How fast is your Internet connection? The days of 56K modems are — thankfully — long gone for most of us. But before you get too smug with your gigabit fiber connection, have a look at what researchers from the Network Research Institute in Japan have accomplished. Using a standard diameter fiber, they’ve moved data at a rate of 1 petabit per second.
The standard fiber has four spatial channels in one cladding. Using wavelength division multiplexing, the researchers deployed a total of 801 channels with a bandwidth over 20 THz. The fiber distance was over 50 km, so this wasn’t just from one side of a lab to another. Well if you look at the pictures perhaps it was, but with big spools of fiber between the two lab benches. The project uses three distinct bands for data transmission with 335 channels in the S-band, 200 channels in the C-band, and 266 channels in the L-band.
To put this into perspective, a petabit — in theory — could carry a million gigabit Ethernet connections if you ignore overhead and other losses. But even if that’s off by a factor of 10 it is still impressive. We can’t imagine this will be in people’s homes anytime soon but it is easy to see the use for major backhaul networks that carry lots of traffic.
We are still amazed that we’ve gone from ALOHA to 2.5-gigabit connections. Although the Raspberry Pi can’t handle even a fraction of the bandwidth, you can fit it with a 10-gigabit network card.
It is also really surprising how much throughput you can get with off the shelf DWDM transceivers running multiple colors on conventional single mode fiber. The Raman pumps were probably because of the distance. None of this is done on a budget. Next issue is finding a switch with fabric that supports that kind of speed.
Well, there were 3204 separate links, so each switch only needs to handle a few hundred Gbit/s, you just need ~1600 of them.
Well with micro SD card capacity stuck at a Terabyte, looks like IPoAC has been bested at last… station wagons might still be in the game though.
So I back of the enveloped it, annnnd I’m getting figures over 100 petabits per second for a large station wagon stuffed with micro SD cards over 50km….
I’d like to see the ping and jitter times of the station wagon tho
The former can be improved with a higher octane fuel.
Don’t drink and jitter.
And how long does it take to write and then read all those SD cards?
How long does a kid last on the Oregon trail
Until he gets smallpox.
Kid A has dysentery, so not long
If you have a server at point A that receives the data into ram, it might be easier to just take the whole server with a UPS. That, or somehow take its ram.
Interesting but just how much 4-core MCF is out there to begin with? Seems no retrofitting here.
Thank you for bringing logic into the equation :)
With that bandwidth and a fast computer and of course youtube having the X100 speed you could be strapped into a chair and forced every youtube video ever made in like 24 hours. You would either go insane or be the smartest puppy on the planet.
Or both!
B^)
Clockwork orange
Didn’t they have a futuristic medium for music? He goes tothe record store, but comes home with a tiny thing. And a futuristic player awaits him at home.
“The days of 56K modems are — thankfully — long gone for most of us”
Although we do miss times when websites were compact and adverts were less invasive. Or at least some of us do.
great, now can someone please upgrade my 6 mbit connection
For those of you with slower connections, there’s always SQM: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm
Dang, millibit?
And with all that fibre bandwidth, you’d think the posted image wouldn’t just be a blury mess :D
Meanwhile I’m lucky to get 30 mbps down 10 up
Is there any computer that can actually ingest a petabit per second? That seems way faster than anything you could do with PCIe.
I’m lucky if I even get 11 mbs at my home via at&t and it’s been that way for years and I’m still paying 70 bucks a month for this crap
Time to do some shopping. You can get 3x faster internet for half the money.