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Nokia Says It Can Deliver Internet 1,000x Faster Than Google Fiber (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Verizon Fios has topped Netflix's speed index for quite some time now with its 500 Mbps up and down internet speeds. When compared to dial-up speeds of about 56 Kbps, Fios is roughly 1000 times faster (since 500 Mbps is equivalent to 500,000 Kbps). Google Fiber on the other hand offers 1 Gbps speeds, but it's not as widely available as Fios as of yet. In a statement made to ZDNet last week, Nokia said it has figured out how to deliver internet that is 2,000 times faster than Verizon Fios, or 1,000 times faster than Google Fiber. Their technique is called Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS), which can deliver 1 Tbps speeds over a fiber connection. "The trial of the novel modulation approach, known as Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS), uses quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats to achieve higher transmission capacity over a given channel to significantly improve the spectral efficiency of optical communications," Nokia explains. "PCS modifies the probability with which constellation points, the alphabet of the transmission, are used. Traditionally, all constellation points are used with the same frequency. PCS cleverly uses constellation points with high amplitude less frequently than those with lesser amplitude to transmit signals that, on average, are more resilient to noise and other impairments. This allows the transmission rate to be tailored to ideally fit the transmission channel, delivering up to 30 percent greater reach." Nokia's demonstration is described as being achieved in "real-world conditions," though there is no timeframe as to when the technology will be deployed in real networks.

55 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. The big difference is... by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Google are actually out there doing it.

    1. Re:The big difference is... by The-Ixian · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Perhaps I misread this but this seems to be referring to the modulation technology that the light traveling over the fiber uses. So Google fiber and Verizon FIOS could license the technology from Nokia and increase the speeds... am I wrong?

      --
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    2. Re:The big difference is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Your interpretation is probably right, however the claim is still laughable as using said technology for last mile will require mass replacement of equipment on customer premise AND building a core network thats thousands of times faster than the 1tbps last mile

    3. Re:The big difference is... by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      The real appeal with Google Fiber and Fios is that they are priced so average middle class people could afford such speeds.

      1Tbs unless offered at a good price, would be useless for most homes and would be more important for VPN across good sized companies.

      My home internet is only 30mbs and that is more than enough for me and my family. Perhaps if I had a 4k TV it may be more important, or many people streaming at once... However we need technology that will utilize such speeds before we need to consider upgrading to it.

      4k Real Time (non-buffered) two way communication may do the trick. Then you have all the privacy concerns about that too.

      --
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    4. Re:The big difference is... by Shatrat · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The hilarious thing about this summary is that both Google Fiber and Verizon FiOS already use Nokia equipment.

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    5. Re:The big difference is... by msauve · · Score: 1

      No, you're not wrong. If they can standardize/commercialize it, it would first appear in backbone interconnects - and presumably at great relative expense (profit?), since it would offer 10-25x the performance of what's currently available (40-100 Gbps).

      They're comparing it with consumer speeds because it makes the numbers look bigger, which makes for a better press release.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    6. Re:The big difference is... by JustNiz · · Score: 1

      I'm not so sure about 4k needing much more then regular HD, because sites like Netflix are always gonna have to support people with the least bandwidth, so that means they're gonna compress the hell out of everything.
      I'm betting that the only way 4k is ever gonna look noticeably better than 1080 is if you have a 4k BluRay, or an OTA antenna and the TV companies ever start producing/broadcasting in 4k.
      TV over cable or the internet is gonna be compressed to hell for bandwidth reasons (like it already is), so if those are your main/only sources then in terms of picture quality, a new 4k TV wont be any better than the 1080 one its replacing.

    7. Re:The big difference is... by lgw · · Score: 1

      1Tbs unless offered at a good price, would be useless for most homes

      Comcast will offer unlimited* 1Tbs for a perfectly reasonable price.

      *Capped at 1 GB/month. Comcast programming excluded from the cap.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    8. Re:The big difference is... by zlives · · Score: 1

      i think not, i am ready to replace my X2 modem and this technology should fit an end user like me.

