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Qwest Achieves 100-Mile IP Round-Trip At 40Gb/sec 141

Posted by timothy from the my-that-*is*-fast dept.
TheShrike writes: "As reported in the Denver Rocky Mountain News: 'Almost without fanfare, a joint venture of Denver-based Qwest Communications and Dutch telecommunications company KPN has smashed the cyber speed record for transmission of data over the Internet. The joint venture, called KPNQwest, transmitted 40 gigabits of data per second in a 100-mile round-trip connection between Frankfurt and Gernsheim, Germany, last week.'" Add Napster, stir. [16th May, 4:50GMT: Updated headline to read "Gb" not "GB." Thanks, all. -t.]
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Qwest Achieves 100-Mile IP Round-Trip At 40GB/sec More

Qwest Achieves 100-Mile IP Round-Trip At 40GB/sec

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  • Streaming video. Streaming TV. A good idea I think, but when you get people who start to stream movies, that will naturally piss off the MPAA.

    Not if they are for pay. You can get movies via digital cable, why not have the functionality of a digital cable decoder in your PC? It certainly can be done, but the question is, can it be video "on demand".

    It's all converging now anyway. In some areas, you can not only get cable and internet through your cable TV company's wire, but also phone service (like a plain-old dumb phone with a keypad and handset, not iphone, etc)... The question is, will the local phone companies die out because they are so slow to get decent bandwidth to the homes? Try to get them to put in ISDN or DSL in your home if you are more than N yards away from the office if you don't know what I'm talking about...

    And yeah, there are some QoS concerns that IP can't address wrt "internet phones", but... It's happening.

  • Is employee turnover rate.

    They cut through workers about as fast as they send data through a fiber circuit. Great bandwidth, horrible company (they bought out my last employer, please allow me to make my stabs wherever I can).

    As to the latency questions a lot of people are asking about, Qwest's backbone (their American version anyways) freaking screams. When I worked for them, they could average a 70ms ping between SF and NYC. Before that, averages I was getting were around 90ms. At the time of me posting this, they're pulling 74ms.

    I can only imagine that this feat over in Germany mimics that behavior.
  • Very funny.

    A PC with a standard 100mb ethernet card only really uses about 25% of the 100mb bandwidth. This is a NIC card design limitation.

    7 PCs on a 100mb CAT5 hub would most likely be a very fast network, unless all 7 PCs were trying to ping each other to death.

    CAT5 if properly installed can support gigabit ethernet, so you have a lot of expansion room before you need fibre.

  • hehe

    yes that guy was quite a tool
  • I'm running Win98SE, and I just tried that like to see what it did.

    Right after I clicked it, I got two BSOD's, and then I was dumped back to my desktop. I tried running some programs to see if my system was still stable, but that just caused my system to lock up, so I was forced to reboot.
  • Perhaps I'm missing something here, but if you check out this article [interesting-people.org], you'll note that Bell Labs transmitted 3.28 terabit over 300 kilometres by multiplexing different wavelengths over a single fibre strand.

  • You are not kidding, Qwest is my worst problem for a simple MUD. It has horrible routers and they SHUTDOWN on ya at times. Lag is fierce across Qwest.

    Qwest has no speed increases in my book til they get decent sysadmins and routers.

    Yes, I am flaming qwest cause they do SUCK. expecially thier chicago routers.
  • First of all, I am a Qwest employee.

    Second of all, yes, Qwest is a long distance company. However, we do other things besides long distance. The group I work in, QIS (Qwest Internet Solutions) hosts a lot of big name sites. We are the third largest carrier of internet traffic now, and are growing fast.

    US West deal: Yes, it should be going through. Its not my department, but as far as I know, we are getting state approval for the merger.

    What is the other companies part in this? I don't know, ask them. :)

    However, people should be aware that what happened in Germany was not Qwest itself, but another company called KpnQwest, which is a joint effort between us and KPN, a large teleco in Europe.

    Hope this answers some questions.
  • Therefore, since fewer new developments are likely to come in the physical fiber technology, but lots are expected in the tx/rx side of things, is it possible to figure out which companies are more strongly poised to profit from this phenomenon? Any ideas?

