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Nortel gets 6.4 Terabits on a Single Fibre
GFD writes " Nortel claims to be able to do 80 gbits/sec in a single wavelength. Using their current top of the line DWDM equipment which handles 80 wavelengths on a single fibre they get 6.4 terabits per second.
What's scary about this is that future DWDM products are claimed to aim for 400 wavelengths per fibre. That fibre would be able to carry over 21 million T1 channels! "
Maybe I can convince the University to move our campus backbone to this. Sure would improve the pr0n^h^h^hq3test^h^h^hmail server.
21 million TV channels! That's a whole lifetime of channel surfin'! :-)
I think the key sentence in the piece is the one that 'claims':
Nortel showed 80-Gbit transmission over 480 km of dispersion-managed fiber manufactured by Corning, in a single span without regeneration.
I'm starting to feel lightheaded...
makes me hot...
that's just amazing! *dools*
Okey, i know this is a off topic, and I know I'm going to sound like a moron, but could someone explain to me why people refer to quantaties of storage they refer to byes, (kilobyte, megabyte) but when talking about transmission rates they talk in bits (10 megabits, 80 gbits). Can anyone enlighten me?
... that a backhoe can cause even more damage to the network than ever before.
At this rate, most of our copper wires (Even inside the machine) would be replaced with fibre optic cables and everthing would be done with light. Crystal CPU's come to mind :) Then what? Would we have then reached the final/ultimate speed limit? I think not.
:) We can just run everthing from one centralized server (yes Linus, can you host it for us?) :>
Before that happens, we need to concentrate on our algorythems and develop better compression. Sure people are getting rid of compression just cause there is mode bandwith. Nowdays you cant even watch a web broadcast without having a 56k modem, soon it would be a 256K DSL line. Just cause we have faster lines and better computers doenst mean we should stop developing better compression and tighter programs. I for one would welcome a totally opensource fractal compression algorythem and encoding/decoding routines for audtio/video and other media. That would be a nice day.
Anyway, at this speed we dont need to install OSes
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We're talking hundereds of gigs a sec over a line like that. Kinda puts DSL to shame...
What does this button d$#%* NO CARRIER
The article said that it it would theoretically be possible to hook large numbers of people (whole cities?) up to effectively one piece of fiber and give everyone their own wavelength.
The key pieces of technology missing were, IIRC, lasers which can retune themselves very quickly, and purely optical amplifiers (got to eliminate the electronics totally).
Interesting idea I though. They called it the "fibersphere" I believe.
Bruce
It won't be long now before we'll be able to describle all the matter in the Universe over a single communication channel in the blink of an eye. Of course, this doesn't help with the problem of taking the measurement... I want a few of these, would be great for a beowulf cluster.
Think of all the PORN you could download!
Sorry... I just thought it needed to be said ;)
Hemos seemed to have forgotten to mention it when he posted...
Jeff
SCSI and parallel ports aren't, but USB is, I think FireWire is, modems are, etc. Since comm is bit at a time, bit speeds make sense.
Storage is almost byte oriented. Actually, disk drives are sector / block oriented, but that differs from drive to drive, making byte the common denominator.
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Infuriate left and right
*attempts to quantify the bandwidth in an understandable mesaurement..*
*keeps trying..*
Brain Panic!
Overflow while using 30486203968203962bit integer!
So 15 fibers would be enough to carry one T1 channel per person in the USA. Distribution is left as an exercise for the reader.
If this potential bandwidth increment means that telephone companies can carry even more telephone lines for a lower price and still charge us the same rates I totally disagree with this kind of technology advances.
Telephone companies should realize it's time to offer higher bandwidth services for lower prices, they will still be making money while bringing benefits to their clients (us) instead of just getting every time richer with the 3rd world services they currently offer charging 1st world rates.
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In other words, they do transmit 80*80gbits/sec of data, but the actual information they transmit is (merely?) 80gbits/sec. So, unfortunately these setups are far from the real thing, but maybe someday...
Oh, and the high-bandwidth transmitters and receivers do work better in stable conditions such as a research laboratory. Try that in an actual environment and be surprised. Lasers and PIN-diodes are temperature-dependent and chirp becomes a problem in high-bandwith lasing. (Chirp = a change in laser wavelength when laser diode's current changes.) The bright side is, that at least these things are under intense research.