    9. Re:The big difference is... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      My girlfriend had the cheapest, crappiest internet connection available to her. It's gigabit in both directions.

      I understand that it's actually 2Gb on the fibre side, but the Ethernet port on the modem is only gigabit. It's shared between multiple apartments in the same block, but I've never seen it slow down.

      --
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    10. Re:The big difference is... by KingMotley · · Score: 1

      Only because you are already entrenched into an environment that has been tailored for that type of set up. Imagine having a Xbox/PS with next to no storage capacity where all (your) games are loaded directly from the cloud. How about an "unlimited" DVR where your DVR stores everything in the cloud? Full system backups to the cloud? How about moving your entire CPU/GPU to the cloud where what is rendered is set to you for displaying locally much like Nvidia was attempting with their grid architecture. You'd never have to buy another game console or PC ever again except if/when something revolutionary happens, and even then it would be 1/5th the price.

      In short, local storage becomes much less desirable if you can get virtually unlimited storage at nearly the same speed as you could locally. Consumers would never need to buy another hard drive for any device. You would only need a small amount of storage to use possibly as a cache, and you would be better served by using an appropriately sized SSD for such a task.

    11. Re:The big difference is... by almitydave · · Score: 1

      Eh, not really. Compression is relative, sure, to the codec/methodology, but Netflix 4k streams require 25Mbps while their 1080p requires a measly 5Mbps...definitely a tremendous amount of additional information in the 4k stream, compressed or not.

      It's surprising that 2160p would take 5x the bandwidth of 1080p when it only has 4x the pixels... Is it less compressed to allow for increased decoding time?

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    12. Re:The big difference is... by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Currently commercially available is 32Tb/s with 6km ranges, and has been for 5+ years now. There is little demand because backbone bandwidth supply has completely outpaced demand. No point in increasing the backbone's bandwidth if it's mostly idle already. They are expecting 100Gb/s FTTH over 5Tb/s shared fiber by 2020. I'm sure that will start to drive up demand.

    13. Re:The big difference is... by msauve · · Score: 1

      Apples and oranges. This is a single frequency modulation scheme, you're talking DWDM. Additionally, this has been demonstrated at distances on the order of 200 km.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    14. Re:The big difference is... by Bengie · · Score: 1

      I mean 6,000km ranges. I heard "kilo" in my head but forgot a km is the base unit. So 6kkm?

    15. Re:The big difference is... by msauve · · Score: 1

      Show your source. I suspect there's EDFA involved.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  2. Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses.

    Not to the home but maybe to an local hub / node.

    10GB e-net stuff is still mostly priced at enterprise levels.

    1. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by wagnerrp · · Score: 2

      Good for backhauls

      Nearly all long distance links are single-mode fiber, because multi-mode fiber results in dispersion and low signal quality at longer distances. You can't run QAM over single-mode fiber. Assuming the breakthrough here is a new modulation technique that allows for such longer distance links, you would still need to run all new fiber.

    2. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by Shatrat · · Score: 2

      You can actually get 10G residential service now, using a different Nokia equipment using NGPON2 from EPB in Chattanooga.
      You're right about this Terabit announcement summary though, this is an idiotic summary comparing a train to a shopping cart.

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    3. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by Shatrat · · Score: 1

      All optics > 40gbps are running some sort of phase shift modulation, up to 16 and larger QAM constellations. These are referred to as 'coherent' optics, although all lasers are coherent so I'm not sure who came up with that as the standard way to refer to them.

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      09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
    4. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by sexconker · · Score: 2

      I'm annoyed that consumer gear doesn't have 10 gig ports on it yet. It's really not that much more expensive to implement anymore.

    5. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by Khyber · · Score: 2

      I could think of plenty of uses for 1T-bit connection in the home.

      Camfrog Video Chat, if they hadn't fucked up and removed your own ability to host your own server.
      4k broadcasting of multiple video cam angles for things like live from-home guitar education, lapidary education, etc.
      Being able to back up your stuff to whatever silly online cloud provider you have thank to our ever-increasing data glut.

