Slashdot Mirror
Lucent Makes 10 Terabit Router
maladroit wrote to us with an interesting press release from Lucent Technologies. The former Bell company has made a breakthru using microscopic mirrors in fiber that will allow data to be carried at upwards of ten times current speeds. Supposedly, a ten terabit router has already been created, and it will be rolled out to the public towards the end of next year.
This is more like a very special patch panel than a router. It is NOT a breakthrough in optical computing, or a computing device at all. It uses tiny mirrors (and maybe some tiny smoke *grin*) to direct different wavelengths of light coming off one port to different ports. It apparently does NO routing or inspection, it just sends light from one fiber to another.
Not to say this isn't interesting, but let's not get carried away and declare Lucent the ruler of high-speed optical routing yet!
(Unlike the present-day situation, where most corporate networks remind me of a concussed ferrit in a molasses-filled pipe, with concrete boots. Though what a pipe is doing, wearing boots, I don't know. :)
Personally, I would like to advocate that Lucent promote this technology to the world at large, by offering 4 such routers as prizes in a sweepstake, held on Slashdot. What does everyone else think?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not to sanction this kind of behavior, but stuff like this is something moderators should ignore anyway. Like the guidelines say, use your points to moderate worthwhile posts up, don't worry about stupid things like this.
-A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Disclosure: I work for Cisco, but believe me, I'm just the tiniest of schmucks in the corporate ladder over there. Translation: This is me talking, not them ;-)
:-)
Lucent continually impresses me with their labs... breeding new technologies from within. Cisco, on the other hand, devotes very little to research.
I wouldn't say this is flat out wrong, merely somewhat short-sighted. From what I've learned, Cisco's employee turnover rate is famously low--there probably is no other company in the high tech field that can claim such a successful acquisition department; indeed there was an article in Fortune about how skilled Cisco is in successfully absorbing new companies.
This is rather critical, if you think about it. Low turnover means those individuals who have proven themselves productive in generating new technologies in a small company on the open market remain working with and for the company--thus, when Cisco purchases a highly skilled research organization, they actually get what makes the organization what it is--the people.
You can't claim Cisco doesn't do any research when they've fully absorbed so many research heavy teams.
That being said, there's a "baselining effect" that's at play here. Cisco spends immense amounts of money creating advances on R&D, and Lucent is not completely averse to buying companies(they recently purchased a major network services company, if I remember correctly). But you hear about Cisco buying companies, and you hear about Lucent inventing technologies, so that becomes the "baseline expectation" even though both organizations invest significantly in the other paradigm.
Of course, it's probably fair to say Cisco does much more internal research than Lucent does external purchases. Lucent comes from Bell Labs, so you're looking at a corporate culture endowed with a pretty significant legacy of advancement--there's a very strong bias against "release early, release often"; rather they prefer to develop ad infinitum. Whether this is good or bad, I can't say
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
This is NOT a router for IP, it is a router for WAVES. Read DWDM please.
The optical switch technology is used to switch diffrent lambdas through the switches.
Primary use would be if you wanted to by a Wave on a carrier's fiber. (much cheaper than buying the fiber, because you don't have to light it up and maintain it yourself)
So, the bottom line is, now I can buy a wave that crosses several pieces of fiber, and can be re-routed in case of a fiber cut!
That'd be nice, but right at this moment, I'd settle for BT sorting themselves out and giving me their pathetic 512Kb/s asymmetric line at their hugely inflated prices. They don't even seem to be able to get that right. Sigh. Until then, I'm stuck with ISDN, and even that is significantly better than the average UK household...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Depends. Is it high-order smoke, or low-order smoke? Also, is it aluminium-based, or copper?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I wonder what they mean by "terabyte" speeds. I would be more concerned about latency (How fast does it handle complex filtering rules, or NAT / load balancing?) and the maximum /effective/ bandwidth...
--
This box doesn't actually route IP, it routes lambdas.
Read up on DWDM for more details.
There isn't a box out yet that can do OC-192 IP routing. Do the math on how long it takes to dig into an IP packet, make a forwarding decision, and execute it. It will be HARD, with current RAM read rates, to fill up an OC192.
Of course, this doesn't prevent people from putting OC-12s and OC-48s on OC-192s and making press releases!
Very impressive, maybe, if they'd made that announcement last week, or last month. But in the same day that Lucent starts shipping routers over 1000 times faster? It becomes less staggering and more "why did they buy the cheap stuff"?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This type of device is obviously a good thing(tm), however, I don't see it making a big difference in what we as the end users see for a long time.
For one, just because you have a router that can switch packets at 10 Tbps, that doesn't mean you have the money to support the fiber lines you would need to even come close to those kinds of speed, much less pay for someone to route traffic over it to you. It is also likely that your local telco doesn't have the capacity at your CO just yet to support this either.
Also, what happens when you start slapping on filters and access lists and start doing some layer 3 routing on top of this machine? Does performance degrade? Most likely. While being able to read packets at line rate is great, the real obstacle is to be able to build a full-fledged routing device that can route and filter at line rates. There is a huge difference.
Don't get me wrong, this is a great breakthrough, but don't expect to see the end of the Slashdot effect just yet.
-B
Yeah, I agree. I hate spanking hard earnt moderator (tu-wisted moderat-ah... Cooooo-me maaaaaark myyyy po--sts, slashdot surfing addict insane! - need to lay off the Prodigy, I think :) points on useless first posts.
I've noticed recently with provocative issues (Roblimos' lovers guide, MS's legal troubles etc) that comments run to 375+ in number. Is there a constant calculated along the lines of
Arbitrary constant = Total number of comments today / Total Moderator points available
In these big discussions, I've found that the first 100 or so comments are moderated, the rest seem to be ignored. I've lost count of posts which I thought were worthy of a high score, only they have not been moderated up because they weren't posted in the first 100... So I think the proposal for M3 should include something like forcing nested or flat mode for moderators when browsing, and maybe prevent the average number of moderator points expended in any quartile (by timestamp) of comments exceed that of any other quartile by an arbitrary constant (50% maybe?).
I'd also like to see two additional moderation classes - "Lame First Post" (you should get your moderation point back for this - but abuse of it should put you on a moderator black list) and "Offtopic But Interesting"...
What do you guys think? How is the moderator system working for you?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Most people in the Internet world use router to mean something that switches packets at layer 3.
Almost everything else is called a switch, so I think this should be called a DWDM switch, since it is working at layer 2 with DWDM (or maybe layer 1 depending on how you look at it). (DWDM = Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, or shoving several colours of light down a single fibre.)
This sort of kit will be very useful though - before too long it should be possible to run DWDM to the customer premises, but even before that heady prospect DWDM should make it possible for xDSL and cable modems to run closer to full speed.
All we need now is faster servers and 10-gigabit ethernet (which a standards group is working on I think).
Look bub, having Cisco certification doesn't mean you work for Cisco.
No, sitting at my desk in Building C, 2nd Floor, in San Jose means I work for Cisco.
You're probably some stupid contractor.
No red badge on me. Anyway, I'd be happy to be a contractor; many of the smartest people in the industry contract.
I've read some of your posts and to be quite honest, you're very stupid.
Why thank you. If I've offended the likes of you, I'm doing something right.
If you are indicative of the quality of people at Cisco, I'm calling my financial advisor and instructing him to dump my Cisco stock.
I think that speaks more of your intelligence than of mine.
Yours Truly,
Someone who sees right through you
Ciao, Jizmak.