this new technology is anything more than toys and pastimes. Planes still fly at the same speeds, cars still drive on wheels, on the road, and also drive at the same speed. Saying you can keep in touch with your boss 24/7 is hardly progress in my book. What happened to the leisure society ??????? Why isn't all this "progress" used to make us, you know, progress? And if there is so much progress, where is it? How come people still starve? Still work in fields? Besides communications, there isn't any progress at all as far as I can tell.

Re:Pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see the point unless we also get processing speeds able to keep up with the data.
And specially storage speeds. SSDs don't cut it.

It is because you don't understand that computation is, for most part of it, communication. Even working storage is communication on very short distances. Storage speeds are bottlenecked by communication speed. Etc.

Re:Pointless?

[Ultra64]

At those speeds, why would you need to store anything locally?

Re:Pointless?

[sgt scrub]

i agree with you that is it pointless. mostly because this statement, "we could soon see networks that are capable of petabit or exabit transmission speeds", incorrectly uses "we". "we" being large ISP's and people in academia, maybe. "we" being the people getting bandwidth to our homes, completely unlikely. "we", being the later in most U.S. locations, can't even get fucking fios in our neighborhood!

Faster than silicon

[empiricistrob]

So in theory if you can get an electrical signal to the graphene, you can use it to modulate laser light up to 500ghz. Awesome!

That just leaves two fatal flaws:
1. You need to modulate the electric signal with useful information at 500ghz. I'm not an expert, but it seems like we're a long way off from being able to do that. Can anyone comment?
2. How do you demodulate such a signal?

Re:Faster than silicon

[drolli]

1. there is a logic which is nearly fast enough. It's called RSFQ, but interfacing it to graphene may be difficult.

2. with RSFQ ADCs.

If its about analog mixing, you could use bolometer mixers, interfacing to RSFQ circuits.

Re:Faster than silicon

[Anonymous Coward]

1. there is a logic which is nearly fast enough. It's called RSFQ, but interfacing it to graphene may be difficult.

Dude, Reading Something Freakin Quick won't cut it.

Re:Faster than silicon

[mpoulton]

The modulation problem can probably be solved with clever use of current technology. Initially at least, the only application for links with this bandwidth would be in aggregated data transmission, accumulating dozens or hundreds of lower bandwidth connections. A clever modulation method would utilize multiple separate electrical modulation signals to control the optical modulation, possibly by using multiple separate modulator elements in the optical path, each operating at a lower modulation rate (but synchronized with the others and phase shifted). In the long run it will be interesting to see how data transmission technology evolves to accommodate high data rates like this. 500GHz is hardly even an electrical signal, it's almost light-like. Wires don't work at those frequencies; it's waveguide-only territory. It can really only be handled easily as a modulated optical signal. If we are to progress to a point where data rates like these are practical for individual computing devices we will have to switch to all-optical protocols for networking, and probably also for internal data transport within computing devices. Demodulation of an optical signal with this much modulation bandwidth is pretty much an unsolved problem for now, AFAIK. As with the modulation process, I'd probably try to split it into multiple channels each covering a narrower bandwidth. Unlike the modulation process, I can't think of an obvious way to do that off the top of my head. It's also worth noting that the professor seems to be contemplating the use of many optical modulators (each at 500GHz), each operating on a different fundamental wavelength to multiply the link bandwidth. Hence the prospect of petabit and exabit data rates from 500GHz modulation.

Re:Faster than silicon

[Luckyo]

Building it on a meaningful level is hard enough, as it requires supraconductivity. Costs would be astronomical.

That said, tech mentioned in OP, unlike RSFQ doesn't even exist yet. It's just a working theory. By the time it's working, there are bound to be ways to use it.

Re:Faster than silicon

[AlecC]

You fan in and fan out in several stages, the later of which are graphene based.