      --
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    6. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by Kjella · · Score: 1

      10GB e-net stuff is still mostly priced at enterprise levels.

      The 10 GbE card would be the least of my worries. We have had two operators offering it for "consumers" here because apartment buildings typically have a single connection but most pro routers have dual uplink ports so it didn't really cost them anything to offer it - but the price has been ~10x their gigabit price at $1800/month and $700/month respectively. From what I've understood it's extremely few clients, but... there's always that guy working with 4K dailies both from home and work or whatever and the odd billionaire tech freak I suppose. Personally I got 150 Mbit and could get more but my connection is rarely the problem, I think the only time I'd like a faster line was when my GTA IV installation got irrecoverably borked and I had to wipe it and download ~57GB again. And even that took less than two hours...

      --
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    7. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by Guybrush_T · · Score: 1

      Indeed, stupid clickbait article ... comparing state of the art research to home equipment, comparing technology providers to ISP, ... that's ridiculous.

      The original article (http://www.zdnet.com/article/here-comes-the-terabit-per-second-network/) was about the next generation of fiber going running at 1TB/s instead of 100GB/s currently. This is used by datacenter, high performance computing ... very expensive stuff. The fiber is usually not the problem here, the optic transmitter being the key.

      If we're talking about home equipment, this should be about having the current high-end technology (line 10Gb/s or 100Gb/s) becoming cheaper so that it can be deployed to homes or even local hubs.

    8. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by guruevi · · Score: 1

      10GbE is priced for small business, you can get 24 port switches for ~$2-5k (even from overpriced shops like Cisco) and 10GbE NIC's for $200 or less. 40GbE is being priced for your largish office building and 40/100GbE is considered 'standard' in new data center designs. Development of 400GbE has been going on since 2013 and 800GbE and beyond is expected around 2020.

      --
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    9. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by guruevi · · Score: 1

      The last few workstations I purchased come with 10GbE (mostly SuperMicro) but I understand some desktop motherboards have it as well. It's not that expensive to buy a NIC either, most 'homes' only have 1Gbps and are mostly relying on wireless.

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    10. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by guruevi · · Score: 1

      I can only get gigabit for $1200/month and $10k installation cost even though the fiber is right in front of my house. I'm still on TWC 15/1Mbps.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    11. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by sexconker · · Score: 2

      And where are all the home routers/switches with 10g?

    12. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by guruevi · · Score: 1

      There are plenty of gigabit switches with 2-4 10GbE uplinks sub-500 and there are even some full 8 or 12 port 10GbE switches sub-1000.

      --
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    13. Re:Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses by sexconker · · Score: 1

      I'm talking about linksys, tp-link, d-link (ugh), etc. commodity shit.

      Those guys paved the way (however shittily) with wireless standards, especially in the early days of 802.11n ("Pre-N" routers were everywhere), 5 GHz, and 802.11ac. The business grade support for those new shits didn't really happen at any sane prices or across all products until well after the consumer shit blazed the trail.

      For 10 gig Ethernet, the reverse is happening. It's been readily available at the business end for ages but there's been virtually no movement on the consumer end. This is a large part of the reason why it's still so expensive at the business end - there's no consumer level shit at the $100 level to force the prices down. A few years ago I would have expected that in late 2016 I'd have 10g at home and be looking at 40g by default at work.

  3. Bad math... by sconeu · · Score: 2

    By my count, 500,000 is about 10,000 times more than 56.

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
    1. Re:Bad math... by Guybrush_T · · Score: 1

      Indeed, and I guess the comparison was with 512k DSL, which is indeed 1000x faster. Honestly, 56k ? Does that still exist in any country also featuring Fiber ?

    2. Re:Bad math... by tsqr · · Score: 2

      Honestly, 56k ? Does that still exist in any country also featuring Fiber ?

