Researchers unlock fiber optic connection 1.2 million times faster than broadband
Researchers unlock fiber optic connection 1.2 million times faster than broadband
Using an optical processor to operate in the E- and S-band ranges, UK researchers hit a transfer rate of 301 terabits per second.
xfinity will advertise 100 Tbps lines with the abysmal 1.5 TB/mo data cap anyway
"you can drive this super sport car for $ per month - but only for 10 miles"
Don’t be silly son, the free market will signal there is opportunity and prices will drop and quality will go up.
🤪
All fed to you on the not updated data line that caps at 800 MBps
I hate Comcast as much as the next guy but I feel like 1.5TB a month would be reasonable. Even at those speeds you probably wouldn't be downloading more, just downloading whatever you do now but faster.
E: I was gonna ask why this was so controversial but I just checked my routers stats and, oh yeah I've only downloaded around half a terabyte over 3 segregated VLANs in the past 2 months. I've uploaded almost double that which is baffling to me though. Even still I don't see why anyone would be downloading anything more that a terabyte in a month unless your one of those data hoarders, which fair but.. I'll stop my rambling.
Why the fuck would I want that speed if I can only fully use it for less than a second before hitting the data cap? I'd rather have 100 times less speed with 100 times more cap, so I can actually fully use it however I want.
Also it's just ridiculous anyway because I don't even think hard drive write speeds are that fast.
Data caps are simply false advertising - if your infrastructure can only handle X Tb/s then sell lower client speeds or implement some clever QoS.
There are plenty of users for whom 1.5TB is quite or very restrictive - multi member households, video/photo editors working with raw data, scientists working with raw data, flatpak users with Nvidia GPU or people that selfhost their data or do frequent backups etc.
With the popularity of WFH and our dependence on online services the internet is virtually as vital as water or electricity, and you wouldn't want to be restricted to having no electricity until the end of the month just because you used the angle grinder for a few afternoons.
I'm on pace for 0.60 TB this month and I'm no heavy user. I only have 1 4k TV and a laptop for work that I use all day. My wife is mostly on her phone but is a heavy TV user in the evening. I can imagine people who download and/or torrent most of the content they consume can easily hit 1.5TB
Tell that to my (nonexistent) off-site backup.
Broadband is not a speed.
Do you know how fast you were going?
Faster than broadband...
Faster than "[...] the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"?
(Quoted: Tanenbaum, 1981)
according to the FTC or FCC whichever one it was recently raised the defined speed of a broadband connection.
It's not symmetrical yet though. Which is weird.
It's not symmetrical yet though. Which is weird.
Eh, I would say it’s to be expected. A lot of infrastructure still relies on coax/DOCSIS which has its limitations in comparison to an all-fiber backbone. (This post has some good explanations.) However it wouldn’t surprise me if some ISPs argue that “nobody needs that much uplink” and “it helps restrict piracy” when really it’s just them holding out against performing upgrades.
There are limitations to the technology, similar to saying 3 times faster than sound.
Also broadband as a regulated term would have speeds tied to that definition.
Distances though? I've seen similar breakthroughs in the past but it was only good for networking within the same room.
It's optical fiber so it's good for miles. Unlikely to be at home for decades but telcos will use it for connecting networks.
Optical fiber is already 100 gigabit so the article comparing it to your home connection is stupid.
So the scientist improved current fiber speed by 10x, not 1.2 million X.
Note they did not say 1.2 million times faster than fiber. Instead they compared it to the broadband definition; an obvious choice of clickbait terminology.
It’s optical fiber so it’s good for miles.
OM1 through OM4 have full rate distances of less than 800 meters.
Yes there is faster stuff that goes for literal miles but saying that optical fiber can always go miles is incorrect.
It’s much more than just 100Gb/s.
A single fiber can carry over 90 channels of 400G each. The public is mislead by articles like this. It’s like saying that scientists have figured out how to deliver the power of the sun, but that technology would be reserved for the power company’s generation facilities, not your house.
Its not stupid at all. "Broadband" speed is a term that laypeople across the country can at least conceptualize. Articles like this aren't necessarily written exclusively for industry folks. If the population can't relate to the information well, how can they hope to pressure telcos for better services?
And 1.2 million times less likely to be available to the public
Also 1.2 million times less likely to leave the research stadium because even if this is true (very big if already) it's still "new and exciting and revolutionary improvement #3626462" this week alone. Revolutionary new battery tech comes out twice a week if you believe the pop sci tech sites, it's 99.9% crap
Stuff like this is a bit more believable. Still will be more than a decade before we will see any benefit. First all of the sea cables would get the upgrade, then private companies (banks mainly), then governments (military and such), ISPs will prolly not touch it for as long as possible till governments force em.
Battery advancements aren't crap. We've gotten 5-8% improvement in capacity per year, which compounds to a doubling every 10 to 15 years. Every advancement covered by over sensationalized pop sci articles you've ever heard has contributed to that. It's important not to let sensationalism make you jaded to actual advancements.
Now, as for broadband, we haven't pushed out the technologies to the last mile that we already have. However, this sort of thing is useful for the backbone and universities. Universities sometimes have to transfer massive amounts of data, and some of the most efficient ways to do that are a van full of hard drives.
No normal consumer user would have any reasonable use case for this kind of bandwidth.