    Lucent, Ciena, Cisco, blah blah... They're all doing this stuff. Multiplexing at different light frequencies is a big market right now. At one time, Ciena was the best at it (it's a big leapfrog contest... "We're better!" .. "No! We're Better!"... ad infinitum)
    T

  • another story about blazingly fast communications records being set & I'm still waiting for Bell Atlantic to run a string out to my tin can.

    <OFF TOPIC>I'm wondering if the Bull system does loop qualifying for DSL by a certain list or is there some way to let the last mile monopoly know your waiting for it and please DO ME FIRST & stop wasting time qualifying people who can't even spell DSL.</OFF TOPIC>

  • ... a beowulf cluster linked with this stuff!!

    (Sorry, just had to do it....)

  • Re:Mmmm...bandwidth *drool* (Score:3)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @06:06PM (#1070667)
    Well, this is missing the point of MBone and multicast technology. To send a 1 Mbps video signal down the MBone to 100000 people requires exactly 1 Mbps of bandwidth on any single link. Routers that are routing the signal to multiple destinations need some multiple of that for their backplane speed, but not on the wire. Sadly, the current popular streaming formats (RealVideo, in particular) would require 100 Gbps to do the same thing. Sigh.
  • As fatter and fatter pipes appear on the "high end," the smaller pipes will hopefully get cheaper. Really...do you need 40Gb/sec, or would you be happy with getting your own T3 for half today's going rate? Look at CPUs. As faster ones are introduced, the slower ones have the prices cut. Not a perfect comparison, but it's close.
  • Ten 100t cards to each 100t hub, 10 100t hubs to each 100t switch, ten 100t switches to each of ten Yellowfin switches plugged into the uplink ports.

    Ask everyone to reload /. once. Not only do you get the peak 40G figure, you DDoS /. as well!!

    When did they say they did the testing? Hmm.. Makes me wonder..

    Seriously though.. They didn't use commodity PC equipment.. Prolly a purpose built signalling device just sending an alternating binary stream on each specific range. Easy to check for error!!
    You could do it with just over fifty 556 ICs and just over seventy transistors..
  • I seem to remember hearing that 40 Gbps was the maximum amount of information that could be processed by the human vision system. If so, this breakthrough represents a key step towards absolute telepresence, no?
  • Therefore, since fewer new developments are likely to come in the physical fiber technology, but lots are expected in the tx/rx side of things, is it possible to figure out which companies are more strongly poised to profit from this phenomenon? Any ideas?

    I have a feeling the telcom giants (ATT, MCI, Sprint) and all their subsidaries (WorldCom, UUnet, and whatever Sprint named theirs) will make the most money. They will install the lines, in order to reduce their cost of transmitting data/phones across their backbones, and "in order to pay for the upgrades" they will raise ISP costs by 10 percent or so. Then they will never lower them again. Great.. here come higher dedicated access costs again...

  • Remember that camera setup from The Matrix? Well, this bandwidth is highly useful for sending all 30 of the movie angles through simultaneously of the... um....

    try again:
    Know about ADAT recording? It uses SVGA tapes, and has a sample rate of 250 MHZ (I think) for quality 16 times better than CDs- oh wait... still not enough...

    Remember that SF story about people licing in the computers, with ALL of their synaptic connections represented in the computer? Well, here we go! And I bet Al Gore will take credit for it!

    (Sorry for this stupid fucking post)
  • this could be just like RDRAM; increase in bandwidth along with a greater increase in latency
  • Elsewhere it was mentioned that compression is used in this setup. How well will an alternating binary stream compress? I'd rather see a test done with realistic data - even if you're just streaming an insane amount of MP3s down the wire, it's a closer representation of actual data that might be send over it.
  • Only if you are going to boil your eyeballs by looking down through the cable. Did you know even small lasers boil the cells on the backs of your eyeballs? Imaging what the high powered lasers they are using could do.. Ouch!
  • Unless your phone was a hopped up terminal emulator.
  • a TV runs at about 30 frames per second. This is enough to fool the human vision system
    No exactly. 30 frames per second is only good enough for TV and film because there is blur between frames. If you wrote a strobe program that flashed your whole screen black/white/black white, how fast would you have to go before you stoped noticing the strobe effect and saw a smooth grey? How about with your peripheral vision (look slightly above/below the screen)?