Re:Faster than silicon

[drolli]

Pulse tube coolers are not terribly expensive and they are off the shelf components: http://www.oxinst.com/products/low-temperature/pulse-tube-coolers/single-stage-tube/Pages/single-stage-pulse-tube-cooler.aspx

As a matter of fact, RSFQ id being tested right now for space constrained situations for transceivers. And it may pay off at some point to replace parts of conventional cell base stations by RSFQ ADCs.

Re:Faster than silicon

[Soft]

the professor seems to be contemplating the use of many optical modulators (each at 500GHz), each operating on a different fundamental wavelength to multiply the link bandwidth. Hence the prospect of petabit and exabit data rates from 500GHz modulation.

And that's the key problem: you can't just replace the 40-GHz modulators in a 50-channel x 40-Gbit/s fiber system, because the optical frequencies of the channels must be spaced widely enough that the channels won't overlap. These ultra-high-speed modulators might help do Tbit/s single channels better than all-optical solutions such as OTDM (which has worked in the lab for a decade, but fiendishly fragile and unstable), but won't change the total bandwidth, whether it's 50x40 Gbit/s or 4x500 Gbit/s that you'd fit in the couple of THz of the C band (wavelengths in the 1530-1560 nm range, corresponding to the bandwidth of conventional Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers).

To increase fibers' total capacity, you can go two ways: a larger bandwidth, or a higher spectral efficiency. To enlarge the bandwidth, you need new amplifiers; I mentioned EDFAs, but other types have been developed with much larger bandwidths, and you could theoretically cover the entire wavelength range where fibers transmit well, about 1200-1600 nm (60 THz wide). Of course, you'd have to replace currently-deployed long-distance fiber links, which usually have EDFAs every 100 km or so.

A cheaper way, also promising, is increasing the spectral efficiency: instead of modulating the light by switching it on and off (on-off keying, OOK), which basically yields a bandwidth about twice the modulation rate (so 40-Gbit/s OOK channels must be separated by 100 GHz), you can adjust the intensity and/or do tricks with the phase and polarization of the light (modulation formats such as PSK and QAM). Currently favored is PolMux-QPSK, which can fit 100 Gbit/s in the same bandwidth as a 10 Gbit/s OOK channel, and thus lets carriers upgrade their WDM systems progressively, wavelength by wavelength.

The price for high spectral efficiencies is that you need a much more complex receiver (keywords: "coherent optical systems"). But the payoff is potentially huge, because it has to include DSP, which in turn enables systems to implement much more advanced digital communications algorithms, making the links far more robust to signal degradations, increasing the transmission length.

Re:Faster than silicon

[FST777]

Modulating broad-spectrum light at 1GHz is still way better than modulating an electrical signal at 1GHz. So for on-chip silicon circuits there would still be a huge gain at current "clockspeeds".

It's nice to think about this tech on a large (optic-fiber networks) scale, but the applications on a small (silicon wafer) scale are, IMHO, more interesting.

Re:Faster than silicon

[operagost]

Pulse tube coolers? Bolometer mixers? Modulating lasers? Right. So I bet you'll just solve the problem by channeling the beam through the main deflector dish, right?

Re:Faster than silicon

[Anonymous Coward]

"You need to modulate the electric signal with useful information at 500ghz. I'm not an expert, but it seems like we're a long way off from being able to do that. Can anyone comment?"

We've been able to do that since a long time. What do you call modulating an infrared LED? Or BWOs??

And it's done with tubes!

Re:Faster than silicon

[MattskEE]

1. By the time graphene is ready to be modulated at 500GHz we will almost certainly have the technology to modulate the graphene at 500GHz. It requires a transistor with unity gain at roughly 1000GHz to do that. State of the art university and military researchers are building both analog and (very simple) digital circuits in the 300+GHz region using transistors with unity gain frequencies at 1THz and above. They are using group III-V heterostructure devices such as InGaAs/InP heterojunction bipolar transistors for this, and people continue to push the envelope on scaling silicon transistors, though the group IV materials like silicon and silicon/germanium alloy are still well behind what III-V's can do and will probably never be as fast.

