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New Data Transmission Record — 14 Tbps

Posted by kdawson on Sat Sep 30, 2006 03:22 PM
from the that's-140-hi-def-movies dept.
deejne writes to alert us to a new bandwidth record: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone has announced data transmission at a rate of 14 terabits per second over a single optical fiber. The paper claims the previous record was "about 10 Tbps." In the new experiment, NTT sent data over 160 kilometers (nearly 100 miles) of optical fiber, in 140 channels of 111 Gbps each.
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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:23PM (#16260477)
    And still nothing worth watching.
  • Preparing? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:24PM (#16260483)
    vista.windowsupdate.com?
  • by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:25PM (#16260493) Homepage Journal
    I thought it meant 14 ThePirateBays per second...
  • Well, I remember back on my 14.4 modem... those text pages loaded like the wind. I was on top of the world... Then those damned pictures started cropping up on websites. Pictures on the internet? Ha! Then came the 56.6k modem which showed those pictures who were boss. No problems. Oh wait, online gaming? File sharing? Cable and DSL save the day. More than adequate... so now this time it seems we got the good speed coming up before the need for it. Its like always being busy all week and never having time to
    • by EnderWigginsXenocide (852478) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:44PM (#16260665) Homepage
      Quote:

      Well, I remember back on my 14.4 modem... those text pages loaded like the wind. I was on top of the world... Then those damned pictures started cropping up on websites. Pictures on the internet? Ha! Then came the 56.6k modem which showed those pictures who were boss. No problems. Oh wait, online gaming?
      File sharing ? Cable and DSL save the day. More than adequate

      Reply:
      I beg to differ. I have [cough] friends that download movi^H^H^H^H^H content from the internet, and some dvd rips^H^H^H^H^H^H^H database files can be larger than 4GB! Even at a good (cheap) DSL line of 1KBPS it still takes quite alot longer to download content than it would take to go to blockbuster^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the office and pick up physical media with the data on it.
  • by tverbeek (457094) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:29PM (#16260531) Homepage
    That's still nothing compared to a semi loaded with DVDs traveling at 70mph.
    • by CrazyJim1 (809850) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:40PM (#16260637) Journal
      This is the internet, not the interstate.
    • or a C-5 loaded with 750 gig hard drives :)
    • by EnderWigginsXenocide (852478) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:46PM (#16260687) Homepage
      The internet isn't a truck you can't just keep dumping things on it and expect it to go. It's a series of tubes and they are getting filled up!
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        The internet isn't a truck you can't just keep dumping things on it and expect it to go. It's a series of tubes and they are getting filled up!

        You mean like the highways get filled up with semis and traffic slows to a crawl? Yeah, tubes aren't like highways at all...
    • Let's say that a DVD's box is 15cm by 15cm by 2mm (about 2000 DVDs per cubic meter), and the semi is 20m by 5m by 5m (500 cubic meters). That's one million DVDs, each containing about 8 GB or 64 Gb, so 64 petabits total. Traveling at 100 km/h (60-70 mph), that makes approximately 20 Tbps over a 100 km link.

      (If hard drives are carried instead of DVDs, I guess that number becomes about 100 Tbps.)

      So, a loaded truck is still better than a single fiber link, but not by an order of magnitude. It's not "no

    • ok 14 Tbps = 1.7 TBps = 438 DVD's per second (Assuming 4 gig each)

      The distance traversed is 100 miles, which would take 1.4 hours, at 70MPH.

      There are 3600 seconds in an hour.

      This means that per hour a line can move 1.58 million DVD's

      for a 70 MPH trip this adjusts to 2.25 Million DVD's

      or 225,000 (100 disk spindles) Each Spindle Weighs 4Lbs

      leaving 900,000 lbs or 450 tons..

      That would be a semi with 200 cars loaded on it....

      Now How big of a truck are you drivin....?

      Storm

      • by tempest69 (572798) on Saturday September 30 2006, @04:46PM (#16261103) Journal
        or a 70 MPH trip this adjusts to 2.25 Million DVD's or 225,000 (100 disk spindles) Each Spindle Weighs 4Lbs
        I missed by an order of magnitude here... 2.25 M /100 = 22,500 so this moves it down to a 45 ton cargo . Which isnt even close to the heaviest load on the road.

