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Technology

New Fiber Optics In The Works 89

Posted by timothy from the now-that's-bandwidth dept.
Logic Bomb writes: "An article from MIT's Technology Review has the details on a new kind of fiber optic cabling that could provide part of the backbone bandwidth increase everyone is looking for. Instead of sending the light through glass, the light is actually sent through nothing but air. The key is a tube lining made of a special class of materials called "photonic-band-gap" which manage to perform an almost-perfect reflection of particular wavelengths of light. I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use. :-)"
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New Fiber Optics In The Works More

New Fiber Optics In The Works

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  • mmmmm....pr0n (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    goatse.cx is already pretty fast. What more do you need?
  • This had crossed my mind. It would actually be easy to do with this fibre -- just pump it down from one end. If you don't do this, I imagine you do at least want to fill the central space with clean dry nitrogen, or something, rather than mucky ambient air.

  • Cost (Score:2)

    by boinger ( 4618 )
    I don't care so much if this new technology will be priced for home use - I'm more interested whether this new fibre cable will cause the current higher bandwidth technologies to drop in price...I'd be quite satisfied with a home T-3. I'd even settle for a good T-1, even.

  • Thoughts on fibers (Score:5)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Thursday April 19, 2001 @12:09PM (#278885) Homepage Journal
    The article isn't clear on how these hollow-core fibers handle multiple frequencies of light (rather it implies different answers at different points.) It appears that (using their trite analogies) one might be trading in a several-hundred lane highway with regular tollbooths for a single lane without need for a tollbooth. Presumably this would be a boon for some applications but it's not a universal revolution.

    Indeed with many of the increases in fiber-bandwidth having come from multiple frequencies of light & with greatly improved hardware soon to roll-out ('tunable' lasers & all-optical switches, some using light-frequency as a routing determinant) if these new fibers are truly limited in their frequency-transmisson they could find themselves hobbled when they eventually come to market.

    I also wonder about splicing these cables, terminating them, etc. The difficulties of a single fiber were surmounted but with a number of wave-guides closely bonded together I imagine most present technology wouldn't work.

    Those concens aside I can see a number of applications where a long-distance non-repeated cable could be of enormous use, particularly in under-sea cables.

    Back to the when-can-we-see-this-in-our-homes I doubt we will ever as this particular technology seems unsuited for such an application. If the question were about fiber-in-general expect it to become possible in a few years.

    Plastic-based fiber is proving to be cheaper & more versitile then glass based in the sort of mid/high density generally assumed for residential and now the sticking point is the connections & switching. Once cheap optical switches come onto the market it'll just be a matter of physical installation - presumably in about the same pattern cable-TV has used.

    If you can get cable-TV now hopefully in about a deacade you'll begin having the option of fiber.

    Imagine a Bewulf cluster of these... - sorry, couldn't resist.

  • I'm sorry, but the author bio had me chuckling for a few minutes.

    He is also the author of H2O: A Biography of Water.

    I have to say I'm curious, in the extreme. When is he coming out with "Air: Friend of Foe?" and "Fire: Ouch!".
  • we can nail down where a fiber is cut by measuring where the refractivity of the cut takes place

    Is this the same sort of thing as using the impedance change for a cable to determine the length (or length to the break) with traditional coax and TP networking? Never heard of a similar technique in fiber, but then again I haven't had much experience with fiber.
  • You may laugh, but I distinctly remember reading a cyberpunk-whodunnit in a brit computer mag back in the early 80'ies, which featured a 1GHz CPU as a cheap comodity. Boy was I convinced that it was over the top... At that time I had a 4MHz Z80-based Sinclair Spectrum with 64K's of RAM. Yup, that included display memory.


    If you read your stats, you'll notice that bandwith price/performance ratio is improving at an even faster rate than CPU price/performance - the jumps in performance are bigger, but spaced farther in time than CPU performance jumps.


