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Wireless 10 gigabits/sec data transfer
swedub writes "Lucent Technologies announced a breakthrough technology that eventually will enable business customers and service providers to transmit up to 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s) of information between locations through the air. " They are calling it WaveStar OpticAir. Global Crossing will be doing field testing this December already. This is the first system to actually use Bell Labs dense wave division multiplexing-can I get coverage in my area? But the encryption issues will be interesting, methinks.
Not to rain on your parade, but...
Audio CD's are 720 MBytes...
720*15 = 10.8Gbytes...
I'll be monitoring your connection, and putting up logs of your cybersex on the web. Sorry dude.
Couldn't one design a beam splitter if this is optical? :-) You're just a sceintifically (sp?) designed and cut prism away from tapping this baby undetected (sort of)...
ever heard of a gyroscpe stabalizer?
HOw do you think military warships communicate to satelites while the ship is moving and rocking?
Its easy to do.
this is good in cities where you can do 10gig connection between sky scrappers . ie NewYork
and any other city where telcos rip you off using
ground cables.
looka t www.davnet.com.au
"Well, looks like the Smiths are having a LAN party again..."
:-)
Ya, well, SSH is a pain in the rear to set up -- I started to and gave up because of the effort. I want something more like telnet but with public keys exchanged at the beginning of the transaction. Yeah, you lose the authentication part, so some really determined person could spoof your "good" host, but I just would rather not have stuff going out over the network in plain text. There needs to be a middle ground between SSH and telnet.
Ha ha ha ha.
A fair amount of light ? How about a few photons here and there. Any light that is disspersed will go in all directions. Trying to intercept such scattered light and properly demodulating and demultiplexing it would be extremely difficult without even considering encryption. Dust and smog would absorb the light rather than reflect it and I would imagine that the variable propagation delay of the extremely weak intercepted signal would make proper demodulation extremely hard.
Why would Boeing set this up? I would imagine that setting up a system like this would cost a lot more than setting up a fiber optic cable system (of course, I don't know what fiber optic cables run...)
Uh oh...a rainbow...we're picking up the Johnsons' traffic again...
Ya, but that's on one frequency, right? I get the impression that this is spread-frequency (though I don't understand this newfangled optics techno-talk :-) ), which I would imagine would spread out all over the place as the different wavelengths refract at different angles...
Hmm...what frequencies are these? Will things start glowing in the dark? :-)
Get a coupla good mirrors, send it around corners... :-)
:-)
Agreed. The only applications *I* say you need short-range wireless (and can live with unreliablity) are things like quickie home LANs, where you can't/don't want to open walls (or run cables all over the place like I have...:-) ).
Now, if they could make neat laser shows with this, or something that looks pretty...
It's amazing that they are able to get the information transferred in such a tight fashion. Being transferred by waves, it would have to have a very high freqeency wouldn't it? If there was a fraction of a second worth of static, huge amount of data loss, unless there was some redundency.
CD = 650MB
650MB*15 per sec = 9750MBps = 9.52GBps
assuming
1 GigaByte = 1024 MegaBytes
1 MegaByte = 1024 KiloBytes
1 KiloByte = 1024 Bytes
1 Byte = 8 bits
A couple of points:
1) cable modems target home users, not corporate users. Downtimes are less critical for home users. Lucent's press release makes this technology sound like it will be targeted for business more than personal use -- a huge mistake if downtimes are any more than 1%
2) I have a cable modem and during the first few months, i had downtimes approaching 15%. A few well-placed calls to customer service and they sent out someone to fix it up. I haven't had more than a few hiccups (5-10 minutes of downtime) ever since. Moral: cable modem technology *can* be reliable if done right. But wireless technology (especially outdoors) is practically guaranteed to fail if conditions aren't perfect.
No?
A four-wavelength system with a maximum capacity of 10 Gb/s for distances up to five kilometers is expected to be commercially available in the summer of 2000.
it that ansering any questions?
OK. Take a few deep breaths and then down a couple dozen Prozac.