2. You demodulate the signal the same way current ultra high speed optical signals are demodulated: A really fast and expensive chip(s) de-multiplexes the wideband 500GHz signal to N signals each having 500GHz/N bandwidth, so that cheaper chips can handle the lower bandwidth signals and eventually send it to customers. If we can modulate it we can demodulate it.

Re:Faster than silicon

[JustinRLynn]

It's kind of awesome when real physical devices start to sound like technobabble isn't it?

The race is on

[Isbiten]

Will graphene computing be the new quantum computing henceforth?

Re:The race is on

[somersault]

Not really. Even 500GHz processors would still be extremely slow compared to quantum computers for crypto stuff, though this technology could presumably be used to make a very nice system bus, useful for graphics processing and other bandwidth intensive applications..

Re:The race is on

[SuricouRaven]

Quantum computers are a whole lot faster for some specific tasks. Not faster communications. But they'd easily be able to outperform existing tech by many orders of magnitude on prime factorisation, database lookups, statistical modeling. A lot of things used for scientific computing. A quantum computer would actually be a hybrid technology - a largely conventional computer, with just a quantum co-processor added on.

Re:The race is on

[Wandering Idiot]

I assume he meant in the sense of being the "new hot technology that's just over the horizon" for the next couple decades.

data storage?

[Necroloth]

It's all well and good having super fast transmission capabilities but do we have anything that can process/store data as quickly? It's an honest question as I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.

Re:data storage?

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

It's all well and good having super fast transmission capabilities but do we have anything that can process/store data as quickly? It's an honest question as I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.

Infrastructure is where this is important. There are these extremely expensive cables made of glass under the ocean connecting various land masses. It's extremely convenient to be able to upgrade the boxes at either end instead of laying more tubes (*warning* simplification!). You don't need to store the data (at least not in one box), you just need to switch it. This is why fiber is so awesome; people just keep on discovering new ways to jam more down those pipes!

Re:data storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer is yes assuming that they find a way to bundle data from multiple lower-bandwidth sources and transfer it through such a cable.

No disk or even SSD will give you such data rates, but network traffic from a whole city will easily.

Re:data storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true for your last mile connection and for downloading stuff to your hard drive, but nationwide and intercontinental connections would greatly benefit from this. This should greatly improve the network's ability to transfer insane amounts of data quickly from many different users at the same time. No more "promises" of 10Mbit ADSL and only getting 6Mbits most of the time. Just do the math, if 10000 people in a city have 10Mbit connections and they all start downloading at the same time (lets say everyone tunes into a live broadcast HD stream), you'll need a network that can handle 100Gbits continuously...

Re:data storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.

Put enough storage units in parallel and that's sorted out. All you need then is fast communication with those storage units, but that should be a no-brainer if fast communication fueled the need for parallel storage units in the first place. Also, rest assured: high communication bit rates are useful beyond storage.

On an unrelated note, I suppose you're into heavy metal?

Re:data storage?

[somersault]

I can assure you that there will still be plenty of "promises", no matter how fast things get..

Re:data storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if the Internet backbone ever reached exabit/sec speeds, the whole way we viewed data storage would change. I see no reason why most computers would need local storage at all. After BIOS POST is finished, an OS boot over the network would take under a second (by the way, the BIOS POST would also be much faster than today as fewer devices would need support: in my experience, detecting potential boot devices takes much if not most of the time). Similarly, all applications would be in the cloud (only a few copies needed, as opposed to the millions of copies of common applications today). All the messy maintenance needed to keep system and application software up to date disappears.

Of course, actual implementation of networks that fast (if it ever happens) is so far in the future that we probably cannot even imagine what the shape of computing will be by that time.

Re:data storage?

[erayd]

Actually, if the Internet backbone ever reached exabit/sec speeds, the whole way we viewed data storage would change. I see no reason why most computers would need local storage at all.

Latency is why. It doesn't matter how fast the link to your storage is, if it's several ms away from you the delay gets annoying *real* fast.

Re:data storage?