    Thad

  • Yeah that's great but.. (Score:5)

    by HalB ( 127906 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @05:36PM (#1070678)
    I'd like to see them get the latency down. What good is extra bandwidth if it doesn't improve your gaming experience? 8')
  • what about Canadian beer? we have some of the BEST! beer here! not to mention all the imports!
  • I work with a number of large companies in the data networking arena. Even large "wealthy" companies try to manage the bandwidth closely. Trying to get a company to purchase additional T1's when there is a clear need is often diffcult.
  • my god could you imagine quake @ 40gbps .....
  • Hope that yor smart fridge doesn't run an OS from Microsoft. Imagine how lame it would be to have to reboot your whole house every time you bought groceries: "What do you mean this brand of cheese requires an updated cheese driver? I can't reboot now I have guests over!"
  • I find it very interesting that the 2 telecommunications companies were American and Dutch while the actual test was conducted in Germany. The lure of beer must have done it or something...
  • Only if you are going to boil your eyeballs by looking down through the cable. Did you know even small lasers boil the cells on the backs of your eyeballs?

    "Do not look into laser with remaining eye".

    I know someone who actually looked into the beam of a laserpointer because 'the colors were so pretty'. Needless to say he's blinded himself in one eye now...

  • Wow. (Score:1)

    by Spax ( 84516 )
    Put simply, *twitch*

    Granted, this is certain to be old hat in another two years. As the article mentions, this a quadruple of the previous record of 10mbit from two years ago.

    In the meantime, I want a point to point from my office to my house. I'll never have to get dressed again.
  • You got that right. I just tried "La Duchesse du Bourgogne", a truley beautiful belgian (beer) and that now replaces my previous favourite of Ciney Blonde. So many choices to try......sigh...800 or so just in Belgium!!!

  • Weren't "they" supposed to put a 40Gbps Fiber cable in the ocean around Africa?
    I remember reading about that a while back.
    Here's the /. article [slashdot.org].
    So, what makes this cooler?
    T
  • My local newspaper carried this story from the Associated Press. The article read that some nonstandard hardware/software combination compression method was used to attain this speed. Just a bit of information not mentioned in the article.
  • A japanese company showed these at CEBIT 2 years ago. I don't know if they're commercially available over there, but it looked like a finished product.

    Message on our company Intranet:
    "You have a sticker in your private area"

  • Mmmm...bandwidth *drool* (Score:3)

    by AntiNorm ( 155641 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @05:44PM (#1070690)
    Several issues/questions are raised by having gargantuan amounts of bandwidth as in this story:

    1. Streaming video. Streaming TV. A good idea I think, but when you get people who start to stream movies, that will naturally piss off the MPAA.

    2. MB overload. Even the most modern computer systems can only handle so much bandwidth...

    3. Overki...never mind, there's no such thing as overkill when it comes to having too much bandwidth.

    And last but not least....
    4. $$$$$. Bandwidth is a Good Thing(tm), but it can get rather expensive.


    =================================
  • I got thrown out of a Best Buy once because I told a customer than the salesman was a chump.

    The customer was buying a 56kbit modem and the salesman was telling him how he'd be able to connect at 56kBytes, nodding yes to questions like "I can download a 1MB file in less than 20 seconds?"

  • Re:Wow. (Score:1)

    by Spax ( 84516 )
    Um. I misread the article as megabit. Sweet mother of John Carmack! Double wow.
  • See the link here [internet2.edu] It's much tougher to do it over longer distances. Quest learned a lot of this from the I2 project.
  • Maybe now with higher speeds like that, you can visit the Starcraft Linux [eyep.net] page faster thatn before. Hooray for technology.
  • The speed of light is about 1864 miles per second (3e6 meters/sec)*(3.2 feet/meter)*( 1/5280 miles/feet). So the time to travel 100 miles is about 0.0536 seconds. Add in some time for electronics to switch states, and it goes up. IIRC, this is faster then the theorical max speed for copper wire, since you have to play fun games with internal resistance and the like. Also faster then your woody station wagon with tapes.
  • hrm...suppose i should have read the damned article. lol


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • WorldCom has already demonstrated a 1.6 Tbps system using 160 10 Gbps channels over one piece of glass. The system uses Dense-Wavelength Division Multiplexing to pack the 160 channels on the fibre. 40 Gbps is faster for 1:1 computer transfers, but this system could in theory give 160 nodes full 10 Gbps access without having any interaction with the other channels.