This is data center and backbone network stuff.
ultimately the end consumer is going to run their connection through it SOMEWHERE, or something very similar more than likely.
It's not going to be FTTH levels of connectivity, but interconnect to ISP it very well could be.
Maybe so. Would sure be nice to have that kind of breathing room though
Cool I'll be able to download CoD in just a few hours.
With data caps, you can now go over your limit 1.2 billion times faster!
It's compared to the average broaband speed in the UK, so it's not quite as exciting as it might sound ...
So it’s barely faster than my phones internet when I’m traveling through nature.
Source article is here https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/aston-university-researchers-send-data-45-million-times-faster-average-broadband
One originally linked is re-post of re-post.
I remember the early 90's when fiber connection was being developed in research centers.
Researchers had found a way to transmit all of a country's phone calls' bandwidth through a simple fiber cable. Then, they wondered: what could we use this for?
This was a few years before the explosion of the internet...
1988 TAT-8 already went into productive use as the first transatlantic fiber optic connection. So the lab work must have happened in the 80's already.
With further refinement and scaling, internet providers could ramp up standard speeds without overhauling current fiber optic infrastructures.
Don't worry. They'll find some way to use this to justify massive rate increases.
We must make ISPs a public service owned by the people. Who can argue that internet isn't essential to being a regular member of society? These companies rob us and use their monopolies to manipulate us.
Wow! That site sucks on mobile.
PopSci in general has seen better days. I tried subscribing again to their physical magazines and it's just a mess... There were more full page cigarette ads than interesting articles.
They want you to try the updated fiber optic connection
Works fine on mine
remember kids, commit arson against your local ISP, and you will only be arrested for probably 20 years.
First of all some corrections:
By constructing a device called an optical processor, however, researchers could access the never-before-used E- and S-bands.
It's called an amplifier not processor, the Aston University page has it correct. And at least the S-band has seen plenty of use in ordinary CWDM systems, just not amplified. We have at least 20 operational S-band links at 1470 and 1490 nm in our backbone right now. The E-band maybe less so, because the optical absorption peak of water in conventional fiber sits somewhere in the middle of it. You could use it with low water peak fiber, but for most people it hasn't been attractive trying to rent spans of only the correct type of fiber.
the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum
No, it does not, the S-band is between them. It goes O-band, E-band, S-band, C-band, L-band, for "original" and "extended" on the left side, and "conventional", flanked by "short" and "long" on the right side.
Now to the actual meat: This is a cool material science achievement. However in my professional opinion this is not going to matter much for conventional terrestrial data networks. We already have the option of adding more spectrum to current C-band deployments in our networks, by using filters and additional L-band amplifiers. But I am not aware of any network around ours (AS559) that actually did so. Because fundamentally the question is this:
Which is cheaper:
- renting a second pair of fiber in an existing cable, and deploying the usual C-band equipment on the second pair,
- keeping just one pair, and deploying filters and the more expensive, rarer L-band equipment, or
- keeping just one pair, and using the available C-band spectrum more efficiently with incremental upgrades to new optics?
Currently, for us, there is enough spectrum still open in the C-band. And our hardware supplier is only just starting to introduce some L-band equipment. I'm currently leaning towards renting another pair being cheaper if we ever get there, but that really depends on where the big buying volume of the market will move.
Now let's say people do end up extending to the L-band. Even then I'm not so sure that extending into the E- and S- bands as the next further step is going to be even equally attractive, for the simple reason that attenuation is much lower at the C-band and L-band wavelengths.
Maybe for subsea cables the economics shake out differently, but the way I understand their primary engineering constraint is getting enough power for amplifiers to the middle of the ocean, so maybe more amps, and higher attenuation, is not their favourite thing to develop towards either. This is hearsay though, I am not very familiar with their world.
I'm highly suspicious about group dispersion over long distances. Today's infrastructure was developed for a certain range of frequencies. Broading it right away wouldn't be applicable that easy - we would need to introduce error correction which compromises the speed multiplier.
Too lazy to get the original paper though
The zero dispersion wavelength of G.652.D fiber is between 1302 nm and 1322 nm, in the O-band.
Dispersion pretty much linearly increases as you move away from its zero dispersion wavelength.
Typical current DWDM systems operate in the range of 1528.38 nm to 1563.86 nm, in the C-band.
Group dispersion in the E-band and S-band is lower than at current DWDM wavelengths, because these bands sit between the O-band and the C-band.
Faster or more bandwith?
More bandwidth. The physical Bit already travels at the speed of light inside the cables
The transiever and network processing stack at some latency as well.
Yes
My docter said i needed more fiber.
Its a shame i dont have an ethernet cable that fast or a motherboard with a network interface capable of that speed.
Great if i can get faster fibre into my home but my internal infrastructure is not up to the task. This wont be in the home until we can use fibre cables like we currently use ethernet cables.
Or is there some other tech that would replace ethernet that would handle those speeds. Also whats my wrote speed on my ssd?
Yeah i dont know if thisnis a tech thats meant for home, more likely large businesses with lots of devices all fighting for bandwidth.
It will only be used for corporations, but at some point we will also get it for our homes, but not yet. Also Theres still a lot of research to do before this will be used anywhere.
The closest that comes to mind are QSFP cables.