No apologies for any misspellings, this ain't my best language. :)
At this years Hannover show, I saw Fujitsu's latest speed demon, the 320Gig. WFDM, I remember being very impressed. being a Telco Engineer. However as I was looking (drooling) over this new sparkling toy the following occured to me.
a) These things do get faster every year or so. No biggy there. So what. CPU's speed up Harddrives get bigger/faster cheaper. Is anyone really surprised by this ? The numbers ar big and very fast - but it *was* a lab.
b) These things are horrendously expensive to put into the ground. The only people that can actually afford to use them are Telco's (think Baby Bells AT&T and MCI Worldcom/Sprint )
So what does this gain us. Nothing. We won't see any increase in internet backbone because of this. The Telcos' have to much capital investiture to pull all those gloriously expensive CBR services out and replace them with something innovative like POS ( Packet over Sonet ) or ATM.
The ITU has only really ratified OC-192 ( STM-64 ) 9953.28 Mbit/s ( 10Gig ) fairly recently. These new multipliers are not yet part of the standard. Traditionally we have seen steps of 4X over the last signal speed.
STM1 = 155 M
STM4 = 622 M
STM16 = 2488 M
STM64 = 9953 M
etc.
I'm not sure that these actually fit cleanly into the current SONET / SDH infrusture. Which is fine for point to point comunications, within the one company or Country. But it you needed to interconnect one of these to another vendor's bit of kit, unless they follow the same technology tree with FWDM 80 Gig Steps, it would mean that you would have to step this bad boy down to a level in the standards to actually get something out of it. That could mean a lot ( a real lot ) of 10 Gig boxes stepping down across lines of demarkation ( or POI's )
And just on the side. Nortel's track record of just keeping 1X ( Their name for an STM1 box) running is really not so good. How are they going to support 6 Tera if they *really* can't get the basics right ??
MRo
and we thought a guy with a backhoe could do some damage before...-
... and missing.
--------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
Make a mistake and your talking 80kBIT/s
instead of 10.
Would we have then reached the final/ultimate speed limit?
Before that happens, we need to concentrate on our algorythems and develop better compression. Sure people are getting rid of compression just cause there is mode bandwith.
You're doing the same thing that a lot of the general populace does, and getting latency mixed up with bandwidth.
Latency is how long it takes for an individual packet of data to get from one place to another.
Bandwidth is the total amount of data you can get from one place to another.
A little comparison: if you had a large plane that had a top flight speed of about 300 mph (mach 0.4) and could carry 1000 passengers and you also had a jet fighter that could travel at just over mach 4 (3000 mph) and transport a single passenger. Most people would agree that the jet fighter was "faster" in a very real sense than the large plane (by a factor of 10). However, with two cities 1000 miles apart, (ignoring time spent loading, unloading, refueling, etc.) the large plane could transport 2000 passengers in 10 hours (3.3 hours per one-way trip) while the jet fighter could transport 15 passengers. With vehicles, carrying capacity (bandwidth) and speed (low latency) don't get confused. Yet, somehow, when you replace planes with modems, the average consumer gets confused and thinks that speed means something completely different than it means in any other context. Speed is how long it takes to get from here to there (miles per hour, for instance).
Very luckily, however, for big expensive products that aren't aimed at the average consumer, latency is considered very important.
When you compress data that is being sent live, you actually have to slow things down in order to do it. (look above at explanation of what speed means, if you're unclear already) This is because you can't effectively compress a single bit or a single byte, so in order to compress you'd hold onto the data for a little bit before sending it off.
With your average consumer modem, compression slows things down by 15ms or however long it takes to receive a large enough block to send from the user (whichever happens first). With a normal home modem, though, you've already got something like 100ms that's wasted going across that link, so in most instances another 15ms isn't much, and is a good tradeoff for the slight boost in bandwidth.
When you've got a DSL line, however, you've got much lower latency than a normal modem would get, so something like 15ms tacked onto it would be doubling your latency. Double (or worse) latency in exchange for a small increase in bandwidth simply isn't worth it. It would just slow down your overall experience. (The only thing where you might want high bandwidth more than low latency is, basically, if you're downloading a lot of large files (like porn or software), and those are usually already compressed (JPEG, GNU zip, ZIP, etc.))
Improving switching and routing speed is much more important and useful. Adding compression to high-speed lines is a bad idea.
Also, electrical impulses already travel at about 2/3rds the speed of light -- outside of your CPU the speed of light over the speed of electric impulses isn't too much of an issue...
I don't know of any country in Europe who's telcos offer prices that are half as attractive as what you guys have in the states. Cheap long distance calling, free local calls, quick new-line installation - these are things most European companies and private individuals dream about. Did you know that price of an inter-city connection in Poland is over $0.50/minute even though salaries here are 10x lower that in the US? Or that BT, the (ex?)British State Teleco doesn't differentiate between local and long distance calls, so in effect all calls are long distance? Or that most German internet users I know pay between 3-4DM per hour of on-line time, and that's just the connection fee!
