Siemens Reaches 107 Gbps Data Transfer Record

prostoalex writes "Reuters is reporting on Siemens engineers reaching 107 Gbps data transmission record over a fiberoptic cable, and expects the technology to be on the market within a few years: "The test, 2.5 times faster than a previous maximum transmission performance per channel, was done in cooperation with Germany's Micram Microelectronic, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications and Eindhoven Technical University of the Netherlands.""

Fiber is Great but quite expensive still

[vg30e]

I wonder if we will get higher speeds on copper or maybe just cheaper fiber interface cards. Fiber optic networking technology has always been fast, but I guess due to production quantities, it never seems to be as cheap to implement even in a Data center environment. I wonder if we will ever get to see fiber optic network interfaces that are close in price to the copper ones.

We run multiple cat6 cables as trunk links between our switches just because there are more ports to do so and it is cheaper to do those runs.

How viable is it over longer distances?

[presentt]

From the article:

sent it over a single optical fiber channel in a 100 mile-long (161-kilometre) U.S. network

After 100 miles, how much does the throughput degrade? The technology might be limited if, after 200, 500, or even 1000 miles, its speed drops significantly. Or does it reach a hub of some sort that re-sends the signal every 100 miles? I should admit now that I'm not very familiar with how large telecom networks are set up.

Re:How viable is it over longer distances?

[ZX3 Junglist]

This figure of 100mi is actually quite good,
a general standard in the industry is in the order of 30mi of fiber before signal regeneration is necessary. This is a main reason why the US is not very well suited to fiber octics transmissions in the way a smaller countries like germany or netherlands are. It's not the cost of running fiber, but the cost of maintaining sites and equipment to provide a long distance (cross-country?) signal.

Technology anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I see no post above my threshold about:
fast photodiodes
fast multiplexers
GaAs-transistors
fibre amplifiers (this is for the post about connecting continents)
?

They say they do it electrically, so they need to have a photodiode with 200 GHz bandwidht,
compare that with the diode in your DVD!

NTT in Japan reached 111Gbps!

[Anonymous Coward]

optics.org / FibreSystems Europe reports: "Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) of Japan has demonstrated optical transmission of 14Tbps over a single fibre 160km long. The transmission consisted of 140 channels of 111Gbps each using complex DWDM techniques."
107Gbps... pfft... yesterdays news. :)