        So while the new line isnt quite nothing compared to a truck, a truck can move more data 100 miles faster than the new link.

        Storm

    • ... or pigeons carrying hard drives...
  • by KG6 (1007815) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:29PM (#16260537)
    and yet I'm still downloading at a measly 300 kbs.
    • Ignore what you read in the news! - bandwidth is a PRECIOUS, SCARCE resource that we must carefully ration and provision by the byte. That's why the Internet is in grave peril from network neutrality proposals, there won't be any bandwidth left over for our innovative new business models!
  • Actually, I was at that postdeadline session. I don't have the proceedings handy, but Lucent reported about the same capacity, something like 15 Tbps over 100 or 200 km (and another experiment with a few Tbps over 200 km, if memory serves). The previous record was set by Alcatel in 2002, transmitting 10.2 Tbps over 300 km, and I believe it still stands as the largest capacity*distance. The distance is important; I'm not sure that there haven't already been 100 Tbps transmissions over a few km -- much eas
    • and another experiment with a few Tbps over 200 km, if memory serves

      Memory serves, fingers don't. I meant a few Tbps over 2000 km.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      1) Yes, distance is cruically important in these measurements. There's no points in having gazillions of petabyte data transfer if it can only done from one corner of the lab to the other. Which is why all credible speed-of-information-transfer articles include a number with units of [ (bits / second) * distance].

      2) The record is still held by the transmissions from Voyager II's encounter with Neptune.

  • Cost (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bender0x7D1 (536254) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:32PM (#16260579) Homepage
    I'd like to know what the cost of the required equipment is. We know that hardware has a premium for the newest and fastest and it would be interesting to see what the premium is in this case. Maybe it would be cheaper to run 14 1 Tbps links instead of a single 14 Tbps link. Sure, if I already have the fiber in place, then using it for higher speed would be the way to go. However, if I am in a position where I am about to lay fiber anyway, I don't really care about those costs since I will be paying them anyway.
    • The problem is the switching equiptment. Nobody had built a switch that can go much above 2 terabits per second, making all extra bandwidth useless unless you lob on a whole bunch of extremely fast demultiplexors to split the 14 terabit speeds 8 ways. (Powers of 2 are Good.)

      On the whole, fiber is cheep. Ultra-high-speed multiplexors and demultiplexors are not. A typical bundle of fibers might easily have 128 or 1024 fibers running through it, and the extra quality needed to go from a few terabits to a few t

  • by Evets (629327) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:33PM (#16260589) Homepage Journal
    While impressive, the feat was accomplished over a single optical fiber using proprietary amplifiers not in production. It certainly is innovative, but it is not an indication of speeds you will see in consumer level services. I see these high-bandwidth paradigms being very useful in the medical industry in the near future - especially for things like transferring high quality MRI images from hospital to hospital with very little delay, or in transferring patient ICU data to a centralized monitoring center - which is currently being done, but super-high bandwidth models open up avenues of information that are not currently available - anything from real-time HI-DEF video from the room, to real-time control of in-room instrumentation.
    • by wfberg (24378) on Saturday September 30 2006, @04:08PM (#16260823)
      While impressive, the feat was accomplished over a single optical fiber using proprietary amplifiers not in production. It certainly is innovative, but it is not an indication of speeds you will see in consumer level services.

      That goes without saying, right? It is, after all, a record. People don't usually turn to the Guinness book of world records for guidance on, say, what a realistic number of hotdogs is to consume within 12 minutes.

      Now of course, greater bandwidth is cool and all, but 14 Tbps is obviously impractical for actual use, even in specialist medical imaging applications -- for the simple reason you couldn't fill up your harddrive (or even RAM) as quick as that!
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      My title at work is actually 'Radiology Information Systems Manager', and I'm one of the people responsible for sending MRI images from hospital to hospital, handling video streams from telerobotic surgeries, and the like.