.sig free since '88
One of the main reasons that the internet has exploded in America like it has is because your telcos are offering 1st world services at 3rd world rates. Imagine how much harder it would be to justify an extra $150 phone bill (like a lot of Poles do) just to be online reguarly. Or to have a telco that just last month started differenting rates for nighttime (22-6) calls (50% less.) Not a pretty picture, is it?
jay
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Telephone lines are known to be the most expensive in all the world, but how about geting one or more E1s for a whole building and share the rate and bandwidth between all the people living there? It seems that if high-bandwidth prices start getting lower every building (or group of buildings) can have it's own PBX (or router or both) and let the telephone companies in charge of only high-bandwidth services which have to be cheap.
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Yeah, but my Catepillar can get 6.4 Tb on a single backhoe. Maybe more, if they put em all in the same conduit. Better'n pingfloods ;)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Lab tests may be one thing, but I know for a fact that the multimode fiber strung all over our campus has recently been discovered as almost worthless as we do 100mb and gigabit testing.
So what if their lab equipment can get 80 different wavelengths over a fiber? If we can only run one beam over a piece of fiber 1000 yards long, how are they going to jam them into a strand 1000 miles long? Hmpf.
SHOW ME THE MONEY.
Sorry, couldn't help it.
Someone said:
"What's scary about this is that future DWDM products are claimed to aim for 400 wavelengths per fibre. That fibre would be able to carry over 21 million T1 channels!"
and I would like to know what part of the above can be classified as "SCARY" ?!
I know it may be a figure of speech, but new methods that push up the bandwidth of a pipe isn't something to be scared about.
We are not luddites, or are we?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There's so much of this in the ground already it's not even funny. If the telcos were to light it all tomorrow, with currently utilized gear, the US would have nearly THREE TIMES the bandwidth that's available now.
Yeah. The mega-bandwidth that this would provide makes me drool. But the cost of implementing it would be horrendous.
And we all KNOW Ma Bell ain't gonna just eat the bill for it. Well.... We don't know. But we could make some guesses and stand a really good chance of being spot on. =)
$5 for a 2 minute call to my next door neighbor!!!!!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The costs of providing T1 and T3 service have plummeted but the rates have stayed the same or even increased. Rather than price their products at cost plus a reasonable profit margin, the telcos price their products based on their perceived "value". This means that many services are grossly overpriced. It also tends to inhibit the introduction of services and technology that would cannibalize cash cows like T1 lines.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
So maby that Mindcraft 400Mb/s Linux vs NT webserver-test will have some validity after all... 10 years from now that is!
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
Assuming a wavelength window of 1500nm to 1580nm, theres an optical frequency range of some 10 Tb/s (assuming my quick calculation is correct).
Accordingly there will need to be fancy coding methods before 6.4Gb/s and above will be reached (eg. methods that trade bandwidth for signal/noise such as used in Modems).
Actually thats all pretty accademic anyway, since the limits for non-linear interactions between the wavelengths will be reached much sooner. Causing at best loss of signal, at worse distruction of the fibre....
Its all vey good to say 80 channels in one breath, and 80 Gb/s per channel in the next. Its an invalid assumption however to assume they can be combined since the effect of modulating one channel results in wavelength "sidebands" that affect the adjacent channels.
This is from my experiences years ago, but I dont think the laws of physics have changed since then...
Cheers
Dave P
With this much bandwith , you would never have to leave your home, forget going to the movies you can watch the latest release on your home pc
/. effect take one of these lines down ?
Everyone in the world could all watch the final episode of the Xfiles at the same time, and no damm american would spoil the ending for us poor behind the time Australians !
Also with this much Bandwith some issues need to be raised ! Could the
Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
FIBER optic is networking, FIBRE is a communications protocal for Storage Area Networking, aka Fibre Channel
Theatre, trousers, spanner, colour.
ac.uk
Do we have the ability to route traffic at that rate?
hmm... what's Cisco stock going for these days...
Yeah, and I wonder if Nortel will team with Redback again to cripple this new bandwidth with PPPoverE again.
Indeed, as far back as 2400bps modems, the difference between bits per second differed from baud. If I recall correctly, the QPSK scheme 2400bps uses sends two bits per transition, and so is 1200 baud, 2400 bps.