    This is like having the choice of a 10-BaseT switch or a 100-BaseT Hub. take a look at the article

    Yahoo News [yahoo.com]

    Spacecase

  • The point of this is not to run 40Gb to your house, but to use it for major backbones. The benefit to you personally is getting full bandwidth to your DSL line (or whatever) from various web sites or download servers.


    --

  • Just how does one generate 40 gigabits - 5 gigabytes - of data per second?

    Post to usenet using your real email address. The resulting spam ought to do it.... Jason.

  • You goto Anritsu and buy a pattern generator thats 10 Gb. Get four of them and multiplex it on the same line.
  • (Assuming it takes about 5 hours for a truck to drive the round trip):

    1) Get one large truck.
    2) Get approximately 1.5million CD-ROMs
    3) Put 3) into 2)
    4) Drive to Frankfurt from Gernsheim
    5) drive back

    explanation:

    1.5million CD-ROMs @ ~ 600Mb/disc == 900000000Mb
    divide 900000000/5hours == 180000000Mb/hour
    which is about == 48Gb/s

    Latency is your problem to solve :)
  • ...i can't stand the RMN...
    Hmmm... pretty soon you'll be reading both, when they merge (which they've already started doing. Is it the size of the DRMN that gets to you or the editorial content? I generally find the Post rabidly pro-authoritarian.
  • Goto Alcatel's homepage and check it out. It seems Qwest is getting all the credit here. All they did was put some fiber in a tube and let Alcatel come over. From a technology standpoint Alcatel did all the work. The fiber is also important (way to go Lucent or Corning).
    BTW, this really doesn't mean a thing. Assuming you can buy a 40Gbs tomorrow (which you won't be able to). It can't use any fiber older then like 2 years, and even then it can only use a small percentage of that. This puts costs way up. As in not feasible.
    So for the moment a system like Nortel's 1.6Tb is more feasible and even then you have to be picky about the fiber.

  • How about JDS Uniphse? They're into some pretty cool optical switches.

  • Yeah. 3.28 terabits. And this technology isn't just being tested. Evidently PSINet is actually putting some of these connections in place, according to a speech I recently heard from the president of PSINet, Bill Schrader.

    Schrader claimed that 3.28 terabits is enough to handle all the telephone conversations being made in the United States all at once. I think a few of these would probably handle all the cellphone video connections anybody might want.


  • That's all well and good, but when is Qwest going to start nuking spammers on their networks?


  • I wanna see a MUD where your bandwidth is suitably respected...

    "come here dwarf lord, I am going to sk00l you with my 5 megabytes per second firebolt!"
  • They don't. At the end of the pipe are multiplexers/demultiplexers. Remeber this is a
    telco pipe used for ATM in a SDH. Not only for
    use with computerdata.
  • This assumes the telcos are competing for a market on high-bandwidth lines, and that they're competing for customers that care about price. T3s, and even T1s, are often owned by businesses and price doesn't matter much. Likewise, telcos don't get much internal competition for high bandwidth wires.
  • Hmm..

    Uncompressed: 40G/s
    Compressed: int x=1; while (x) cout x --x++;

    For any significant amount of data, I'd say near infinite compression..

    But it doesn't have to be limited to such insanely small homogenous granularity. Say you're using conventional CMOS components. Rig it to just spew random data. Trivial to do. While it would repeat eventually, the granularity is 1/infinity instead of 1/1.

