Terabit-Per-Second Class Connections over FTTH

Big Fat Dave writes "Thanks to research from Japan's Tohoku University, an article at Tech.co.uk wonders if someday the megabit and gigabit classes of net connections will join kilobits in the 'antique tech' bin. By doing some advanced mathematics and 'tweaking' existing network protocols, researchers may be able to enable standard fiber-optic cables to carry data at hundreds of terabits per second. 'At that speed, full movies could be downloaded almost instantaneously in their hundreds. At the heart of the development is a technique already used in some digital TV tuners and wireless data connections called quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). One glance at the Wikipedia explanation shows that it's no easy science, but the basics of QAM in this scenario require a stable wavelength for data transmission. As the radio spectrum provides this, QAM-based methods work fine for some wireless protocols, however the nature of the optical spectrum means this has not been the case for fibre-optic cables ... until now.'"

ya but..

[mastershake_phd]

At that speed, full movies could be downloaded almost instantaneously in their hundreds

Not until the PC buses catch up..

pirst fost (not really)

[rice_burners_suck]

duh, what will it be used for? pr0n.

LANs

[Sarten-X]

This won't be as useful for Internet use (as mentioned above, the last link will continue to suck), but for businesses and other LANs with high demand (data centers, anyone?), this will be a big help.

Re:I bet...

[vivaoporto]

Not really. My cable TV provider (that is not a MPAA member, but certainly buy a lot of content from them) would love such technology in order to serve digital Video on Demand faster, less compressed and to more people at the same time. As other people observed, such a fiber would be next to useless to current home user technology (other components would become the bottleneck), but to content provider, it would be miraculous.

Re:Nice, but what for?

[stormguard2099]

Please let's not start that debate again. I know it started a long time ago with "no one needs an abacus, who's going to count over ten?" but please no more debating on what's sufficient and what's not as far as computing, etc. It comes up everytime there is talk of major increases in x aspect of computing. We don't need anymore of it.

The data has to go somewhere...

[normalperson]

We need faster hard drives to catch up

Re:Yeah, but in the U.S.

[ScrewMaster]

The media companies (well, the motion picture companies) will do everything in their power to prevent it. All they have to do is have Congress or the FCC keep the telcos in power and we'll never see anything more than we have now. The very last thing they want is for it to be as quick to download movies as it currently is to download music.

QAM

[b1ffster]

Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is frequency based. It's 4 way (hence the 'quadrature thing) They're been doing way more than QAM in the last decade, they're doing 64-way amplitude modulation, with frequency spectrums (cable) for ages How the fuck are they using multi-frequency modulation techniques on light rays (fibre) ? This is either crap, very good or deserves a Nobel prize! Is this an early April 1st ??

Re:the vision

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you have everyone storing Gigs of data elsewhere then you've exponentially increased your bandwidth usage and you are back to having an effective download rate in the Mbps as opposed to Tbps.

Re:Academic work

[porpnorber]

You go over the 1G mark just by doing uncompressed HDTV, and uncompressed is good; for teleconferencing applications, codec latency is the killer, since your brain is hardwired with estimates of other people's response times. Now, you may think that HDTV is good quality, but if the future offers me 64Mpixel HDR images in stereo (or better, with full depth representation) at 100fps, I for one am not going to complain. Multiply it out; that's approaching the terabit per second, and I didn't even have to choose any outrageous numbers—2*8k*8k*3*16*100 is pretty conservative for a convincing virtual French window. Contemporary video, even HDTV, is not enough like being there, as you come to realise once you've had a chance to play with high-end systems (my stuff: http://ultravideo.mcgill.ca/activities.html [mcgill.ca]; my friends': http://www.hp.com/halo [hp.com]; both a few years old by now).

So, yeah, what you really want the terabit network to your home for—is chatting with your mum.

I wish I could show you even current research teleconferencing systems in operation... and they suck compared to what I'd like to be doing.

(I'm not, by the way, suggesting that there are no useful low-latency techniques providing moderate compression for when you don't have gigabandwidth—of course there are. I'm just pointing out that these numbers are not unimaginable, and that if the pipe were provided, there would indeed be end-user applications for it.)

Re:Yeah, but in the U.S.

[lattyware]

Your 20mbps is from Virgin. Who do cable. In a lot of, nigh most, areas you cannot get cable, and most areas do not have lines that can handle high speed connections. My point was that most areas will not get those kind of speeds, that is true. I did not suggest it was ceased. I suggested that not everyone is going to get those speeds for quite some time.