One interesting thing to note is the fact that most modulation schemes for modern modem hardware mostly eliminate the stop-bit/start-bit/parity overhead that RS232 has. This started with the 2400bps error correcting modems Way Back When. On these modems, ZModem download rates as high as ~275 bytes/second were not uncommon, since the modems disassociated the RS232 signal from the audio signalling. In contrast, the old-fashioned Bell 110 "0 - 600 baud" modems were little more than a voltage-controlled oscillator hooked to the Tx line and PLLs hooked to the Rx line and Carrier Detect line.
Back to the original topic: Transports (such as Ethernet, T1s, etc.) are specified in Bits per Second largely because they are a bit-oriented medium, and they generally have little protocol overhead associated with them. (Although T1s do implement "bit robbing" for their control channel, thus reducing their advertised capacity to 1.536Mbps rather than 1.544Mbps.) Higher-order operations such as file transfers are reported in Bytes per Second, since (1) files are usually collections of bytes, and (2) the protocol stack provides a byte-oriented interface to the file transfer program. Somewhere in the stack (usually very, very near the bottom, at the Physical layer), the bytes become bits (and vice versa), but by that time you've inherited all of the protocol overhead of whatever protocols you're running (anything from ZModem to TCP/IP to SNA to whatever) and so bits vs. bytes starts looking alot like apples vs. oranges.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
The speed of light in a vaccuum is constant. Electric current running down a wire is in anything but a vacuum, however. The rate at which a electrical signal propogates in a given wire has to do with the series inductance of the wire and the parallel capacitance of the wire, per unit of length. (Parallel to the shielding, that is. Unshielded wires are often treated as having shielding at "infinity" that is tied to ground.) The ratio of these quantities forms the "impedance" of the wire, which is usually specified in Ohms, and is invariant with respect to length. That's why, regardless of its length, RG-6 Coax (cable TV wire) is 75ohm.
(Note that I'm talking about ideal wires here. The series resistance of real wires also mucks up the propogation rate somewhat. Not only that, but also it delays up signals at different frequencies differently, leading to something known as "skew", if I recall correctly. Whee. Transmission line theory was never my strong point, but I'll never forget the basic lessons it taught.)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
The scary part is that it would take just one construction worker a hoe to bring down 21 million T1 lines. I seriously hope they're doing work on protecting these cables they plan on building.
Actually, the nonlinear and crosstalk effects are accounted for. The 80x80Gbps system uses the same fiber as Nortel's older 160x155Mbps system: that is, the newer scheme uses half as many wavelengths to avoid crosstalk. The actual limit on fiber bandwidth is no longer the lasers and receivers, nor is it the optical amplifiers. Rather, the constraint is the energy density in the fiber at the point of amplification. When there is too much energy at one point, the fiber goes nonlinear and strange things happen to the pulses. Nortel's system uses a spooky phenomenon known as "distributed Raman amplification" to avoid this. Distributed Raman amplification works by turning the entire length of the fiber into an amplifier. A steady beam is sent from the receiver toward the transmitter. The modulated beam from the transmitter picks up energy all along the path from this opposing beam. The energy transfer is mediated by a non-linear effect in the fiber. The result is that since the amplification is distributed along the entire fiber, the energy density in any one spot is never high enough to cause nonlinear pulse distortion.
Nortel is one of the partners that help put together Canada's advanced network, CA*Net3. This network is already installed across Canada. You can get more info at: The Home Page of CA*Net3 http://www.canarie.ca/frames/startnetworks_e.html or ABC news coverage of CA*Net3 http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/cuttinged ge/canadanet990827.html
Thanks to your local Baby Bell, you still won't be able to do more than 54,000 bps from your house.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It turns out a Korean construction company had driven a support beam for a new bridge right through the line. Have you ever seen those machines that drive a beam into the ground by repeatedly lifting a large weight and dropping it? I doubt anything could survive a hit like that.
The point is that protecting the cables is not possible. It is far more important to have the ability to use an alternate route. In this case, we were lucky enough to have some of the tactical signal units in the field and they could provide enough bandwidth to alt-route the VTC on.
Put them inside a gas line. If backhoe monkey boy still cuts the cable, at least he gets 'sploded in the process. After a while, Darwin should take over.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There is a minimum latency, and that will be the time it takes light to go from one location to the other along a path. In networking, we can view this as the time it takes light to go the distence of the networking cable connecting point A to point B. (This does not count for subspace negative matter wormhole theories and what not--by today's technology).
:)
However the time (latency) is usually much longer than this time, due to many things, such as media conversion (ex: copper to fiber) time, and routing. One thing that is usually a big bottleneck for most of the world is that ISP's make money by overselling their connections. If an ISP has a T3 uplink, then they will make profit by selling 15-20 T1's, or the bandwith equivellent in a modem pool. If all 20 T1's were using their full bandwith load, then the T3 would be swamped, and the router should line up the packets and send them out as it can, putting the extras it can't send ASAP in it's memory (if it's memory becomes full then the packet is usually dropped). This is reflected in your ping time, or latency since the ping packet had to wait in a line to get past the ISP's router.