    Watch it strip mp carats..
  • fast, reliable, and cheap, (sounds like some oxymoron) [...] available soon,

    Grouping fast, reliable together as "good", as the old saying goes: pick 2 of the 3. You can't have cheap, good, and quickly delivered all at the same time. So yes, it is an oxymoron. 8')

    I guess you have to wait for it to trickle down. In getting you to the internet backbone, there is kind of this fat tree tructure, with fat being bandwidth. The backbone is the fattest part (okay, the LAN is the fattest part, but I am talking about the WAN here). If the branches can get fatter (i.e. from the cable company, the local phone provider, or the ISP to the net) then you have a chance of speeding up that bottleneck. And likewise, it can trickle further down to the network that gets the signal from your home to the ISP. The can run high-speed lines to those big green boxes outside your house. If there is enough bandwidth to those (and to the above internet), you won't notice any "sharing effect"

    There is also the matter of physical cables. Once companies have the right-of-way, they can wire you whatever they want. Once fiber is cheaper, they can run that to the homes if the part on the tree above can support it. But that is a lot of cable...

    Then comes the business part... How do they totally rewire to every home on the the planet with fiber at a reasonable cost?

    There is only so much channel capacity on the phone switches and cable networks until they upgrade them... So that is another option. There is still a lot of bandwidth to be had in copper, but you need a lot of electronics to keep it going (repeaters, amplifiers, etc)

    It's kind of funny that, after you go to all this hassle, the site you want to download the Diablo 2 movie caps you at a 10kB/sec download speed. 8') Oh well.

  • There isn't one. Just the +1 starting at 26.

  • First of all, realize that this is not meant to plug into some personal computer, or even mainframe. It's meant to work with a pair of big-ass expensive backbone routers between major ISPs. Think about the big pipe between, say, Exodus and MCI.


    --

  • The same effect has been caused when driving down a tree-lined road on a sunny day, when the periods of light and dark caused by the trees' shadows happen to be at the right frequency.

    I have experienced this many times. I get this kind of blackout feeling, like I've lost consciousness for a brief second or two. It used to happen to me on the school bus, when I would be sleepy in the morning, and the light would flash at some frequency from the trees outside, and I would suddenly feel like I blacked out.

    I actually had a car accident that I believe was caused by this type of effect. Does anyone have any more information on this type of "seizure/blackout"?

  • KPNQwest is an operator. They own the pipe. Consider a car Ford makes the vehicle Exxon provides the fuel. No what does the driver do,
    Push the button ?
  • Actually, I believe that Orange [orange.co.uk] (a UK mobile phone company) is planning to bring in video-phone mobiles [orange.co.uk] sometime soon (early next year they claim). They've been going on about it for ages. The demo models I saw a while ago looked pretty nifty, but I think that the quality will be naff, and the batteries will probably last about five minutes.
  • since juniper stuff was used, you can bet it was done with regular old IP.

    their stuff switches IP at full wire rate, on all wires, at the same time. AND, it can filter all that stuff at full wire rate, too.

    pretty amazing stuff. you hear that cisco? ;-)

    --

  • Slow down a minute, folks - sending 40 Gbps over a fiber is trivial - it's been done by shipping, commercial telecom-grade DWDM (Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing) equipment for at least 5 years.

    What's cool about this, is they put 40Gbps on a single carrier on a fiber. This means that, eventually, they can stack a bunch of 40Gbps carriers, on slightly different laser frequencies, in the same fiber to carry [1,2,4,8?]Tbps.

    Commercial systems with the capacity to carry over a Terabit-per-second of data over a single fiber are already commercially available (and actually shipping) from companies like Ciena [ciena.com] and probably Nortel [nortel.com]. Lucent says they have equipment in the lab that is faster, but they're a bit like Microsoft in terms of making press releases long before they have working products, to inspire FUD in their competitor's potential customers... :^)

  • I have to relate this short little story (which is nearly completely off topic) about modem speeds. A friend of mine, much more comptuer literate than I at the moment, who is soon to be working in silicon vally, once explained to me why I wasn't getting the full 28kB/s out of my 28.8kb/s modem: "Oh, there is just transmission overhead, you shouldn't use AOL." I swallowed that, we switched to enteract, and I imagined that my downloads got faster, not that they ever got as fast as I thought they should. Now, of course, we both know a lot better than that, but let it be a lesson to any of you who think that the average person pays attention to the difference between B and b.
  • Qwest was responsible for creating the delays and determining the reasons why it couldn't be installed on time.
  • Oh.... I see! It must be pr0n, what else can you find at such quantities on the internet? ;-)
  • I'd like to see them...
  • 1) Don't stream MPAA Movies. If they don't want to play, they'll quickly become irrelevant in the information economy. Actually their antics are such that I expect they're on that route as it is.