    So bandwith is cheap, and getting cheaper. The only true barrier is latency. After all, increasing bandwidth is (basically) just a matter of bundeling more fibers pr. connection :)

  • The problem with transmitting yourself one atom at a time lies with having to destroy yourself and thus all the molecules in your body in order to transmit yourself. They are sending individual atoms that have little better to do than be the subject of experiments. The atoms in my body and yours are much too busy right now to bother with being guided through anywhere.
  • A Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters of course.
  • This is only a test
  • As a kid I knew the inherent limitations of a string based network, and chose to forego it for costlier, yet more flexible hose network.
  • There is already, and they dont sell to many units either. The cost of deployment is very high. Forget the price of fiber, even for a second. Their NID costs $900 EACH (thats per home, folks)

    http://www.opticalsolutions.com/index1.htm

  • Speed of light in glass is what, about 1/3rd speed of light in vacuum? So it's only a threefold increase anyway; you get more than that with clever use of multiple frequencies down the same fibre etc.

    Just checking, but I hope you mean you can get a better bandwith increase by using multiple frequencies (than by increasing the speed of transmission). I deal with Network Performance on a regular basis and most people keep forgeting that there are always two numbers to think about:
    Bandwidth (how thick your pipe is)
    and Latency (how long it takes to get from point A to point B).

    We did some work for a company (who shall remain nameless) who moved all their servers to an East Coast data center and were trying to figure out why their Dallas branch office was having poor responce times. The final report to them included a sentance to the effect that "The top speed of this application is limited by the speed of light. There is no way to make this application go faster short of altering physics as we know it."

    The customer was a bit angry (lots of dollars spent) and the DB Consultants from one of the BIG houses (won't say who but it starts with an "O" ::grin::) were rather sheepish (after having told the company to do this in the first place).

  • There are two main advantages of this technology: (potentially) ultra-low loss, and increased bandwidth. The increased bandwidth is due to the nature of this type of waveguide to have low to zero dispersion, while the "band-gap" allows for a wider range of wavelengths to be used for WDM.

    Now the bad news, this technology is likely a few years off, for telecom anyway, and will certainly be more expensive than silica fiber, which is amazingly cheap these days. Not to mention that the main barrier to any improvements in the fiber part of fiber optic telecommunications is the huge installed base of single mode silica fiber. Installation/right-of-way is the currently biggest cost associated with fiber systems. There is alot of unused bandwidth out there right now and any service provider would be crazy to spend mucho dinero to replace silica with any new technology at this stage in the game.

    For the near future, other applications can benefit greatly from this technology. Especially since hollow band-gap waveguides can transmit near, mid and far-IR energy as well. Medical and industrial IR laser applications are longing for a low-loss, high-power IR delivery system.

    This is still a very exciting concept and I hope to see more from these guys in the future.

    -Dan
  • Synopsis: What happens when the air-fiber-optic line is cut underwater and it fills with seawater?

    One of the biggest problems facing this is underwater lines. Let's say you produce one of these new lines underwater from California to Japan. All is well for 2 months, when suddenly all communication is completely cut.

    A crew investigates at the bottom of the ocean. Something has cut the fiber-optic line into two pieces, and since the fiber is filled with air, the entire line has filled with water. Murky seawater. What do you do now? Pump air through it? There's bound to be residue that will impede light transmission. I guess that means there will have to be a new line laid.

    Maybe they'll produce an armored sort of line to reduce the possibility of a cut. Hopefully that will prevent anything weird from happening.
  • Argh...

    Ok, I agree with your point. However, this is not FUD.

    FUD is fear, uncertanty, and doubt. It is trying to undermine a product by making people think less of it. FUD is not "lame marketing crap I don't agree with".

    Sorry to nitpick, but since the term FUD is used so often here on /., I would hope it would be used correctly.

  • It wasn't the MIT people who created it, it was the University of Bath in England.

  • Also... (Score:2)

    by Puk ( 80503 )
    This is very similar to this article [slashdot.org] from Slashdot in March. This is another form of "holey fiber" making use of photonic bandgap effects.

    It's not identical is application or results, but it's similar and another use of the same basic idea, so the earlier article and posts should make good reading. The article that prompted the previous story doesn't mention the photonic band gap, but this [soton.ac.uk] paper from the researcher discussed in the article does.

    -Puk
  • Yes please...

    I can see it now:
    "Dad, what do you mean that you could only download at 300k/sec... wow, that must have been soooo slow"

  • "I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use. :-)" "

    Fiber is cheap now. The high cost of fiber is not the fiber cable, it is the installation and maintenance. Add on the cost of all the routing equipment and you see where the real costs lay.
  • I thought it was Fucked Up Data... (when people kept talking about the mindcraft shit, it made sense).
  • The only difference in this case would be that the traditional fibre would be easier to repair (assuming you can repair them).
  • "An article from MIT's Technology Review has the details on a new kind of fiber optic cabling that could provide part of the backbone bandwidth increase everyone is looking for....I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use."