      Surprisingly, data demands in the medical environment aren't nearly as high as you might think. We routinely route MRI images from hospital to hospital with infrared and T1 connections. Those MRI images are actually only about 10MB each. We got ourselves a 1Gb/s imaging network at our
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      While impressive, the feat was accomplished over a single optical fiber using proprietary amplifiers not in production. It certainly is innovative, but it is not an indication of speeds you will see in consumer level services.

      Pushing 56k through a POTS line was an experiment once.
  • i wonder what kinda of hardware you need to send a burst of 14 TBps? is it comming from that much ram? harddrives? U must have some good hardware to be able to queue up that much data and burst transfer like that.
  • by Night Goat (18437) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:40PM (#16260633) Homepage Journal
    Good thing I didn't buy that eSATA card I was looking at today. 3Gb/second? What a piece of crap!
  • I get a lower ping in Quake? Seriously though, I think half the time it's the servers on the internet that are slow rather than broadband connections. I'm sure this has some real world use, other than publicity, (stock trading) but I can't imagine many companies needed it - except the obvious googles of the world. Backbones are obviously going to be interested but do they shift that volume of data at peak levels?
  • by Have Blue (616) on Saturday September 30 2006, @04:17PM (#16260883) Homepage
    How many DVD movies per second was this?

    Also, they failed to provide a conversion from terabyte to Libraries of Congress.
  • I love acronyms (Score:3, Insightful)

    by necro81 (917438) on Saturday September 30 2006, @04:21PM (#16260917) Journal
    Our experiment used the carrier suppressed return-to-zero differential quadrature phase shift keying (CSRZ-DQPSK)*1 format and ultra-wide-bandwidth amplifiers.

    Try saying "CSRZ-DQPSK" three times fast! I guess this acronym does serve the purpose of being easier to say than "carrier suppressed return-to-zero differential quadrature phase shift keying," but couldn't they have chosen a snazzy acronym that was hip to say and then worked out what it meant, like NASA?
  • by Tamerlan (817217) on Saturday September 30 2006, @04:31PM (#16261003) Homepage
    One of the russian computer trading companies easily topped that. The box with 20 400GB HDDs fell from the shelf 2m high. Total data transmission rate was

    20*4*10^11*8/sqrt(2*2/9.8)~=10^14 bps or 100 Tbps

    As you see if you have enough money to burn you may easily scale that number.

  • by khafre (140356) on Saturday September 30 2006, @05:04PM (#16261247)
    Current routers, like the Cisco CRS-1, use OC-768c/STM-256, which is about 40 Gbit/sec. Right now, there are a couple of camps in the IEEE, ones that want 40 Gbit Ethernet, others that want the factor of 10 increase that Ethernet has normally been associated with. Since there is no 100 Gbit SONET (that I'm aware of at least), these public demonstrations, this one by NTT and another by Lucent, prove that 100 Gbit Ethernet is possible, even for long haul. Some providers like at&t, Yahoo and Google, really need 100 Gbit Ethernet because they produce that much data, or provide 10 Gbit service to customers, and they need to aggregate it somehow.

  • by kd3bj (733314) on Saturday September 30 2006, @05:08PM (#16261281) Homepage
    I once threw a box of 120 Gig tapes into a dumpster. I think there were about 200 tapes in the box.
    I admit the distance wasn't far, but the burst rate was 24 TBytes/sec.
  • by chrisinsocalif (984172) on Saturday September 30 2006, @05:27PM (#16261399)
    Someday our kids will look back at us and wonder how the hell we surfed porn so slow.
    • Re:Damn (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:45PM (#16260685) Homepage Journal
      Each advancement in technology allows the main internet backbone companies to purchase one very expensive fast pipe and share it between all the customers (ISPs) of a country or state.
      These things need to be thousands of times faster than your home connection because each one will carry thousands of times more data.

      Its no good one single person having all that bandwidth if there is nobody else to talk to at that speed.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      When I multiply that out, I get 1.990656e+9

      That's about 2 Gbps

      So, you could fit about 7000 of these uncompressed video streams over the 14 Tb/s link, unless I'm screwing up the calculation someplace.

    • No, that's under 2 gigabits/sec.