Why couldn't they use another wavelength of light - not visible, but something that the light could easily pass through?
RAM is one of the few things that are sold correctly. 64 MB of RAM really is 64 binary megabytes of RAM.
the fact is that there are _two_ metric systems, a decimal one (kilo=1000) and a binary one (kilo=2^10=1024). RAM is sold using the binary one because no RAM would sell in packages other than 2^n bytes, for design reasons. Hard disks and bandwidth are commonly measured in decimal units. That way you can get away with 1.000 billion bytes when 1 binary GB really is 1073 billion bytes (7.3%)
The only place where you could get to really confuse both is when Nintendo were advertising their ROM sizes in megabits by just saying "megs".
But then, the average guy could confuse anything.
I don't know about the ships in port bit they're talking about. I doubt that a laser link would work with all the moving around ships even in port do...
Someday, I'll register.
-Rich
Well, you're implying that he *can* read 8)
Yup. This site goes up and down more than a porno star.
Actually any of the above will disrupt this link.
I worked for a firm that connected two buildings with an infra-red link. It failed:
- when raining
- when snowing
- when the wind blew up dust
- in the fall when the Sun was setting
- in the spring when the Sun rising
- when pigeons set up a nest in front of it
- the sensors went out of alignment as the building settled
Yea, It looks like they can't tell their bytes from bits. If it used 8 bit / 10 bit encoding you'll get about 1.5 CDs a second, which is still pretty nice. It's also about 10 times as much bandwidth as you'll get out of your PCI bus on a PC, so you won't be using this in your home any time soon.
I'm in central Jersey, and my cable modem's had one brief outage over the past three months.
as always is that i don't do anything too illegal ... i don't have enough money to make me a target ... and what are the odds they are going to hack my line? ... granted the government won't use it but if it were up to the governement they would eat all their messages after reading to keep others from reading it ... someone steals, let's say, my credit card ... i'm out what? $200? ... big deal ... my car's a peice of fertilizer ... sure i have a bunch of computers in my house, but those are heavy and kinda hard to steal ... nope i figure odds ... odds are bad that tornado will hit my house and odds are bad someone will steal my car out of a random parkinglot of bmw's
if knowledge is power, the internet is god - me again
Take a look at this quote...
"Lucent's WaveStar OpticAir system eventually will enable business customers and service providers to transmit up to 10 gigabits (billion bits) per second (Gb/s) of information between locations. At this rate, customers will be able to transmit the data contained on 15 CD ROMs through the air in less than a second."
10 billion bits = about 1GByte/second..
now how many cd-roms (650MBytes) can be transfered in 1 second?
Also, what kind of redundancy does this thing offer? What if something passes in between the receiver and transmitter, or the weather is bad?
sarcasm(on);
Yeah, I heard theyre working on some strange new bizzare technology that will actually let you transmit an unlimited number of data streams in parallel over thin air.
Theyre calling it something weird like "radio" I think.
sarcasm(off);
Bowie
PROPAGANDA
Actually VERY large buildings like the boeing assembly plant actually have their own weather ;-)
inside (fog, etc). I wonder if that means it won't work worth crap there either
Optical isn't too different from microwave when it comes to weather problems (just ask anyone who
owns a DSS system) and they seem to be pretty successful in an outdoor situation...
The idea is pretty cool, but if you are transmiting several differnt frequencies at once will you not also need several emiters for each frequency and what happens if one of them gets out of alignment.
The other question is what pricing is going to be. I can guarentee its not going to be cheap since it is line of site only there will not be a HUGE demand for the things even though I can thing of a dozen or more aplications off the top of my head. Although its still got to be cheaper than digging a trench and laying fiber.
Come to think of it with that much band width the television / movie bizz has got to be excited. This has got to be cheaper than a satalite uplink and if there is a remote even within the usable range of this tech all they have to do is set up and shoot the video down it.
What is the efective range of this anyway?
Well there are alot of questions on this tech. (others have posted the ones about weather ect.) but it does look promising and has more uses than I think most people are giving it credit for asuming it doesn't go down compleatly in a rainstorm.