    For the last time, THE BACKBONE IS NOT IN YOUR BASEMENT.

    Technologies that are being developed for the core are not being designed for your house. They never have been and, unless the semi-hierarchical design of the core dissolves into fractal jelly (which would be pretty interesting, actually, but won't happen as long as it's privately owned), they never will be, because the scalability problem in last-mile deployment is an absolute bitch.

    That said, QWest and others are swimming in backbone bandwidth -- they can't sell it all!

  • It's was either Slashdot or The Register where I got this link [iop.org] from a few months ago. It's about the same subject, but goes as far to mention that this technology can be used to guide individual atoms through the fiber tubes. The article says that the research on this is just beginning, and will be used to measuring gravitational fields and the like... I'm not too up on my physics, but does anyone see this akin to teleportation? It's only one atom at a time, and it's not a "wireless" solution, but you are moving actuall matter over high speed communications lines. Any physics people have an opinion? (as if I had to ask)
  • I read an artice a year or so ago about how exactly they run trans-oceanic fiber lines, and I don't think that the line being severed or even damaged will be a concern. The fiber that was laid from the U.S. to Japan is covered excessive by protective casing and padding. So much so that an oil barge could sink and land on the line with minimal or no damage at all. Sure, all of the extra protection almost doubled the cost of the project, but the impression that I got from the artice was that one the fiber is laid, they don't want to go back and fix it. A cable is closet is difficult enough to work in, imagine splicing fiber at the bottom of the ocean.
  • The speed of light in glass is lower than the speed of light in air (by about 25 percent if I recall), so using an air-core fiber would cut signal delays as well as the other benefits.
  • What I've always though when seeing that because "it is a bandgap it behaves as a semiconductor and it can be used to make a transistor" is that a transistor can not be made without doping. And I haven't seen anything about doping and photonic bandgaps. And for this to happen some property working as equivalent to charge but for photons must be used. Well, these are just my random thoughts right now, and I hope that they are not too incomprehensible.
  • I know I'm probably wrong, but I thought the signal traveled through air an was reflected by the glass anyway? The wasn't as good as it distorted the final light result at the other end or something like that.
  • ... then with no medium for the light to go through and slow it down, we will have true light speed data transmissions. You can't go any faster than that (at least not with current day theories.)
  • If the cable is really a honeycomb, with light passing through a small mirrored channel, does that make it more delicate than, say, copper? Or normal fiber? It sounds like an outstanding idea, but I'd have to imagine that a cable like this could be a little delicate. Anyone have any info?
  • Of course that raises the problem of the tubes collapsing under the atmospheric pressure outside. I imagine it'd be pretty hard to cheaply manufacture tubes that can withstand that pressure and remain flexible. And how would you modify the length of the cable? Either you have to order it the perfect length or revacuum it after shortening it. That and hope it never breaks. Of course many people who use fiber today are incapable of cutting it properly so perhaps that's not an issue. Sounds like it'd be nice though.


    --
  • I don't think he was questioning the possibility of light travelling through a vacuum, but rather the feasibility and/or further benefits of it.


    --
  • REDUNDANT

    This was stated in comment #8 I believe by JediTrainer on 04-19-01 14:49 EST, a full 10 minutes before your post. Was this an intentional attepmt to steal karma or merely not paying attention?


    --
  • I'm wondering who blew their moderator points on your comment. The fact is that there ARE CURRENT DAY THEORIES [maths.org] on using mediums (non-vacuum) to enable FTL communications. And no, anonymous cowards, this is not a goat sex link.
  • There is a little bit more background info on WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) here [techreview.com]. It's also from Techreview and mentioned in the article, but w/o link. And no, that's not a goatse link.


    -----

  • Don't see why it should be that hard.

    You're talking about a vacuum in a cylinder at most 1mm across (internally), with probably 1mm walls, that should take the 10^5 Pa required easily (standing on it would give a pressure of the order of 2x10^5, and you can stand on pipes with no problem whatsoever).
  • Disclaimer: /me is studying physics at Cambridge University, UK.

