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Photonic Switching to Boost Internet Speeds
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Jul 10, 2008 06:57 AM
from the greased-lightning dept.
from the greased-lightning dept.
Da Massive writes "Researchers at the University of Sydney have developed technology that could boost the throughput of existing networks 100-fold without costing the consumer any more, and it's all thanks to a scratch on a piece of glass.
After four years of development, University of Sydney scientists say the Internet is set to become, on average, 60 times faster than existing networks.
According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University's School of Physics, the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world."
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Without costing the consumer any more? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha! The technology might not cost much more, but ISP's will milk consumers for all they're worth.
Re: (Score:2)
So true. It'll be quite some time before we can get significant speed increases without significant price increases as well.
Re:Without costing the consumer any more? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're claiming this is 60x faster than current technology, and that it carries a terabit per second. While it's true that it may be 60x faster than technology IN PLACE, we already have optical fiber technology capable of multiple terabit connections. So considering the cost of upgrade, and the fact that existing infrastructure will need to be replaced, what exactly is novel here?
While I did RTFA, (yeah, yeah, I'm new here) it was incredibly light on detail, maybe I missed something that would make this an actual advancement?
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Re:Without costing the consumer any more? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought it was about photonic switching, not the actual fiber cables itself. Basically there's loads of dark fiber because the switches aren't fast enough or powerful enough to use it all. A photonic switch can make use of it all, and also make use of the full capacity of the fiber rather than have the line speed limited by the switches.
So, you'd need new switches at either end of each fiber cable. I don't know how often backbone switches are replaced, but I could see that happening within 3 years.
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Re:Without costing the consumer any more? (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the core devices in carrier grade networks have an expected five year lifetime before being moved closer to the edge. May system have edge devices that were bought 10+ years ago.
Without many more details it would be impossible to judge when this would be avaialble to the average consumer.
That is not to say that you might not see an performance boost because google was able to upgrade the youtube connection.
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Re:Without costing the consumer any more? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, that's almost it. Optical switches/routing would speed everything up by a lot. But an optical router is a long way off - one of the unsolved problems is buffering light to avoid packet collisions. At the moment, light can be slowed down quite a bit (actually the record is 17 m/s - slower than a cyclist), but everyone is still working out how to store it reliably for long enough to build a router. There are other problems as well.
The advance that has been made is about time division demultiplexing - sending 64 different 10Gbit signals down a single fibre, and then being able to separate out the individual signals at the end. They've been able to separate one of these out using a 5cm long waveguide, of a new material called chalcogenide (As2 S3) which is being researched heavily at CUDOS.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
nad parts do break
I hate it when that happens.
Yeah? (Score:5, Funny)
"without costing the consumer any more"
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
after reading the prices on Telstras new iPhone plans i needed a good laugh
In this house we respect the laws of physics (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
A great [bash.org] reference.
Re:In this house we respect the laws of physics (Score:5, Insightful)
Throughput != Latency
It has always amused me how commonly businesses play fast and loose with the meaning of the word 'speed' when it comes to internet connections. Yes, higher bandwidth will result in a 'faster' internet experience, but the data is not actually getting to you any faster - you're simply getting more of it at a time, so the webpage/download whatever completes in s shorter space of time.
You can drive faster than a truck, but if you're delivering more than your vehicle can carry, that slow ass truck is still going to complete the delivery in less time.
Argh, pet peeve, bad car analogy and all, brought about by years of listening to online gamers brag about how they've got the fastest connection and then crying when it makes no difference to thier gaming experience.
Anyway, the article is a bit light on details - can't quite make out if they're talking about increased bandwidth or increasing routing efficiency.
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Re:In this house we respect the laws of physics (Score:5, Informative)
Since the title says 'switching', I'm guessing it's routing efficiency. I've not RTFA but I'm planning to in a minute if that makes things any better ;)
Totally agree with you about the latency thing. I was reading reviews of Battlefield Bad Company for the PS3 the other day, someone has said "this game has no lag!". While the server/client communication may be more efficient than other similar online games, there's no way it will have 'no' lag (which I would equate to latency). And in fact, when I've been playing it myself some games have had some serious lag anyway, which I doubt was my own connection as connecting to a new server tends to sort out the problem. I seem to get a lot of dropped packets on some servers as my character actually drifts backwards :s
Most people just don't know what they're talking about when it comes to things like networking, but they'll try to pretend they do*. What else is new..