I'll be watching for more.
Since it's just a beam of light, how would this stand up to the rigors of use in space? Maybe to communicate between space stations, or a possible link between say, a space station and the moon. (Cloud cover on earth would probably make this unfeasable there) We're really not that far off from this.
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What it sounds like is they found a way to achieve OC-768 over a laser. OC-768 comes to about 9.6Gbit/sec (I think), so my guess is the marketeers probably thought they would round the figures up to make it sound nice.
There are several companies out there offering OC-3 and OC-12 over laser right now, so it isn't *too* much of a surprise that we now see this level of service. Think of SONET without the fiber...but remember it may be fast, but line-of-sight isn't always easy to achieve in even moderately crowded downtown areas.
You're right...you're right. OC-192 equivalent. Maybe it was just my wishful thinking. :) But still, I wonder what kinds of applications are going to be able to use this kind of bandwidth.
I mean, the Abilene network is moving towards OC-48 on their backbone, and that will be shared by hundreds of universities, labs, etc. So basically, I'm not sure what the point is in point to point 10GBs...get my point?
Other systems I have seen like this fade out at 2 km and are useless in fog, snow, rain.... Anyone know any specifics about this one?
I know there is one in production in Arizona somewhere.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
hahahahahahahahahahahaha...=)
pooptruck
Part of Harvard's internet connection comes via a microwave link from MIT. So whenever network performance is a little off, the hip thing to say is "Hmm, it's a little cloudy today..."
I don't think this sort of link is supposed to hook up a computer, but rather an entire site... 10gb/s is wasted on a single PC, workstation, or server... even a decently sized workgroup would waste the link...
Remember switching! bandwith seems to be getting easier all the time.
of course, going through the air seems pretty cool, takes the fiber out of fiber optic and back into breakfast cereal... speaking of which
hrms... i'm using a microwave link now that sits on the roof and aims through the trees... encryption should be an non-issue as long as bandwith usage remains manageable; that is, the amount of bandwith the average user can use is close to what is reasonably encryptable using a lightweight scheme. Of course, snoopers would have to splice the actual laser... just keep a camera with really really big zoom along the path of the signal... hmm. so i guess i could upgrade my t1-ish (strange, 200 KBps (kbytes)downloads despite paying for 384 kbits microwave) to this in a couple weeks, cough. Ah. Anyone notice dem pitiable foo's in the article who confused bits and bytes? Phall to phoenish.
Why would any service provider use this? How many service providers have a direct connection to the other location, and what happens when a bird flys through the beam, or something else blocks it.
Lucent should try making something usefull for a change. inferno and now this... they had so much potential
I wonder if this will drop out whenever it rains
or snows like infrared Ethernet does?
cable modems in my area (central NJ) reportedly have downtimes of at least 15% averaged over a week. this seems ridiculous to me, but they're still selling like mad.
>Birds are not so much a problem because if it's
:) };)
>important, a TCP-like net connection is being
>used, and retransmissions will occur. Now a whole
>flock of birds, well...
The solution is simple. Crank the transmit power up to a 20-30 watts or so. Any bird that flies through the beam likely won't do so again. Ever. 20-30 watts of laser radiation will probably also break through thick fog, and create an impressive light show people can admire.
- =^o.o^=
Well, 10GB/s - 10% downtime avarages to 9GB/s. I'll settle for that! :-)
-- Nothing is as subjective as reality --
Also, it states the supported distance: A four-wavelength system with a maximum capacity of 10 Gb/s for distances up to five kilometers is expected to be commercially available in the summer of 2000. That's about three miles.
By the way - this is an original company press release. Pretty much hyped, and still quite far in the future. Let's check back in one year and see what they actually delivery, and how big the market for that product will be...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
It's a laser beam going from roof to roof. Eavesdroppers will have to intercept this beam. It's much easier to dig up a cable and tap that.
US Navy Subs only send/receive data at certain times. (when they are on the surface)
Also, all Navy ships (or most anyway) have Stable Elements already, so adapting that signal to a tranceiver would be easy.