    2) About 20GB/Sec one the IDE bus, IIRC. Well within the limits of streaming video.

    3) Companies know that.

    4) As companies compete to increase it the price will fall. I expect either really fast flat rate or for pennies a gigabyte to become a reality fairly quickly. Of course, when you start streaming 4 to 6 gigabyte movies, it'll add up fairly quickly. Should still be less than your current phone bill at the end of the month (Unless you're a real bandwidth whore.)

  • $0 a month is what i pay for my dialup access... that's a lot better than $40... cheap is $10 or so
  • 40Gb is not nearly enough of what is going to be needed in the next 2 years. Now that the wireless moved in, more people will be sending email from their phones and more internet searches will be activated. Streaming video to your PC? Try streaming video to your cell! Yes, I want to present to you my new idea: Stream Video to your Cell Phone! Even have a camera on your cell-phone, this way you could use your phone as a digital camera, a scanner or a videophone.

    40Gb will barely cover the growth of the standard wired networks, forget the mobile.

    I am not saying it is slow, I am just saying it's not going to be enough.
  • You're right. It ought to have been Gb and gigabit.

    Now I've corrected it and noted that in the story. Hopefully many more people get to read the corrected than the uncorrected version :)

    timothy
  • Let us all hope that you aren't a business major. I own my own business, and it is not a big business. I own my own business, and do not know everything about running a business. I own my own business, and no matter how big it gets, or how much I learn about running a business; I doubt I will ever be heard to say "price doesn't matter much". Granted quality, and reliablity will always come before cost, cost will never become a complete after thought.

  • Whatever's available first.

    I'll upgrade as bandwidth becomes available in my area.

    I'm not one of those holdouts waiting for universal ansible connections.

  • Actually, RealAudio/Video/etc. has support for IP Multicast. It's been in there since at least version 5 or so.

    Multicast isn't really available on the public Internet yet, so that's the reason why RealAudio has to duplicate all streams that are being uploaded to listeners. Real's site mentions multicast being feasible "on an internal company intranet" or something like that.

    I haven't tried it myself, though...

  • It's possible to do better than multicast, even with RealVideo. See FastForward [ffnet.com].

  • duh, try this [ffnet.com].

  • 1. Streaming video. Streaming TV. A good idea I think, but when you get people who start to stream movies, that will naturally piss off the MPAA.

    This doesn't really effect the amount of bandwidth that you can get at home, nor does it effect the fact that TCP/IP is not optimized for real time transmittion, what with out of order packets being useless in realtime. (Though IMO as bandwidth increases to the point where it's possible to have high resolution video, this problem with cease to be as important, as the dropped packets will be insignificant to the amount of data in a single frame, and algorythms could be worked out to let it degrade gracefully in the face of missing data.

    2. MB overload. Even the most modern computer systems can only handle so much bandwidth...

    Granted, even the 100mbit switch we have here makes the differance between accessing data across the network, and accessing it locally negligable in terms of speed. However, this sort of high speed fiber is meant to be used at a rather high level where it won't be interacting with the realitively slow PC's.

    3. Overki...never mind, there's no such thing as overkill when it comes to having too much bandwidth.

    And last but not least.... 4. $$$$$. Bandwidth is a Good Thing(tm), but it can get rather expensive.

    Actually, most of the cost of bandwidth in a WANis in the physical medium rather than the hardware being used to route it. Running a piece of plastic across the atlantic ocean is *expensive* designing a router to make use of it is *cheap*. So, this will in fact probably make bandwidth cheaper rather than more expensive.