[erayd]

As an example, this is one of the reasons why SSD random I/O performance is so much better than rotating media.

Re:data storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything you access frequently is simply downloaded at boot time. I think it is safe to assume terabytes of RAM by this time. For other data, yes, you will want the data to be within a couple of hundred miles to ensure latency under 10ms or so. Computers on Mars will need local storage.

Re:data storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fark that.

Privacy is why.

Re:data storage?

[Kjella]

There are these extremely expensive cables made of glass under the ocean connecting various land masses.

More importantly, the fibers themselves aren't that expensive anymore as you can see from FiOS/FTTH deployment. Getting new cables in place is what costs an arm and a leg. So more capacity over same cable is very, very cost efficient.

Also a comment to the GP:

It's an honest question as I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.

If you have streaming, is storage really all that necessary? With Spotify etc. for music, Netflix etc. for movies - and assume you can stream BluRay quality effortlessly, what do most people need TBs to local storage for? Yes, there are niches like when you're going on the road (even though mobile bandwidth is also going way up), what to watch if your line is down and storing your own home videos, but those are minor.

Amazon.com currently lists 13281 blurays. * 50 GB / 3 TB disks = 222 disks to store everything. The reason it always seems we need more storage is that there's millions of copies of each.

Re:data storage?

[SuricouRaven]

Personal privacy I could see being just ignored. We've already seen with Facebook and just email in general that people are willing to give up a lot of privacy for the sake of convenience. Corporate data confidentiality might be a bigger issue - a lot of companies work with informaiton which they cannot really entrust to another for regulatory reasons. Medical files, national security information, financial records, that sort of thing. Even just data that may be of commercial value would be something few companies would want to lose control of, which is one reason there is such reluctance over this new 'cloud' method of outsourcing. Do you want to trust that some disgruntled soon-to-be-ex-admin at McCloudy Data isn't going to grab a couple of hard drives as a retirement plan? I do imagine it would be of some use in a business environment, but not quite as you envision. It would just be the perfection of the existing thin client or app streaming setup: All the data sits nice and safe in the company datacenter where they know it can be kept securely.

Re:data storage?

[Necroloth]

heavy metal? nope, why?

Re:data storage?

[Necroloth]

Thanks... just goes to show how limited my view was as I was only thinking of the cable into my home!

Can these modulators replace existing ones or does the entire cable network need an upgrade for this? If it's just the modulators, then wow!

Re:data storage?

[Taibhsear]

This is why fiber is so awesome; people just keep on discovering new ways to jam more down those pipes!

Same reason why porn is so awesome.

Re:data storage?

[smooth wombat]

what do most people need TBs to local storage for?

For all the software they use but never paid for and have no intention of every paying for, porn, personal documents, porn, backups, porn, backups of porn, music, porn, backups of music and porn, home movies, porn, games, porn, porn games, pictures, porn, emails, porn, porn emails, and of course, porn.

Not everyone wants their stuff in "the cloud". Having something at your location gives you faster access than going to a site, no matter the transmission speed. It's also more secure than letting someone else manage your stuff (as we routinely see).

Re:data storage?

[bjohnso5]

I nearly laughed out loud at work! Well played, sir, well played!

Re:data storage?

[Kjella]

Good question, as far as I can tell there are some variations in fiber optic cables so impossible to say. Most cables are built to work in some rather narrow bands at extreme speeds, you might get the 500GHz with regular cables but probably not full spectrum. This is mostly guesswork though.

Hurray for monsterbits

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worrie, ISPs will throttle you down to dialup speeds ( for your own protection )

Conventional modulators dreaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

> According to the research, due to the high modulation speeds, a graphene modulator can transmit a huge amount of data using spectral
> bandwidth that conventional modulators can only dream of.

I'd hardly call a modulator that is capable of dreaming conventional in any way at all!

Not at all levels

[Sycraft-fu]

You have to remember that the more bandwidth you want to deliver to the end user, the more you've got to have in the backhaul. Like if at work you want to deliver true 1 gigabit to 1000 people's desktops, you can't very well then have a 1 gigabit connection out to your data center. They won't get a gigabit of performance.