    The speed if light is only marginally faster in vacuum. Even then, the wave speed has no effect on the data rate. (I think it's obvious but maybe someone else could explain it to you.) Neither would this improve any slow ping times, the speed of light is not really an issue there.

    What's more important is the problem of dispersion: different wavelenghts traveling at different speeds. It's present in any material. As a consequence, the waveforms are smeared out over time, so distances are limited (but long lines are possible with repeaters). It gets worse with higher data rates. With vacuum there won't be any of this problem, so the bandwidth would only be limited by the frequency of the light, some 10^14 Hz.

    However, I've got the feeling you still have to worry about dispersion because glass is involved in the confinement of light.

    One final question: what the heck were the moderators smoking this time? Seems like good shit :-)

    --

  • when I was a kid we first tried two cups and string for a phone, but you always had to keep the string tight.... then we tried hoses...

    see the similarities?

    coincidence?!?!? i think not ;)

    ----

  • As always, (Score:3)

    by photozz ( 168291 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [zzotohp]> on Thursday April 19, 2001 @11:45AM (#278921) Homepage
    The goal, .. of course,.. is for faster porn.... Anyone got a guess on the availability? The fiber I mean,.. not the porn.....

  • Just checking, but I hope you mean you can get a better bandwith increase by using multiple frequencies (than by increasing the speed of transmission)
    Hm, yes, that's what I meant, looking back at what I said it doesn't look like it though.

    The top speed of this application is limited by the speed of light. There is no way to make this application go faster short of altering physics as we know it."
    The customer was a bit angry (lots of dollars spent)
    "We've spent so much money, can't you get us some, um, extra-fast light or something?"

    Nice :-p
  • I know this isn't feasible (at least, not yet), but is the next step going to be to try to get light to travel through a vaccuum?

    I understand (with my crude understanding of physics) that the more 'stuff' you have in the way of the photons, the more it gets blocked. What if there were a way to take everything out of the light's path?
    Yes, that'd be fun. All you'd need is a vacuum in a perfect straight line from you to the target system. :-p

    Or a very long tube, with perfectly mirrored insides, and a vacuum all the way down the centre - not exactly easy to manufacture, and it'd be pretty delicate.

    Speed of light in glass is what, about 1/3rd speed of light in vacuum? So it's only a threefold increase anyway; you get more than that with clever use of multiple frequencies down the same fibre etc.
  • There's another good article on this in the April issue of Discover. You can find it online here: http://www.discover.com/apr_01/feattrap.html [discover.com]
  • Actually, if you look at the waves traveling in a single mode fiber you will see that most of the wave is traveling outside the fiber in the surrounding cladding. kindof like in a high speed coaxile wire: most of the energy is travels as microwave radiation between the inner and outer cable.
  • Actually, that is a good point. I work for a large fiber company and we can nail down where a fiber is cut by measuring where the refractivity of the cut takes place. Makes it a hell of alot easier when you have to go out into the middle of Indiana and figure out which farmer cut your fiber...

    B
  • Most companies are more worried about how many lambdas (wavelengths that are carrying 10GB/s each) they can squeeze down a pipe compared to deploying new fangled fiber systems. This is probably still vaporware, and right now it's a hell of a lot cheaper to keep cranking glass-core fiber out instead of some sort of air/vacuum-core fiber.

    The nice thing about cutting fiber is that the contamination ends right at the cut, not 30 feet up the pipe.

    Next dumb question, what type of equipment would you hook up to a 1,000GB line?

    B
  • Although I agree that that folks like Qwest will have to pay an arm and leg to replace existing cable

    Acutally, they won't. Qwest has empty conduit buried above their existing fiber network.

    While fiber is expensive in relative terms, the optoelectronics are often 20x more expensive.

    One more problem is power, running two sets of photonics equipment that are not interchangeable as opposed to one standardized piece of equipment doesn't make sense. Comapnies like Notel (r omitted on purpose) Lucent and Corvis are dumping huge amounts of capital into DWDM as opposed to telling their largest clients that their existing fiber systems are useless.

    Want to make a leap in optical technology, develop a box that will deploy dialtone/DSL to a neighborhood off of a four fiber system (eight for SONET)

    B
  • Why not put a giant mirror into geo sequences orbit and bounce lasers off of it.