It sounds like the private sector wouldn't benifit as greatly as the Military might. But you gotta admit, the thought of filling up your (present) Hard Drive in a sec or 2 is a pretty awesome concept!
Disgruntled Microsloth user, lookin to be converted!
What we the people need is a WLAN device that can communicate with other WLAN devices in the neighbourhood, so making the internet more independent of local telecoms authorities. With parallel routing the bandwidth could be huge.
It is still cheaper for me to buy 2 NE2000 clones and a 100m of cable than one single WLAN card. Until this changes we will never break the grip of the telcos, and will forever remain subject to the whims of the governments that they support.
Vik :v)
No - not OC-768. What they have is 10Gbps which is OC-192.
But - what they actualy have is 4 OC-48 links.
Each OC-48 link is 2.5Gbps (really 2.488 - but close enough) and they use 4 different wavelengths of light.
Uh, I am pretty sure I have 128MB of RAM, not 16MB (128Mb).
Nature abhors a vacuum. So does my sister's dog.
I worked with a client who had 2 IR Wireless links (LACE - Laser Atmospheric Comm. Equipment ? ) installed. The systems were configured for T-1, although they could be used for Ethernet at 10Mbps. The path length was about 1/2 mile in each case. One link was pretty reliable, the other was quite troublesome. In the troublesome link, one end was mounted atop a chimney ( can you say wind? Sure! ) and the other was on a floating membrane roof. The links cost about $37K each, including the T-1 to Fiber converter and the mounting hardware. They were inconvienient to work with due to the mounting locations and hardware, and when aligning them, very minute adjustments of knurled-headed screws made significant changes in signal. The complete range of usefull adjustment was on the order of one rotation of the screw!
I imagine that there are applications where these types of things are usefull, but the installation has to be rock-solid and well engineered.
I think a better growth path is to install fiber. Lots of fiber. Everywhere. NOW !
Z
enough is too much
Would I have to wear a tinfoil hat if I were standing in the datastream?
data cds are 650 megabytes... that extra 70 megabytes are used as a buffer. if you have a glitch in an audio cd, maybe you have an audible distortion in a song. if you have a glitch in a data cd, its all corrupted...
..................................@ @
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
"Lasers are directed ... "
Well, my Ham Radio experience tells me that radio is VERY directional, especially at high frequencies! Ever hear of EME bouncing? Basically, ya take a very short wavelength (in the low digit Gigaherz range) Yagi antenna, aim it at the moon and it maybe bounces back somewhere here on earth. I've been in the presence of conversations with folks from Agentina... all via radio waves bouncing off the moon.
Mike
I doubt that this will become very popular. I work for a small ISP and can say that this just wouldn't be financialy feasable. Plus, the weather here sucks eight months out of the year. Another factor that people haven't mentioned is what about a nice wind storm? Or bandwidth on the internet to begin with? DSL is already causing a slight slowdown as it is, this would bring it to its knees if it were to be popular. I'm beginning to think that Lucent is full of crap between the ears (IMHO).
Did I just say that out loud?
they mention DWDM which stands for dense wavelength division multiplexing... in escence they are using many different eavelengths... and they are probably IR ....
The main reason this system is better than RF is because it has much higher capacity... The fastest LMDS radios today can do 155 Mbps while this can do 10 Gbps. So there's an obvious advantage. Another advantage is licensing. microwave radios require licenses to operate, this does not. Those licenses have to be paid regularly too... and they are getting expensive.
that's actually called scintillation and does have a dramatic effect on performance. However, by installing them properly and with proper design, one can reduce the effects.
Maybe there should be a vaporware category. Please don't take my post as a flame or flamebait, but I am starting to get tired of stories like [company] discovers/invents a new process/technology that may become useful sometime between 1 and 10 years. I just find information that is relevant today to be so much more useful, if there was a vaporware category then I can consider it as such. The same thing goes for game sites that write article after article of previews and rumors and interviews about games that aren't out yet. I guess I prefer to live in the now. I'm just too impatient to constantly be looking forward to the next big thing.