So while speeds like this wouldn't be needed for servers or such, they could be for big links. You want to link big_router_a with big_router_b which have all sorts of very fast connections to smaller routers then maybe this interests you.

Re:Not at all levels

[Kjella]

No, but you probably don't need 1000 gigabit either. At the giant LAN party "The Gathering" this easter they had 5200 people and a 100 Gbps uplink, but the traffic mostly stayed in the 10-12 Gbps range. True, the ~140 table routers were limited to 2 Gbps each, but that is still only 5-6 of those maxed. And those are pretty much all computer enthusiasts spending their easter there.

The NIX (Norwegian Internet eXchange) in Norway tops out at about 70-80 Gbps maximum for 4.96 mio people - that isn't all Internet traffic but all that crosses an ISP boundary. Netnod is something similar in Sweden, they max at 220-230 Gbps for 9.35 mio people. Even if you take The Gathering as an extreme high end, you could comfortably place 500 million people on gigabit with an exabit uplink. Using Sweden as a more realistic sampling of average people under average conditions more like 40 billion.

Eventually you reach a point where it's more like laptops, the faster you can finish the faster you go back to an idle state. Currently on my 25 Mbit line I can download a BluRay in 5 hours. On a gigabit line more like 7 minutes - but it'll still take me 2 hours to watch. And I have to do a lot of other things like work and sleep and other stuff too, which means I don't even need 7 mins of max capacity every 2 hours, maybe 3 times a day at most.

Already 12% of the households here in Norway have fiber connections, pretty much every apartment complex with 50+ apartments built now has fiber and they're rewiring a lot of normal residential neighborhoods too. They expect more than 1/3rd coverage by 2015, and I can believe it. The future is coming, maybe not to the US but that's not the rest of the world's problem. Anything that's not fiber is going into the "legacy" category.

Re:Not at all levels

[Sycraft-fu]

True, you don't need 100% backhaul. The more people you have, and the faster the connection, the more you can pack in to a given connection. People use in spurts and it all kind of evens out. However it still gets to be pretty massive. The connections their teir-1 ISPs have between each other and between big points are massive.

Also I think we'll be able to find a use for quite a bit more bandwidth to the home. I've got a 50mbit line (officially, actually seems to be more like 100mbit most of the time) and I gotta say, is real nice for digital game purchases. I can buy something and get it installed FAST. However if we can push it to gig speeds, and I mean reliable gig speeds, you are then talking about speeds as fast or faster than most magnetic media. So that makes the idea of actually running programs from remote servers a hell of a lot more feasible.

Eventually we'll hit the limit of what is useful. Personally I think somewhere in the realm of 10-100gbit to a home will be more than is needed even with extremely large programs, high def video and so on. However there's still a lot of room to grow and the backhaul has to be there.

need a library of congress analogy please

[Anonymous Coward]

That is how many libraries of congress per millisecond?

Re:need a library of congress analogy please

[FST777]

Should be around 1.2*10^12 libraries of congress per fortnight.

Yes, but is it OVER 9000?!

[gnarlin]

How long is it until we can keep a local copy of all human culture and data on a thumb drive? A long long time ago, back in the dark ages of the intertubes called the 90's, people started downloading individual mp3 tracks. Then individual albums, then artist collections, then music video collections and soon entire genres. Of course now people don't bother much with downloading music and just stream it from wherever is convenient at the moment (youtube, music stores, illegal streaming sharing sites etc.). The same thing is happening with video of course. And the quality of the encoding is constantly getting better to the point of diminishing returns. How long until there will be a torrent of all human music collected by the sharing community on the Internet?

Another thing that I have sometimes wondered is: why can't you have a torrent of torrents? That is a torrent that redirects to a bunch of other torrent so as to make collecting larger data sets easier, to avoid repacking to some extend as well.