      Best Buy lists a 56k dial-up modem priced at $50. 133 reviews, 4/5 stars. So yeah, that still exists. Gotta say, though, that some of the customer questions are pretty hilarious (or maybe just sad): "Will this connect DSL line to a cable modem router?" "Can we use this for a USB port on the router to use as a phone line?" And the winner: "Can I connect it to a led flat screen TV to surf the internet. By the way, the TV has Roku streaming connected to it."

  4. Re:10,000 not 1000 times faster by peektwice · · Score: 1

    500Mbs is ~10k times 56kbs, not 1k times as the article is written

    ~8,928 but who's counting?

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  5. Re:10,000 not 1000 times faster by sexconker · · Score: 1

    500 * 1024 / 56 = 9142.857142857142...

    I'm counting. And yes, kbps means 1024 bits per second. Networking clowns fucked up and used 1000 instead of 1024 because they were stuck in the analog world of symbols per second and baud. b = bits, not baud, you fucks.

    I'm aware that there's basically no networking gear, manufacturer, etc. that uses 1024-based shit. That doesn't make them correct, it makes them unanimously retarded. If you want more proof they're retarded, why would they use 1000 instead of 1024 yet still go to the trouble of branding things as 1000 Mbps instead of 1 Gbps?

  6. Does it work for copper too? by MetricT · · Score: 2

    While I'm sure getting a terabit to the home would be wonderful, the real-world situation is most people are going to continue to have copper to the home for years/decades due to regulatory capture.

    Is the Probabilistic Constellation Shaping concept also applicable to twisted pair/coax copper? Because being able to get some people decent DSL would be a major advance. My parents still can't get 1990's-vintage 200 kbs DSL because in 20 years, AT&T still hasn't run fiber *to their own fucking cabinets*, much less the home.

    I know AT&T already has g.fast, but that's one of those things that's mostly only useful for short distances and "demonstrations", the actual real-world speed isn't much better than DSL after so many hundred feet, and it would have required the same AT&T who has refused to spend money on fiber to spend money to upgrade their existing cabinets.

  7. Like all good porn by argStyopa · · Score: 1

    ...they save the money shot until the end:
    "there is no timeframe as to when the technology will be deployed in real networks"

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    -Styopa
  8. That'd be pretty easy... by kuzb · · Score: 1

    ...since the speed of google fiber in my area is zero due to no availability.

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    BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
  9. House wiring by XanC · · Score: 1

    I'm looking at wiring a house we might buy for Ethernet. Should I string some fiber in there too?

  10. Re:internet speed by Razed+By+TV · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not a Microsoft company.
    Microsoft purchased the "Devices and Services division" of Nokia,
    but the rest of Nokia is still Nokia.

  11. That's not exactly what Nokia said by Guy+Harris · · Score: 4, Insightful

    TFA doesn't claim Nokia said anything about Google Fiber. All it claims is that the number Nokia's talking about is 1 Tb/s, and that "For comparison on the consumer side, Alphabet's Google Fiber embryonic US fiber-to-the-premises service is offering 1Gbps connections.", so the comparison is being done by ZDNet, not Nokia.

    They also say "on the consumer side", so it's somewhat like Caterpillar saying some new haul truck can handle 500 tons and the article reporting on it saying "For comparison, on the consumer side, a Ford F-150 can handle 1 1/2 tons" - it's not as if somebody's going to use one of those big trucks to do residential construction, it's just there to give a sense of scale.

  12. Re:internet speed by Guy+Harris · · Score: 1

    Nokia -- a Microsoft company.

    No, it's not. Nokia is an independent company that sold its mobile phone handset business to Microsoft. They mainly sell stuff that's used to build networks.

  13. So I'll get it next Tuesday? by bobbied · · Score: 1

    So, to reverse the common quote about paying later for hamburgers...

    You are promising me faster internet LATER? I suppose you'd like me to pay you for this now?

    Way to go guys... I can do this NOW... You just cannot afford it.... And who wants to drop 10 Gig onto their WiFi router anyway? Oh, you want me to WIRE everything back up? Thanks, but no..

