Exabit Transmission Speeds May Be Possible 98
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all well and good having super fast transmission capabilities but do we have anything that can process/store data as quickly? It's an honest question as I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.
Infrastructure is where this is important. There are these extremely expensive cables made of glass under the ocean connecting various land masses. It's extremely convenient to be able to upgrade the boxes at either end instead of laying more tubes (*warning* simplification!). You don't need to store the data (at least not in one box), you just need to switch it. This is why fiber is so awesome; people just keep on discovering new ways to jam more down those pipes!