    Even better, build a huge Tesla Coil and beam death rays to each subscribers home!!!

    Oh sh*t, we did that already, it's called Radio...

    B

    Flamebait .sig for sale, low mileage, one owner only. Serious inquiries only.
  • OTDR's...very cool when some backwards farmer or water company can't read the damn "FIBER BURIED HERE" signs.

    B
  • I believe the IoR they are referring to is the one in traditional fiberoptic glass versus the lack of need for any material.

    That tosses anything to do with IoR out the window since it is dealing entirely with reflection and wave propagation origination in the initial direction.

    For those of you that were talking about a total vacuum in this cable, that's impossible. There will always be some particulates in the cable and desorption of gasses due to lack of pressure in most all materials. Even space has pressure. Although small.

    It would help some to pump out the tube and it is not that tough to build a tube that withstands 14.7 psi.

    Lets say at .375 in. diameter. you're only seeing about 17 pounds of force per inch. Not too hard at all to design.

  • This type of technology will go a long way to fix bandwidth issues.

    What I would love to see is cheap reliable fiber IN the boxes. 1 TB per second to your lasercube, that's what I want. Storage being accessed at better than memory speeds now, oh mymymymy.
  • The first time I read FUD I thought it stood for fucked-up disinformation. I think I like my version better.

  • Anyone got a guess on the availability?

    If you read the article and you make it all the way to the fourth paragraph, you'll find this:

    "It is still early in the development of this new generation of optical fibers. Even the most advanced of the new materials remain several years from widespread commercial use."

  • Is this anything like the holey fibers [slashdot.org] that were Slashdotted last month?
  • So these are the same technology? This article didn't mention holey fibers, and I posted about it but of course no one cared...
  • And while you might think of metallic mirrors--silvered glass--as good light reflectors, the truth is that they are not nearly reflective enough

    Ohmigod! I AM handsome after all!!

  • It's not the cable that costs, it's the tools and the interefaces. Same as with fibre.

    But for your short distances (unless you live in a 5 acre house) you're better off with copper. Sorry to bust your bubble. Maybe, if you really want to go nuts, you could pick up some old surplus microwave guides. My dad has a pile of them and you can play with them like Lego (brand building blocks, for you Correctness-Nazis)

    --

  • But not with these * NEW * and * Improved * words.

    View the past through Slashdot-O-Scope! =)

    --

  • know this isn't feasible (at least, not yet), but is the next step going to be to try to get light to travel through a vaccuum?

    Hoover, Oreck, or Eureka?

    Ok, that's bad... Not sure how you preserve a vacuum in something like that... Make the fibre in an airless production facility? Maybe NASA has one.

    --

  • I have been sending messages through phartonic datastreams for ever.

    Yes, I can see how you wouldn't want to combine laser beans and a high fibre diet.

    Surprise is a phart with lumps.

    --

  • Many corporations have yet taken measures to move unto those strands of unused fibers, and it would cost many companies an arm and leg to replace their cabling, especially when they haven't even used it yet.

    ...and who knows by the time this is even feasible, with the way technology changes, there's bound to be something even faster by the time this becomes something close to a standard.

    Although I agree that that folks like Qwest will have to pay an arm and leg to replace existing cable, I believe that it's important to realize that this underlying economic argument is not true for all carriers. Some folks out there have multiple conduits -- 12 on all routes in the case of Level 3 -- which allows them to pull smaller fiber-count cables. When new generations of fiber come about, the new fiber is blown through an empty conduit (roughly a 1.25" pipe) at a very low incremental cost.

    This way, one can take advantage of the new fiber systems as they become available. While fiber is expensive in relative terms, the optoelectronics are often 20x more expensive. Thus, with photonic band gap 'fiber' technologies, huge cost savings can be realized as hundreds of multiplexed lightpaths can transmitted without amplification.

  • Photonic Bandgap materials are in their infancy, probably 25-30 yrs from being stable enough for commercial use. So the chances of seeing a price drop in current technologies is probably far off. :(
  • Why not put a giant mirror into geo sequences orbit and bounce lasers off of it.
    Wouldn't that be faster then a hollow fiber optic connection?
    Maybe this is a bad idea with cloud cover and all ;P
  • "photonic-band-gap"

    First you have your GAP khakis, then GAP swings and finally GAP country line dances. Now they're invading the fibre optic cable market! I can't wait for that commercial. Somebody please make that company stop.

