Exabit Transmission Speeds May Be Possible

adeelarshad82 writes "Scientists at UC Berkeley were able to shrink a graphene optical modulator down to 25 square microns in size (small enough to include in silicon circuitry) and were able to modulate it at a speed of 1GHz. The researchers say that modulation speeds of up to 500GHz are theoretically possible. According to the research, due to the high modulation speeds, a graphene modulator can transmit a huge amount of data using spectral bandwidth that conventional modulators can only dream of. Professor Xiang Zhang, in an attempt to boil his group's new findings into consumer-speak, puts it this way: 'If graphene modulators can actually operate at 500GHz, we could soon see networks that are capable of petabit or exabit transmission speeds, rather than megabits and gigabits.'"

Re:data storage?

[erayd]

Actually, if the Internet backbone ever reached exabit/sec speeds, the whole way we viewed data storage would change. I see no reason why most computers would need local storage at all.

Latency is why. It doesn't matter how fast the link to your storage is, if it's several ms away from you the delay gets annoying *real* fast.