  • The 40 gbps (OC 768) has been acheived already here in the US and is being implented by a company called Enkido in NY. Their CEO was the CTO for Qwest. They are currently using the bandwidth for private connectivity not internet connectivity but my understanding is that they already have corporate users. I believe that uuNet and BBN have also demonstrated similar throughput. To clarify some previous posts the 40 gbps is using DWDM on one lambda, one wavelength, and one optical channel. This gives the fiber as a whole a 6.4 tbps speed. There will likely be annoucements in the near future for speeds at about 100 gbps per lambda with the total speed of the fiber being about 10 Tbps. Now if they can just deliver that a fraction of that to my "out of DSL and cable modem range" home I would be happy.
  • Mile? What's a mile? You use metric prefixes like "Giga" and slap "mile" in the same phrase. It's so non-sequitur. What about our international readers?
  • Yeah, it doesn't seem to bother my NT4 box (or, of course, my AIX workstation)...
  • It's not a beer if you can read your watch through it!

    Guinness.... mmmmm...
  • I agree. However the issue here really lies with users in remote locations. Consistency for all is the key. Screw the wiring go wireless. Hell they have "Wireless T-1's" available - at a price - so it's only a matter of time before the faster wireless breed arrives. This will be a sight for sore eyes here in Canada because of our bizarre population disbursement - too much space between cities and towns. But hey our beer rocks!

  • Correction! If you live in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh......all the dsl you can get. screw the rest of PA

  • Personally, I think that the biggest problem is, especailly in low populated areas some 150 miles from any major city, is that smaller, local phone companies can't afford the bandwidth. For example, I live in Minnesota, and anything north of St. Cloud (look on a map if you have to) is terribly expensive. You have to pay every phone company along the way their fee, and by the time you get 150-200 miles away, I have seen prices up to $5000 a month for a T1. Everyone else here has great arguments too, I just have to add my two cents.
  • Chances are this 'ring of fire' cable they are laying around africa is more than just "one" fiber cable. Most likely it is composed of many 'fibers' per fiber, and there are possibly even more than one fiber cable being layed. This would hold to its claim of being self healing and provide redundancy. This recent article has to do with sending 40Gbps through only "one" individual fiber. Now that's something to talk about... until, 80Gb, 160Gb, Naw... It'll be big news when they cram 1Tbps through one tiny fiber cable.

  • I don't believe that is exactly what the poster meant but it was somewhat funny

    If I remember correctly a TV runs at about 30 frames per second. This is enough to fool the human vision system. Now take the number of rods and cones on the back of the average retina times two. (I don't know the answer to this.) Then you will have a pretty good idea of the total data available as raw input. There must be some interesting compression happening in the actual processing of the data.

    Apparently the system can be overloaded. Remember that Pokemon episode in Japan a while back that caused many siezures in children.

  • Fiber ring around Africa? Its not Qwest. It was Global Crossing Ltd and Lucent Technologies who were supposed to be involved in that.


  • As far as I know, Qwest is mostly a long distance company, and one of the first long distance companies to use TCP instead of circuits for long distance. Since using packets instead of circuits in real time audio (aka phone) service presents serious problems of lag time, I imagine that Qwest is doing this so they can deal with the problem of packet control lag time.

    The other reason they may be doing this has to do with the fact that they own USWest (or USWorst, as it is sometimes known), which is now the largest provider of DSL service in the world. Since they are still engaged in a campaign to sell DSL to everyone and their senile mother, they will eventually need more bandwidth to deal with all those new DSL lines.

    That would be my guess behind all of this, but I do have a few questions:

    Am I right about Qwest being a long distance company?

    Did the USWest deal ever go through?

    What is the other companies steak in this?

