Terabit Ethernet Inches Closer To Reality 182
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Australia, Denmark, and China have combined efforts to show the feasibility of terabit-per-second Ethernet over fiber-optic cables. The solution involves a photonic chip that uses laser light for switching signals, and a form of the exotic material type, chalcogenide, or arsenic trisulfide."
Re:no good (Score:0, Insightful)
A "few" inches? Define "few." If few='3' then I agree with you, if few='3000000000000' then I think we've got something personal to hash out behind the wood-shed...
=Smidge=
Re:What value? (Score:2, Insightful)
Tera ethernet... 5-25 gig monthly caps... "I used my monthly cap in 31.65 seconds..UH O..."
That would mean the telco companies actually decided to give us enough throughput. Sure, it'll work well on a LAN when they eventually deploy it, but unless if you have fiber coming to your house and all the way to where you're trying to grab that episode of Desperate Housewives from it will not go that fast. You also have to account for your neighbor who is addicted to porn and downloads it constantly seeding at 100% for days on end.
Too early? (Score:2, Insightful)
All-natural ingredients... (Score:4, Insightful)
"...a form of the exotic material type, chalcogenide, or arsenic trisulfide.
Whew, for a minute there I was worried we were going to use some hazardous materials.
Re:Too early? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't exactly destined for workstations in the near future(heck, neither is 10GigE, and that is more or less commodity-off-the-shelf stuff by now); but there are applications where higher speed per fiber could well be desirable.
Re:Too early? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let 1000 people drink?
Re:That's an aweful lot of porn. (Score:1, Insightful)
Imagine streaming video so clear you can actually sense the actresses' emotional issues!
That would be the end of porn. I don't even want to imagine the kind of fucked-up psyche that leads one to a career in porn.
Re:no good (Score:3, Insightful)
For such a high speed link, I think that a CSMA/CD technology is probably the wrong answer. Your "bubbles" in the network wire of collision screaming must be incredibly wasteful. But hey, we live in a field where waste is justified by the comparative cost of hardware upgrades over man hours.
I'd love to route Ethernet packets tunneled through an ATM link set up on this kind of bandwith, but somehow I don't think that solution requires cutting edge research.
Ethernet is good at doing what it does well, but the tuning require to make this truly effective might make the mess of jumbo packets look like child's play. I imagine that as the speeds increase, so will the issues. It's a remarkable achievement to push Ethernet this fast, but it seems that it's the equivalent of making your car travel 0.6c. At those speeds you have to wonder if you're using the right vehicle.
Re:Too early? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, with modern repeaters, that is not necessary. The repeaters are pure optical amplifiers that don't care how the signal is modulated. Only the end equipment needs to be sophisticated to do the fine-grained wave-division multiplexing - so you don't need to pull up the repeaters to upgrade the capacity. It's really quite neat. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier [wikipedia.org]
Re:That's an aweful lot of porn. (Score:4, Insightful)
On a large enough sample set, correlation implies a relation other than chance, and thus should be investigated. Otherwise you can keep screaming "Correlation is not causation" at every piece of data every produced and try to claim that we can never claim results.
After all, if I state that "Each time a plant is deprived of water and sunlight it dies.", stating "Correlation is not causation" is complete nonsense. We've observed over a large enough sample set that yes, in this case correlation damn well IS causation. Effectively, your only argument here should be whether or not the sample size is large enough.
Re:no good (Score:3, Insightful)
For such a high speed link, I think that a CSMA/CD technology is probably the wrong answer.
The modern way to build an ethernet network (at least the important parts of one) is to use switches and full-duplex point to point links. Full duplex links do not use CSMA/CD.
CSMA/CD is rarely used at gigabit (I don't think i've ever seen a gigabit hub) and isn't supported at all at 10 gigabit and above.
TFA and the /. summary poorly titled though, this is about a physical layer advancement. That advancement may eventually lead to terabit ethernet, it may also lead to other standards with similar perfomance.
Ethernet is good at doing what it does well
What ethernet has done well is maintain compatibility accross gnerations. If I have old equipment with a 10baseT controller I can plug it straight into a modern network. If I have even older equipment with a BNC or AUI connector I can still connect it to a modern network without too much fuss or expense.