* that's what I do anyway \o/ these suckers are paying me to administrate their network and I have no idea what a subnet mask looks like, or why a subnet would even want to hide its identity
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i for one (Score:2, Funny)
welcome our photonic switching internet overlords
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You can blame me. I voted for CUDOS
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Photonic Switching?
is there any chance this technology could be used in torpedoes?
1 picosec/switch != 1 million switches/second (Score:5, Funny)
"... this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity.
I guess accurate reckoning was no requirement to be a part of the team...
Re:1 picosec/switch != 1 million switches/second (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:1 picosec/switch != 1 million switches/second (Score:5, Funny)
Are you driving a Hummer? You go five meters on 238 litres of petrol?
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Re:1 picosec/switch != 1 million switches/second (Score:5, Informative)
five meters on 238 litres of petrol
Where in the world did you come up with that conversion?
40 (rods per hogshead) = 0.843539102 meters per liter [google.com]
So you could go slightly over 200 meters with 238 liters of gasoline. Sheesh, you were off by a factor of 40!
Ah, I guess you calculated 1 rod per hogshead.
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Well maybe it switches in one picosecond and then waits for 1 million picoseconds before switching again. :)
Re:1 picosec/switch != 1 million switches/second (Score:5, Funny)
Million, trillion, same thing!
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Re:1 picosec/switch != 1 million switches/second (Score:5, Insightful)
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The Scratch (Score:5, Insightful)
I love it how in these news snippets there is never any explanation of the technology, but long descriptions about the wonderful changes it will do to the world.
Re:The Scratch (Score:5, Insightful)
I love it how in these news snippets there is never any explanation of the technology, but long descriptions about the wonderful changes it will do to the world.
Back in my day we didn't call it a "news snippet", we called it a "press release".
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Re:The Scratch (Score:5, Funny)
Back in my day we didn't call it a "press release", we called it "bullshit". Whilst walking uphill, backwards, in the snow.
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TFA? (Score:5, Informative)
I am guessing that it is all still a bit secrety, but basically the technology will allow optical network switches instead of electronical.
Optical circuits. [wikipedia.org]
"The scratched glass we've developed is actually a photonic integrated circuit," Eggleton said.
"This circuit uses the 'scratch' as a guide or a switching path for information - like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity."
An initial demonstration proved it possible to achieve speeds 60 times faster than existing local networks.
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Re:The Scratch (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yep, I'm in the research group concerned. It was pretty funny to look at the ways in which this story was distorted and Eggleton's soundbites were distorted.
He was talking about two things:
a) This new advance, which is about being able to pull a 10Gbps signal out of 64 time-division multiplexed 10Gbps signals (and was actually done by a group in Denmark/China, with one of our waveguides.
b) The Photonic Chip, which is our long-term goal, of all-optical signal processing (e.g. an optical router).
Speed (Score:5, Informative)
That's all very well and good, but the last mile over here is over copper and based on the inaction of the TelCo, and the lack of REAL competition, will remain copper for another 100 years. So no matter how fast the IP packet takes to get to the exchange, it will be slowed down.
Re:Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just that last mile is a bottleneck. For the majority of services (even and sometimes especially the popular ones) there are also severe bottlenecks on the hosting end, many of which have nothing to do with bandwidth and/or latency.
If any of the hops between (inclusive) you and the service has any capacity/speed problem, you'll notice it.
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Re:Speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, we need to push the price of copper so high that it becomes viable for the telco to dig up all the expensive copper cables, sell them, and replace them with cheap fibre.
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Is it just me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In practical terms this means nothing for internet users since download speeds are invariably limited by the server or your local internet connection - not the backbone.
Even in a hypothetical situation where you have a fiber (e.g. FiOS) internet connection and were connected to a server that required you to have a photonic home router to keep up, you'd still be ultimately throttled by your NIC, mobo bus, or CPU.
Faster/cheaper switches may be exciting to backbone providers, but really that's about it.
Australian Optical Last Mile (Score:2, Funny)
To get to the more remote areas of Australia, sheep stations, mines etc., we will be retaining the same media delivery, but at a much slower rate, dictated by how fast Larry can turn his flashlight on and off...
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NO CARRIER
Magic? (Score:2)
In all seriousness... Did anyone else notice how the article goes from picosecond switching of this device to switching "a million times" in one second? When did science redefine micro- and pico-? And the public demands "instant" web gratification? Somehow I don
well i do (Score:2)
And the public demands "instant" web gratification?