  • Well, then, if they try and patent it, call your buddy from when you were a kid, and see if you can break the patent based on 'prior art'...

  • Looking at the holes in the fiber that they show in the pictures (with a scale), each hole is about 5 microns in diameter. I would highly doubt that water would completely fill these holes.

    The water pressure at whatever depth they were set at could probably determine how far in each hole the water may have been forced. They could simply cut the line well beyond that and splice in a new fiber. Of course, I assume that they would have to do this in an environment free of water.

  • Another alternative fiber structure was described in an article in The Economist [economist.com] in March, referring to work by a Danish company.
  • This post stems from work done at MIT several years ago. The basic idea is to create an omnidirectional dielectric mirror (one that reflects 100% of the incoming light, no matter which angle it comes in at), then roll it up into a tube. Any light that comes in from one end has no choice but to go out the other end, right? So, therefore, with this technology, we could lay undersea cables with no amplifiers or repeaters in them. The light of one tiny little laser would be enough to cross the ocean.

    One little problem -- it won't work. First, to get the light to propagate, you have to make the tube incredibly tiny. Second, to actually get it to move without loss, you have to magically suspend a rod down the middle of this microscopic cavity. Third, there is no way to actually build a perfect reflector. All materials absorb a little light, and these little bits add up.

    Today's fibers can already go 50 miles or more without regeneration of the signal, and there's no reason to suspect these fibers would be any better.

  • In "ordinary" (read: real) fiber optics, the light travels in a HIGH INDEX glass core that runs down the middle. It's reflected at the boundary of the core, where it meets up with a low-index shell. So, this is exactly the opposite.
  • I agree with you completely -- yet another reason that this isn't the best idea. But, just about any cable is hosed if it gets cut, unless the owner is prepared to send a ROV down to pick up the ends, drag them back to the surface, and repair the break.

    However, undersea fiber is as thick as your arm, with all of the attendant packaging, and it's buried several feet under the ocean floor until it gets to the edge of the continental shelf.

  • Cool! We can step on the cable and disrupt networking. It's my childhood all over again!

  • Here [slashdot.org] for more info.
  • I recently suggested that as an upgrade path during an infrastructure meeting. They're still using 10Mb HUBS. Needless to say, it was met with some pissed off looks from management and some under-the-breath snickers from the network team :)

  • One of the significant properties of photonic band gap materials is that they reflect a whole range of frequencies extremely well, so that they can certainly compete with fiber optic cables. You can even write a program to optimize the size of the band gap, see the MIT photonic bands documentation at http://jdj.mit.edu/mpb/. Unfortunately, it's difficult to route them around bends in a lossless fashion; it can be done, but there's a limitation on how sharp the bends can be at the moment. The reason they're called photonic band-gap materials is by the analogy to solid state semiconductors, which have a large range of forbidden energies (before doping). Which brings me to the next point, that the article neglects: photonic materials can be used for optical computing! One can (at least theoretically) construct optical analogues to transistors that perform switching at light speed! Conversion between light and electrons probably is the biggest bottleneck of the internet backbone nowadays. Optical computing would obviously eliminate that; realizing that physically is the real, most important long term goal of the telecom photonic technologies. Of course, the improved efficiency of photonic band-gap fibers would save money on amplification as well....

  • problem is... (Score:3)

    by deran9ed ( 300694 ) on Thursday April 19, 2001 @12:02PM (#278956) Homepage

    Fiber is expensive as hell and many companies like QWEST already have existing dark fiber all over the place. Many corporations have yet taken measures to move unto those strands of unused fibers, and it would cost many companies an arm and leg to replace their cabling, especially when they haven't even used it yet.
    Sounds great. So, where's the catch? It's a matter of limits. As communications networks get bigger, busier and more ambitious, the drawbacks of conventional glass fibers are becoming evident, and existing optical-fiber networks will eventually be unable to cope.
    This is looking way into the future. Has anyone here actually upgraded to a fiber ethernet based network, or is everyone hoping. In reality its again a very expensive thing to do, cheap to think about, but expensive to do.

