23 May 2011

Internet is too slow. Germany to the rescue??

ExtremeTech is reporting that those clever Germans have devised a method of transferring 26 terrabytes per second (hint: that's a lot) using a single laser and a single optical fibre!! While it's still to be determined if this will work on existing trunklines, if it can, it could be one of the most significant changes to Internet infrastructure this century has ever seen.  Impress your friends with the new term called 'orthogonal frequency division multiplexing' or OFDM for short.  OFDM allows 350 independent data streams to be bonded into a single laser burst: a pretty awesome achievement.  Even better, the tech is cheap enough and practical enough for existing ISP's to adopt.  Can't wait!
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3 comments:

  1. g25 May 2011 at 00:43

    was reading this earlier and all i could think of was how the hell r they going to make systems fast enough to store that amount of data at that speed. sata 2 drives still suffer from bottlenecking let alone the new sata 3 drives suffering from the same problems, On the other hand tho it would be great for streaming internet films,cloud based storage and online gaming

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  2. The Angry Rabbit25 May 2011 at 11:44

    Well to be fair, this is more about the network backbones than anything else. Service providers are under tremendous pressure to support an exponentially increasing pile of Internet-capable devices including smartphones (heck, regular phones for that matter), televisions, cars, utility meters. Most of the bandwidth caps you see on connections and 3G networks are to keep the traffic down so that major network highways (fibre) can keep up with demand. This new innovation could completely change all that. Think of it as a freeway/motorway. Imagine that currently, most backbones are six lines across in both directions. When you get on the freeway, you travel at 70mph provided there's room for your car. If not, you have to wait (latency/contention) until a space frees up. This new tech expands the number of 'lanes' to something like 1000 (instead of 6) virtually eliminating wait times altogether and the need for bandwidth capping.

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  3. The Angry Rabbit25 May 2011 at 11:48

    To add to that - this solution will not fix 'last-mile' issues with respect to home connectivity. The best options for that are FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) which requires companies to run their dark fibre to each phone exchange, convert the existing copper to digital (currently analog) and kicking up domestic connections to somewhere about 40mbit/s

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