Two comments (Score:2)
CUDOS: Helping you reach your artificial bandwidth cap just that little bit quicker.
and...
TERRABIT PORN! I'll need another tube of KY... Hell, make it a catering vat.
I had a lot of questions... (Score:5, Interesting)
What exactly do you mean by scratch?
How does it switch?
What wavelengths and materials does it work best with?
How long to market?
If this is a "photonic IC" how long until we can buy photonic logic units?
Will this work with SOS (Silicon On Sapphire) technologies?
But the insightful article cleared them all up. Psyche! No it didn't. I learned that apparently a scratch can act as a waveguide of some kind that switches very rapidly. I know that the average reader doesn't have a PhD in photonics, but come on!
The paper will probably show up on their publications page [usyd.edu.au] soon. I don't think that the top link is about this new photonic switch, because 160Gbps isn't exactly 100x the speed of exiting 10Gbps fiber systems, but I'm not sure.
Re:I had a lot of questions... (Score:5, Informative)
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Anywhere in the world. (Score:3, Interesting)
Speed and more speed...Speed isn't giving us freedom anytime soon.
We need to invent a non blockable way of communicating before the governments of the world unite in locking internet.
Someone go invent an x-ray connection, or something.
Re:Anywhere in the world. (Score:5, Funny)
Someone go invent an x-ray connection, or something.
I think the governments will see right through that plan.
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error-free? (Score:5, Insightful)
So is that error-free as in, a lot fewer dropped packets via pixie dust, or error-free as in it's so fast that you don't notice the dropped packets? I have a feeling if lightning hits the "magic glass" router, it will still screw up just like the current ones do when lightning hits them.
How it works (I think) (Score:4, Informative)
A conventional electronics packet switch is a store-and-forward device. It receives (at least the header parts of) a given packet, stores the data, decodes it, decides what outgoing ports the packet needs to be re-transmitted upon, composes a new header part, and re-transmits the entire packet on the outgoing port. This means that the packet itself must be buffered, and there is necessarily an overhead latency of many bits (at least the length of the header of the packet) between the input bitstream and the output bitstream.
In an optical switch, the optical data is split, so that a duplicate optical pattern goes down two paths simultaneously. One path is basically a many-turns coil of optical fibre, so that it will take a few picoseconds for the carrier-light to transit the length of this coil.
The other optical path goes immediately into a detector and optical logic switcher (if I may coin a new term, "optonics", if you will indulge me), so that the header information is decoded and an optical switch is set to the correct output leg, and a new header is composed and transmitted, just in time for the slightly-delayed carrier-light of the main bulk of the packet to arrive from out of the coiled length and be appended to the outgoing header.
The technology requires fine-tuning of the length of the coil of optical fibre to match the switching latency of the header/decoder/re-generator part.
The entire latency of the packet's transit through the entire optical switch is of the order of one sixtieth of the latency of the highest-performance conventional electronics switches.
Neat innovative new technology brought to you from Oz. Now that is really going to surprise a few arrogant yanks when they eventually figure it out, is it not?
I corrected your typo. (Score:3, Funny)
I corrected the typo in this summary. See following:
"Researchers at the University of Sydney have developed technology that could boost the throughput of existing networks by 100-fold without costing the provider any more, but consumers can expect to continue to deal with unpublished usage caps and limited bandwidth. It is all thanks to a scratch on a piece of glass. After four years of development, University of Sydney scientists say the Internet is set to become on average 60 times faster than existing networks. According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University's School of Physics, the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world."
Oh, and addition to the obvious typo in the article, I fixed an incorrect its/it's situation.
But seriously - when have advances in the internet infrastructure benefited the customer's bottom line in recent years? As it is fibre is supposed to be available to every address in the US but the telcos pocketed the grants and fees without providing what they were contractually obligated to -- AND consumer costs have increased.
This is old news (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:pico/mega/terra (Score:4, Insightful)
It obviously hasn't occurred to anyone else so I'll say it.
Firstly you don't want a 50% duty cycle on a data switch. That would basically scatter your bits all over the world. You want to switch, then send some bits. So switching in a picosecond doesn't mean you'll switch *every* picosecond.
Secondly, maybe it takes the picosecond switch a microsecond to recover before it can switch again.
Or it may just be a bad piece of journalism.
BTW a picosecond is a million millionth of a second not a million billionth of a second. The latter is a femtosecond. It goes milli, micro, nano, pico, femto. pico = 10^-12. You can see how easy it is to be off by 3 orders of magnitude, then ... ;)
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