I know this rambling is a bit of topic, but I think that the speed of the Internet, the speed at which the human race is able to share is directly correlated to the quality of the human experience. That is why I love reading news like this.

Cheers everyone.

Re:Yes, but is it OVER 9000?!

[Deaddy]

Actually you can have a torrent of torrents; at least rtorrent has the ability to scan specified directories for new .torrent-files, and automatically add them to your queue (and move them to destination folders if finishied, so you can download your torrent-torrent to that directory and automatically add them to your conventional torrent-dir. However, I'd go for a simple zip-file and a web-interface where you can check the torrents you want to download, and then download and unpack the zip file with all the selected torrents to a scanned directory.

Re:Yes, but is it OVER 9000?!

[lucian1900]

You could put .torrent files in a torrent.

Re:Yes, but is it OVER 9000?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo dawg, I heard you like torrents, so we put .torrent files in your torrent, so you can torrent while you torrent.

Re:Yes, but is it OVER 9000?!

[phatphoton]

And how long will it be until information interconnection is so fast that ALL information can feasibly be anywhere within milliseconds...thus degrading the value of information ownership into nearly nothing, approaching what could be quantum memory -> all of human knowledge is contained on a memory structure entangled throughout the world....so everybody has a complete copy of all knowledge constantly updated as fast as knowledge is produced....and with Moore's law, this will happen in...about 50 years? Add on a couple for advertising and production. done.

'Soon'

[Anonymous Coward]

This must be some new definition of the word 'soon' of which I was not previously aware.

even worse wed., poison blanket gang rides again

[Anonymous Coward]

disarm. tell the truth. the sky is not ours to toy with after all?
you call this 'weather'? what with real history racing up to correct
itself, while the chosen one's holycostal life0cider mediots continually
attempt to rewrite it, fortunately, there's still only one version of the
truth, & it's usually not a long story, or a confusing multiple choice
fear raising event.

world wide disarmament is taking place based on the pure intentions of the
majority of the planet's chosen to be depopulated, population. as the
biblical fiction based chosen ones have only one ability, which is
destruction for personal gain, they just don't fit in with all the new
life extending stuff that's we're being advised to ignore. life likes to
continue, advance etc... deception & death appear to have similar
ambitions.

wouldn't this be a great time to investigate the genuine native elders
social & political
leadership initiative, which includes genuine history as put forth in the
teepeeleaks etchings. the natives still have no words in their language to
describe the events following their 'discovery' by us, way back when. they
do advise that it's happening again.

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not a speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Exabit is not a speed. What is this, the kessel run?

Captain's Log

[Anonymous Coward]

Supplemental, Star-date 2011.44. En route to the Freudian cluster for a routine survey mission, Mr. LaForge has discovered a new means of data modulation using graphene embedded in a integrated circuit. Theoretically this discovery could break the great exabit barrier, increasing our bandwidth by one-billion orders of magnitude. Such implications could prove revolutionary, & provide great insight into Dr. Noonien Soong's elusive design of Commander Data's positronic brain.

Amazing

[ThatsNotPudding]

I had no idea conventional modulators had the ability to dream.

Better Latency

[Anonymous Coward]

That should give me a decent ping on the Q3A server !

It remembers me of

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems related: http://xkcd.com/678/

Woohoo!

[Compaqt]

With all this extra bandwidth, AT&T will up their quotas from 150GB to 200GB!

Re:Woohoo!

[Anarchduke]

Are you kidding? Now that AT&T has bandwidth caps in place, nothing short of the second coming of Jesus will get them to move them. Its Cha-Ching time and they know it.

Re:Woohoo!

[djdanlib]

If anything, they will increase a few cryptic line items on your bill to "support" the rollout of the technology, then cackle all the way to the bank while you use up your monthly cap in only a few seconds.

Re:Woohoo!