  • Ok. Once I make my first $billion, I know exactly where that money's going: One of these connections between my house and www.cybererotica.com
    --
  • I don't think that convention is universally accepted. I've been working in data communications for a long time and BPS, as in BPS, KBPS and MBPS, has always stood for bits per second. Bytes per second, or more properly, octets per second, has never been a popular unit of measurement. When multi-bit units are involved, symbols per second is commonly used. Most data communications are serial, and at the hardware level, serial streams of bits. It seems that bytes/sec is primarily relevant to the parallel buses used in computers.
  • You use a time division multiplexer (TDM) to combine 20 2 gbit/s signals into a 40 gbit/s signal, or you can use a frequency division multiplexer (FDM) to put 20 2 gbit/s signals on 20 carriers or optical wavelengths. Analog cable TV systems use FDM, a T1 line used to carry digitized 64 kbit/s voice streams is using TDM. Very high speed fiber systems use a combination of TDM and FDM.
  • Will you people STOP abbreviating gigabit as GB? PLEASE?? Everyone is going to immediatly think this wire is 8 times faster than it is.
  • Ok, I can understand the scientific and technological revelations of ths discovery, but when do the benefits come down to us, the average (ok, maybe not so average) users? How long 'till we get a worldwide network at that speed? Not friggin' soon, unfortunately. It's like all other monumental scientific discoveries--it takes years for it to trickle down to us. I applaud the feat, don't get me wrong, but I'll be more impressed, hell, I'll give them a standing ovation, when it's made available to the rest of us.
  • Why would they use TCP? I would have expected them to use UDP for real-time audio and video, plus you can multicast UDP.
  • I'm not familiar with the particular incident, but seizures of this kind are more often triggered by flashing at a particular frequency, something around 10 or 7 Hertz, I think. The same effect has been caused when driving down a tree-lined road on a sunny day, when the periods of light and dark caused by the trees' shadows happen to be at the right frequency.

    As for bandwidth of the human vision system, I'm not at all sure that it makes sense to talk about such a thing. The system is analogue. It would be like trying to say what the bandwidth of a peice of A4 paper is, based on some crude notions of the smallest dot you can make with a pen or something. It's simply not a helpful way to think about this stuff, IMHO.
  • I still get weird thinking of the wire in my hand touching another wire, and another and another, etc till it gets wherever... my own 2000 mile piece of copper just for me. Sort of 'primitive amazing' - pre-mux of any sort technology. Anyway, that is what the world is wired for. One of their guys just told me PacBell installed 12,000 DSL lines in January and they are going to install 1,000,000 this year. And that is not just 'here is your modem and NIC, sir'. That is climbing poles and snipping floaters and whatever other 'defered maintainance' needs to be done to get the line's utilization down... DSL is good for several movies to be downloaded at the same time.. I don't see a fiber re-wire. I see the phone company has figured out their whole world of audio fits in a small sliver the bandwidth people want/need today and they may lose the farm... Did you know the Bell companies had DSL for years, invented when 'audio-video' was the big thing, TV's in the front of the classroom, etc? 300-1200 baud modems were all the Bell's 'let' you attach to 'their' network and they had DSL sitting in a drawer... The 'last mile' is a hot place today. .

  • Dumb question? (Score:3)

    by drix ( 4602 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @05:56PM (#1070781) Homepage
    Just how does one generate 40 gigabits - 5 gigabytes - of data per second? That's well above the throughput of any bus system I'm aware of, let alone RAM or hard drive. Any idea how they do this?

    --
  • Yeah, but what's the latency? A station wagon full of tapes has a higher bandwidth, but pretty poor latency.
    --
  • Errr.. Sure, we can get f***ing loads of bandwidth down a fibre, but that's not the hard part. The point is that the latest test shows that this bandwidth has been achieved with IP.

    DWDM (the multiplexing tech.) isn't that new, the trick is to find a router that can handle it. We can get massive bandwidth over SDH, it's getting it over IP that's tricky.

    I note that the latest announcement didn't actually use the word 'IP' anywhere, but the talk of new routers implied it to me - that and the fact that if they meant SDH it wouldn't be much of a big deal.

    P.S. I'm not fibre optic expert, but I think this explains the discrepancy.
  • Right... and that is why I am complaining. The article uses GB/sec and "gigabit per second" to mean the same thing, which is wrong and misleading. It should be GB and gigabyte OR Gb and gigabit (which is the more likely option).

    b = bit
    B = byte

    Slashdot articles routinly use these interchangably, leading to long discussion threads about whether the new hard drive (for instance) really has a capacity of 800GB or only 100GB (800Gb). This is a waste of everyone's time.

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