>Also, what kind of redundancy does this thing
>offer? What if something passes in between the
>receiver and transmitter, or the weather is bad?
If a cd-rom doesn't make it, you just walk over, pick it up, and throw it again.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
One of the first things that I learned about when I was studying the physical layer in network communications were protocols using this type of medium for physical transport. The author of the text (Andrew Tanenbaum, the author of Minix) criticized it for its easy disruption by weather/obstruction/heat. Something that many people seem to fail to consider with this is the refractive qualities of air - although they see the obvious, such as birds and other foreign object flying through the paths of the beams(something the is quite likely to be corrected for in the protocol; any good data protocol will incorporate error correction/detection featers so these types of incidents are made quite irrelevant), they don't seem to see that if there is a substantial difference in the heat between the two points, the air will be different enough to refract the light so it misses the transceiver entirely. Again, if the protocol designers have a clue, they might incorporate some sort of detection/correction (in this case, possibly moving motors in the transceiver to correct for the refraction). Just my two cents worth on this protocol.
-- K
Not really. If there is dust, smog, or rain in the air, a fair amount of the light will scatter. With proper equipment, it wouldn't be too hard to tap the beam.
From the article:
"At this rate, customers will be able to transmit the data contained on 15 CD ROMs through the air in less than a second."
CD capacity is ~600M, right? 15*600 is 9000, or 9G. Isn't 10Gbps, ~1Gbyte/s? Did they confuse GBit and GByte?
On the other hand, either way it's faster than PCI, so I won't be using up all that bandwidth by myself...
A lot of people pointed out that weather can and will mess up an outdoor laser-based network. Given that, I assume that most of the uses for this will be indoors. Think manufacturing plants (Boeing, Ford), conference/concert halls, trading floors, etc. It makes a lot of sense if you want a high-bandwidth rapid-deployment network inside a building with appropriate lines-of-sight. Much easier to install/uninstall than draping cable over or under everything, especially if you need this network for only a few days/weeks.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
a) Bad weather? Falling rain/snow, fog, dust clouds, tree leaves, a bird... Poof. Terrible reception.
...
b) Not mobile? One of the big things that radio networks are good for is allowing laptop users to move through the areas of service. Lasers are directed
c) Useless for people needing the high speed link - see a
The way I see this technology working isn't too impressive. It seems to me that it would just link directly into a more conventional network for temporary use when the weather is known (or projected) to be good... The conventional net would then be divided among a large number of users... The distances it carries data can't be great, because as distance increases, the likelihood of an interruption also increases. Also, even tightly focused laser beams become diffuse eventually...
From the way the article presented it, it seems like there would be multiple nodes each feeding data to the next... but then you have to have permission to put a node down on property that you don't own...
The only real use I see for this is for very short term things where laying the lines is too much hassle and 100% uptime isn't particularly important... ie. conferences, expos, etc...
It seems every time I see an article on Slashdot about some new way of laying out networks or how netwoking is changing, the author seems to make an small snide comment about encryption. Look, the fact is that we have solved this problem with IPsec and other tools such as ssh. Who cares if everyone is able to read my traffic, for I am using end-to-end encryption with all hosts that I frequent and send sensitive data to?! As machines capable of using IPsec become more prevelant (and they will now that Windows users finally got their own decent IPsec implementation through PGPnet), these comments will become more and more disinformative.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that these comments are just going to contribute to FUD. The tools to be secure are out there. Use them, for goodness sake.
A DS3 (About 44 Mbps, or 5.5 MByte/sec) runs about $1500 PER MONTH. This gadget is the bandwidth of about 227 of them. The equivalent of 100 times the bandwidth of a 100Mbps ethernet, vs a T3 which is a bit less than half of one.