[operagost]

They learned from the government. Have you noticed how many taxes are on your telecom bill from Federal, state, county, and sometimes local government? My $54.95 phone/internet bundle comes out to $74.

consumer side

[Anonymous Coward]

As a consumer all I want to know is how soon I can have faster internet.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Cl

[Anonymous Coward]

Click here to take survey

Xzibit transmission speeds possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo dawg, I heard you like transmitting so I put some graphene on your modulator so you can modulate while you transmit.

Not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Not enough. I'm gonna need at least yottabit speed for my transporter beam to work.

Just a little too late for...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Skynet.

Assuming a growth rate similar to Moore's law...

[divisionbyzero]

This technology should be ready for market in about 13.5 years. Going from 1 ghz to 500 ghz with a doubling every 18 months will take 9 periods. Let's add a few years for developing the tools necessary to mass produce and we are at 15-20 years. Obviously there is no reason to believe that this technology will follow a similar growth curve. It likely will be substantially worse. It's nice to know we have some theoretical headroom but there is even less to get excited about here than when there is the proverbial "3 to 5 years" to reach market.

Use it for data storage

[gr8_phk]

Can we just transmit data through a few kilometers of fiber wound on a spool, demodulate the data and then resend it as a storage mechanism? At 300MHz you store 1bit per meter or 1Kbit per km. At 300GHz you get 1Mbit per km. At 300THz you get 1Gbit per km. At 300 petabit/s you store 1Tbit per km. Of course this storage medium loses data when the power is turned off, but that's OK for some applications. And with 1km of fiber, your data is never more than 3.3 uS away.

Re:Use it for data storage

[spaceplanesfan]

The delay line memory inventors would be very happy to see their technology used again....
Seriously though, such delay lines are actually used in routing to avoid storing incoming packets in memory.

Exabit? How about DSL ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... still can't even get DSL or equivalent - just a few miles outside the city limits.

It's great that we have a super-fast internet backbone, but not so great that not everybody has access to it.

Consumer speak?

[idontusenumbers]

Since when do consumers know what exabit means?

Re:Consumer speak?

[_0xd0ad]

I'll just be happy when I can get one of these exabit transmissions for my pickup.

No, that makes it easier!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even have to get out of my chair. And skipping the account creation and login has also reduced my effort.

Re:Technology for reaching volume caps in less tim

[DickBreath]

The rationale for this will be: such high speed networks are more costly to build, therefore your monthly data cap must be lower, or prices must be vastly higher. Also these measures help prevent piracy. Also less communication is easier for government to monitor.

Well...

[ForgedArtificer]

They might be possible, but then how would the telecomm giants justify drastically inflated bandwidth prices?

Always look for the money...

But...

[frank_adrian314159]

How many porn movies per second is this?

Re:Technology for reaching volume caps in less tim

[Waffle Iron]

Think of what a boon this will be to the wireless telcos on SMS fees:

$ units
2413 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units
You have: exabit / s * (11 cents / 160 bytes)
You want: $/second
        * 8.59375e+13

That's about a half dozen US annual GDPs of SMS charges racked up every second, over one thin fiber!

Xzibit?

[LS]

Yo Dawg,

I heard you like me so we put my music videos on Xiang Zhang's graphene modulator network so you can watch Xzibit on Exabit.

And in 30 years when we get this to the home

[Anonymous Coward]

... my ISP's monthly cap will still be 100GB.

Except in the US

[Anonymous Coward]

2025: Time Warner offers an Exabit broadband plan for $89.99 a month (which is capped at 0.9 megabits)

Dispersion! But On-Chip Networks...

[Talisein]

I haven't done the math, but at 500 GHz it seems like dispersion would make any network longer than a single chip fundamentally unable to use that kind of frequency.

For a mesh network-on-a-chip though, you could probably dumb down the routers a lot (you'd have to to let them operate at that freq), and basically trade inefficient routing for a way higher link rate... basically operate the network such that you can deliver a message 100 times faster than than you can send 1 message. The routers may not even need buffers at that point. But I think there are a lot of problems here.

I think the parent comment is right: 500 GHz modulator is nice and all, but its difficult to use until everything else is at least on the same order of magnitude.