    Call me when you can do that for what I'm paying now... I'm sorry but promises of way faster internet in the future get you a "Well Duh!" from me. Who doesn't expect it to get faster? I'm planning on it myself..

    So, you want me to pay today for a hamburger next Tuesday? No thanks..

    --
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  14. Network providers not homes by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

    1Tbs unless offered at a good price, would be useless for most homes....Perhaps if I had a 4k TV it may be more important

    Try 40,000 4k TVs: Netflix 4k takes 25 Mbps. I don't expect to see this technology in the home anytime soon except perhaps in some selected test areas. There is no 'killer app' which needs this much bandwidth in the home at the moment. If it is cheap enough to act as a home link they would be better off marketing it as a replacement for 10Gb network links and switches. I could easily imagine using that sort of bandwidth for analysis of research data on a cluster in a data centre. Why would you aim it at homes to start with?

  15. Practical use? by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    If I recall the fiber telecom courses correctly, at 1 Tbs/s, we get close to the optical fiber maximum bandwidth.

    However, we have no switches that can handle that. The only way to actually use the huge fiber bandwidth is to use wavelength multiplexing, but when we do that, this Nokia groundbreaking innovation is of little use.

    And in any case, this innovation is not directed toward consumer's last miles link. It is not a possible competitor to Google Fiber and other similar services.

  16. DWDM by mar.kolya · · Score: 1

    Hasn't this already been invented many years ago and is called DWDM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing) and can have speeds over way 1Tb via single pair of fibre?

    1. Re:DWDM by Bengie · · Score: 1

      DWDM does have great bandwidth, but can only transfer about 400Gb/s per channel right now. A single 1Tb/s channel, even if less than the 32+Tb/s DWMD can handle, still has its usefulness.

  17. Sadly, it won't matter by GerryGilmore · · Score: 1

    As mentioned in other comments, probably great for back-haul upgrades but for me doing average web browsing, the connection speed is irrelevant as 99.999% of the delay in loading web pages is due to the hundreds of ad-pushing/sniffing websites that the underlying web site relies on before completely loading. I could have a dedicated terabit connection and my load time would be the same.

  18. Re: Lower Amplitude Better? by Jfetjunky · · Score: 1

    No, the issue is the explanation is sparse.

    From what I gather, intentionally shaping the probability density down to lower amplitudes in situations where there is less noise allows them to stay farther away from what's known as the third order intercept.

    The third order intercept is the amount of power passed through a device such that it produces an equal amount of third order distortion as original signal. Why's this bad? The distortion products interfere with whatever carrier lies in that frequency in an OFDM scheme.

    So if the the noise is low, they use the PCS scheme to keep overall power down, which should hopefully allow them to stack in more carriers in the same BW. Which increase the Hz/bit figure of merit to almost theoretical max.

    That's if the research I'm looking at is the same..

  19. it costs by stooo · · Score: 1

    >> Nokia Says It Can Deliver Internet 1,000x Faster
    The small drawback : it costs 15x more

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    aaaaaaa
  20. When compared to what-up? by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    When compared to dial-up speeds of about 56 Kbps

    Okaaay, crazy old man, back to bed and the nurse'll be round with the green pills.

    "Dial-up" indeed.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  21. Low bar. by thrasher+thetic · · Score: 1

    Considering google fiber isn't offered here or where anyone I know lives, I'm betting that Nokia CAN in fact deliver better than 1000 x 0.

  22. Re:Deployment by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 1

    Of course not - an actual deployment schedule in the US would depend on the existence of actual competition driving incumbent companies to actually upgrade their infrastructure, and we can't have that because too many politicians are in the pocket of those incumbents.

  23. Re:10,000 not 1000 times faster by PetiePooo · · Score: 2

    My Internet connection is 1.21 Jigabits per second. Signed, Doc Brown

    Great Scott!

  24. Re: 10,000 not 1000 times faster by almitydave · · Score: 1

    Power limits meant 53.3kbps max. I clocked a few downloads north of 50, so it was possible.

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