Since most common dialup ISP's connect to a larger domain-wide ISP which gets its bandwith from a backbone ISP or bandwidth reseller, that's 3 routers that it may have to filter thorugh, causing high latency.
With large-pipe OC (optical cable) then cost of supplying bandwith goes down because of supply and demand (there is now more supply) and ISP's can afford more bandwith for their existing customers without cutting profits (so now you would have say an OC-3 for the 20 T1's which even leaves some breathing room on the cable, I think). Now with the big cable (and hopefully a better router to handle the full OC-3) there will not be a waiting line of packets coming to the router and latency will get closer to theoritical minimum (the speed of light between A and B from above)
Of course the ISP will probably expand and oversell the OC-3, but that's another story
(FYI this is what makes some ISP's better than others: they either don't oversell their lines by as much, have fewer "middleman ISPs", and/or have better hardware (ex: having the router in the case above, with extra memory, etc.)
- Sig
I don't understand why a technology advance like this could be bad. Nortel is a Canadian telecommunications company, not a phone company. True they sell the majority of their equipment to phone companies, but that's because they have the most use for them. Europe's telco business tactics are a completely separate issue. In fact, I don't see how this can be anything but GOOD for everyone!
SCSI -- not sure now -- it's parallel, but are transfer rates specified in bits or bytes? Now that I think of it, I can't remember! :-)
Parallel ports also do bytes not bits, but again -- I can't recall ever seeing a transfer rate spec.
Reel to reel tape densities were in bits per inch, but they usually wrote a character at a time (7 track, 6 + parity).
I seem to remember some of the holographic storage specualations discussing bits not bytes, but then media densities usually are reported in bits per square hoojiwich.
Bottom line is, I don't know.
--
Infuriate left and right
You know RealVideo will still look like crap.
There is a german physics professor that has demonstrated the ability to transmit data at 4 times the speed of light through a quantum mechanical tunneling mechanism. i.e. the signal tunnels through a barrier and in doing so goes faster than the speed of light. The story was on PBS last night.
Thank you very much for your explanation. Albeit very long, it was clear and intelligible. I learned things I didn't know and brushed up on the old facts. Alex
Parallellism.
Of course, the latency issue remains.
The bandwidth can be taken care of however. All that is needed is the ability to optically multiplex and demultiplex the bitstream before interfacing to electronics. In most cases, the signal has originated in the electrical domain anyway (how 'bout inside a PC somewhere), so that's the place to compress/decompress, before it's mixed with the other electical signals.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I must say that the fact that a Canadian company is such a leading edge networking power is a great source of pride. But there is an interesting article in the Globe and Mail today and apparently Nortel now drives one-fifth of our stock market. That's big.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
Only problem is that at that speed, my hard drive wouldent be able to keep up with my connection!
BL0W IT OUT YER ASS
This is truly worthless. So what if some lame ass telco can get this type of bandwidth? It'd cost you a grand a month or more just to get 1/21millionth of this bandwidth and that is a sorry crock of shit. Telephone (and cable TV) companies need to be shutdown and given to people who aren't so fucking greedy and who aren't stuck up pricks like these monopolies currently are.
Sounds more like an old news to me. Rights now DWDM can support 19 to 100 TB with 99.999 efficency. They propose with that the "lightning fast Internet". With OPTera, they say they will change the hole way the internet works, creating new needs ( VoIP, VideoConf, etc ) and pushing aside all the "old" ones. I want to be alive tio see that ! Nermal
it costs a bundle to develop these new money saving technologies.
My isp has a beowolf, and claims there isn't mauch use going too far overboard on fast harddrives, etc. since the NICS are a bottleneck.
Technologies like this will probably drive prices down on consumer fibre and optical NICS to the point where the local net is as fast as the PCI bus...
Watcha think?
According to an article here, teleportation over optical cable is not even close to possible.
our telco is the only one in a country of 3.8 million people they are the ones that own the lines we have many internet provides and a couple of long distance calling and cellphone providers (1 in 4 people have a cellphone here) and we get charged under $20 US for a unlimited hours and megs dial up connection our high speed access consists of DSL ranging from $50 US for about 600megs to about $100 US for 1800megs or something like that or a one way system for $35 US a month with a limit of 3gigs International calls are usually along the lines of talk for as long as you want for like $5 US anywhere in the world and long distance calls aren't expensive