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Large Improvement in Graphene Photosensitivity Realized
alphadogg sends in a writeup in NetworkWorld about promising new research with graphene. From the article: "Two Nobel Prize winning scientists out of the U.K. have come up with a new way to use graphene – the thinnest material in the world – that could make Internet pipes feel a lot fatter. University of Manchester professors Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov ... write in the journal Nature Communications of a method of combining the carbon-based material with metallic nanostructures to use as photodetectors that could greatly increase the amount of light optical communications devices could handle. This advance in graphene light harvesting and conversion into electrical power could lead to communications rates tens or even hundreds of times faster than today's, the researchers say."
This sounds promising for backhauls. I don't see it improving last-mile thoroughput, however, since practically nobody has optical fiber going to their house.
I don't think i want spam delivered tens or even hundreds of times faster.
You should go back to dialup then, I'm sure you want spam delivered to you tens or even hundreds of times slower
If it's in Nature, it's probably not going to be commercialised any time soon. Think of the article as engineering shop talk and not a sales pitch from your cable company.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What?!? Those blinking red lights on the front aren't trying to tell me something?
Worst robot friend ever!
Thank god for this. The slow bandwidth to Twitter is killing me. When one my friends goes out to lunch, or has a particularly noteworthy bowel movement, I want to know about it in nanoseconds, not milliseconds, goddamit.
Fiber optic technology that can deliver 100Mbps and even gigabit speeds over wide area distances has been around for years, so the reason it hasn't reached your doorstep yet isn't because it hasn't been invented yet. What's been standing in the way of progress all this time are the large telecom corporations that exploit all those local loops out there, those last miles of ancient copper that they're always promising to replace with something better, but always find a reason not to. No, as far as they're concerned it's always better to squeeze the last dime possible out of your investment if you can, especially when there's no real competition (something most of us can also thank our local governments for).
It wouldn't matter if it were a ready-for-market product. The only way the cable and telecoms would roll it out is if the government gave them another enormous handout to pay for it. No way they are cutting into their bottom line for infrastructure improvements.
Since graphene is so strong you could build a pipe 20 metres across. Not only would it be able to carry data, but also semi trucks. You could order stuff from Amazon with instant shipping, and get physical purchases as fast as digital downloads.
I would expect to see it in about 5 years or so, given the recent advances in mass production technology in the lab (ie methods for cheaply producing continuous sheets of graphene limited only by the size of the production facility).
Longer if the government decides to get involved. Possibly never at that point, just like how they got involved in aviation and killed the flying car (like six separate times).
Comcast is simply being a good steward for the planet in this case. Whilst other companies fritter away bandwidth at an appalling rate, Comcast recognizes and respects that bandwidth is a non-renewable resource. Once you use up bandwidth, it's gone forever. This new research reminds me of nothing so much as an announcement of a new model Hummer that gets even WORSE mileage.
Don't be in such a hurry to use up all the bandwidth, leave some for your grandchildren!
Fuck you, I care. Graphene is the future of humanity. You go live in the past if you want to.
If you need me, I'll be making the spool for my space elevator.
I wouldn't say nobody. Every new little thing with graphene is just as amazing as the last. It's likely going to revolutionize all the fields people claim in the near future. In any case, I certainly do care about it.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Despite living in a major UK city I still have between 0.5 and 1mbps going down copper wires from an exchange the next town over. But yeah keep talking about newer, better broadband.
summery said "could make Internet pipes feel a lot fatter" said nothing about optical anything in that statement.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I've been hearing how awesome graphene is for years and years. Is anybody making anything out of this stuff today?
already much faster than that. I mean yea its not been consumerized but neither has this.
Can't wait to greeze them pipes.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The federal government has already given the telecom industry several large subsidies, purportedly to improve infrastructure, instead companies in the industry have used the money to buy each other, and pocketed the difference.
I know! And some idiot said I was "off topic" (whatever THAT is). Try to be environmentally conscious and people jump all over you.
Yea? And internet pipes being faster has nothing (well, directly) to do with your local bandwidth. This is backbone shit.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Um, I know this is slashdot, but did you even bother to read the whole summary*? It specifically said "... a method of combining the carbon-based material with metallic nanostructures to use as photodetectors that could greatly increase the amount of light optical communications devices could handle" (emphasis mine). Sure that particular sentence didn't mention it, but taking it on its own seems a bit "quote-miney" to me. Then there's the title of course, which seems pretty clear to me.
*It's summary, not summery; that means "like summer".
This advance in graphene light harvesting and conversion into electrical power
Can this be used to improve solar panel efficiency?
Bow before me, for I am root.
And?
The summery suggested that all that would make all internet pipes feel faster.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I don't know about you but I feel faster already.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
They started using Thin Mint instead of Samoas.
Is there not more of a issue with routers not keeping up with the raw bandwidth of fiber then the fiber connections right now?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The "summery" [sic] says "fatter" not "faster" - it's all part of helping the communications infrastructure keep up with rising obesity rates...
Maybe they could stick lots of cheap graphene together and somehow make pencil leads?
I'm sure people would buy Nano-Pencils TM just because of high-techiness.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Well, there will probably always be some kind of cap, just because a tiny minority of users (invariably pirates) tend to use whatever bandwidth they have available. But the question is how big is that cap and what does it cost you?
In any consumer ISP network there are several bottlenecks, and in many cases it's not actually the "last mile", it's in the core network. The issue isn't actually the fibre itself - good, modern optical cables can easily carry terabits/sec of data. The problem is switching and routing it at each end. Those packets might jump down the cable at the speed of light but when they arrive at the other end they have to turned back into electrical signals, processed into packets and then routed around. There are machines that can do this at 10 gigabits/sec but they are incredibly expensive because they rely on, eg, high precision optics that only a handful of companies in the world are able to make. As far as I know no commercial equipment can go faster than 10 Gb/sec, if you see links claiming to be faster than that it means multiple routers are connected at each end and they are using different wavelengths (colours) on the same bit of glass.
What this research has done is improve the efficiency of a material that can turn light into electricity at rates much faster than traditional devices can. That means that a single router can potentially handle much more traffic on the same link, ie, at lower cost. If you can get a lot more routing bang for your buck, you can upgrade your core network significantly, and then raising the caps or lowering prices is just a matter of policy. Whether that actually happens of course depends on whether there's local competition or government regulators interested in forcing the hand of monopolies, but there are technical reasons why bandwidth is limited and non-free.
The problem isn't the fiber. We have a crap ton of it running everywhere. It's really cheap to run fiber. This technology could make us better able to increase the rates further, but seeing as none of that gets to end users our internet will still suck. We have such a glut of fiber that a 100x communication boost means we'd just use less of the already huge amount of fiber. So rather than using only 2 of the 100 fibers we have, we'll use 1 and send even less light down that series of tubes.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
FWIW, ten years ago I lived in a house built in the 50s... The sleepy little housing development it sat in was STILL being served by the original PAPER INSULATED CABLES installed when the place was new...
After a good rainstorm you could pick up the phone, hit any number to kill the dial tone, and listen to a half dozen conversations leaking across the wet paper...
The telephone and cable companies will drag their feet for as long as consumers let them...
MY Internet connection is on a point-point radio since the nearest fiber optic/DSL branch is about five miles short of getting here...
Graphene detectors will be nice... someday.... but we could do SO MUCH MORE with infrastructure RIGHT NOW!!!