If it costs a few grand per box, one-time, a company with two or more buildings within line-of-sight of each other but not on contiguous land, in a region with even moderately good weather, might buy them to connect the building LANs, and fall back to a puny T1 (1.5 Mbps) on stormy days. BIG bargain.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The article doesn't say how the bandwidth will fair during bad weather, ie rain storms or blizzards. Methinks this will go the way of personal satellite uplinks - very specialized applications where reliability is less important than cost, speed, etc. 10GB/s is nice, but if it has 10% downtime whats the point?
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
asinus sum et eo superbio
asinus sum et eo superbio
in omnibus veritas
As another poster already noted, it's 10Gb weather permitting.
;)
Also, it's a line-of-sight technology. I, for one, can't imagine this being used effectively for much more than spanning roadways and other public right-of-way restrictions without the legal hassle of an easement. Maybe jumping over a small river or such, but the morning fog, or the heat rising off the rooftops would just shoot your network to hell...
Cost-wise, I doubt that this will ever be more affordable than traditional fiber. The endpoint hardware has to be at least as expensive, and the cost of fiber vs. the power needed to push light through the air is a major argument in favor of glass/plastic.
My 0.02 euro
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
ping slashdot.org
>Request timed out.
>Request timed out.
>Request timed out.
>Request timed out.
"Oh shit, it's raining again!"
Birds are not so much a problem because if it's important, a TCP-like net connection is being used, and retransmissions will occur. Now a whole flock of birds, well...
2) Encryption? Well, it is hard to intercept because you'd have to be in the line-of-sight. Now if you're between the Tx and Rx, you'd probably have a good intercept, but you might ruin the link for the legit user. If you were behind the legit Rx, then that receiver would be blocking you, and you as well might be out of range for the link.
Still, if it's important, the user(s) that need encryption will do so as necessary on their connection(s) only.
3) No good for anything but line-of-sight (LOS)? This is still a big market for data carriers. There's bandwidth all over the place between 2 GHz up to 38 GHz for point-to-point use, and these pretty much have to be LOS-only. At around 28 GHz, there's LMDS, which is point-to-multipoint; still, it's LOS-only (in spite of what some might say).
This laser solution is clearly LOS-only, and will require proper aiming and all that at each end. And, it isn't very mobile, but Navy ships could certainly afford the required autotrack mechanism to make this useful even with gentle rocking of the ship.
Yes, I do this for a living, only at RF.
Anyone who has used a line-of-sight optical system for doing a T1 or something similar knows that this won't work worth crap in a lot of typical outdoor situations.
;-)
I see a couple of good applications.
1) Get the bandwidth up today while you get the trencher out to bury your fiber.
2) Replace the bandwidth today after somebody else cut through your cable trenching in their fiber
3) Use it indoors. Large convention centers could use a couple of these puppies to move lots of data around where fiber runs might not be pratical. Also think of Boeing's assembly plant. VERY large building with pretty decent sight lines without weather problems.
In general though - this is only going to be useful to a far smaller number of people than would use a traditional fibered system.
Ok, I'm going to geek out here for a second...
:) )
It sounds like they intend to use this like point to point microwave, but in areas where microwave isn't feasible. This is becoming more and more of an issue with wireless local loop technology being the current vogue.
The problems with microwaves is that they scatter. Not only do you have to worry about the beam getting to the other end but you also have to worry about all of the reflected signal that will interfere with both ends and any other microwave sites. Plus there is the bleeding of signal out the back... the antenna patterns can be fairly complex and interference analysis is a very big business. Some would argue that the wireless local loop and point to multi-point markets have yet to be adequately addressed. The engineering can get very complicated. Especially if you are talking about small-scale dense areas like campuses and office complexes.
Also, the equipment for microwave is likely to be more of a hassle. If you aren't familiar with it there is a lot more to it than you might think. Compressors to keep the waveguides empty, etc.. (Fiber makes a pretty good waveguide for light.
re: Weather. Light is highly attenuated by water droplets in the air but so are microwaves. This is all part of current reliability analysis when designing microwave links. There are known ways of limiting the affects of this and they might apply to light as well.
It would be interesting to have a reliability/attenuation comparison between microwave beams and light. If only I were a microwave engineer instead of the guy that writes some of their software... I might have more to say.
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.