    With companies like PSInet which is a big ass ISP coming near the brinks of bankruptcy, many companies are in a rush to SAVE money not run out to buy more equipment, upgrade, etc. I would like to see networks get faster, but is it a complete neccessity at this point? ... The answer is sadly no, and who knows by the time this is even feasible, with the way technology changes, there's bound to be something even faster by the time this becomes something close to a standard. Kudos to the MIT people though ;)

  • mostly refracted and scattered

    can't keep a coherent signal..

    hey that's me.. :-)

  • The doping in this situation is to fill in part of the honeycomb with the glass or to remove part of the glass honeycomb leaving air. This allows certain wavelengths within the bandgap to propogate. This is analagous to doping in semiconductors were you are replacing atoms with more (or fewer) electrons thus adding energy states within the bandgap.
  • I know this isn't feasible (at least, not yet), but is the next step going to be to try to get light to travel through a vaccuum? I understand (with my crude understanding of physics) that the more 'stuff' you have in the way of the photons, the more it gets blocked. What if there were a way to take everything out of the light's path?

    From what he article said, you need a material around the transmission material (in this case, air) with a lower index of refraction to keep the light going along the transmission line. I'm not sure, but I would guess a perfect vacuum would have a very low refraction index, so the problem of finding a material with a lower index of refraction to surround the vacuum with would be even more difficult than with air.

  • jello [exploratorium.edu] orhttp://www.exploratorium.edu/snacks/laser_jello/ index.html for you who don't want to risk clicking on a /. comment url.
  • Somebody please explain to me why my post got moderated as 'flamebait'.

    I'm trying my best to contribute to this discussion by asking an honest question (and I've been getting nice replies, thanks all who responded). To me, the question seemed logical enough to ask.

    Yes, I know that light travels through vaccuum in space. My question was whether science will ever lead us to exploit that. It seemed an interesting idea at the time that I posted it, and I wanted to see if other people had anything to say about it. It was a post which was on topic, and provoked some level of intelligent discussion (not flames).
  • Hard to say, but it would lend credibility to the story we used to tell VP's about the network slowing down on days when there was a traffic jam because the weight of the cars compressed the data signals....
  • It is interesting to know how these hollow tubes are fit together. It seems to be much more compicate than welding the glass fibers end to end. Any suggestions?
  • But if a submarine hollow tube cable got cut off by some stupid fishing net, sea water might damage a substantial length of the cable.
  • Don't be afraid of the whole "first post" mentality, as you say. Embrace it. It's beautiful. "The human drama of athletic competition", as they used to say on old TV sports shows.
    You have achieved something. Revel in it. Wallow in it. The fp is YOURS! Savor your triumph, untainted by uncertainty. It's a GOOD THING(TM).

  • Home use? (Score:4)

    by sllort ( 442574 ) on Thursday April 19, 2001 @12:00PM (#278966) Homepage Journal
    "I wonder if it'll be cheap enough for home use. :-)"

    Considering you can put 100Gbps through 400kilomters on one strand of existing optical fiber, you're gonna have a completely fucked up home if you need more bandwidth than that.

    That said, the article claims that this will "revolutionize the telecommunications industry" because it allows for longer-haul fibers without inline optical amplifiers.

    That might be true, if we were using the existing fiber we have. But look at the people selling low-power in-line optical amplifiers - namely Corvis. Nobody's buying their shit. We have millions of miles of "dark fiber" in America - fiber that no one is leasing. In addition, no one is using the "long haul" capability provided by the new generation of companies such as Corvis - mainly because policing these long fibers for a break is expensive, in addition to the fact that in a store-and-forward network topology (like IP) you have to route at each hop, so there's no reason to go that far.

    The only successful applications of long-haul fiberoptic technologies so far have been underwater trans-oceanic lines. and this technology may help with that. But revolutionize the telecommunications industry? FUD.

    What would revolutionize the telco industry would be if Corporate America actually had applications they wanted to buy bandwidth for, and started doing it. Look at all the solid equipment providers with tanked stocks: lucent, cisco - the bandwidth explosion hasn't happened.

    sigh. fud.
  • Hmmm...how do you think the light from the sun gets to the earth? Of course light can travel through a vaccuum, that's the beauty of Electro-magnetic waves. Only mechanical waves (such as sound, need a medium), light plays by a different set of rules.
  • This doesn't fit what IMHO is the usual definition of teleportation (i.e. near-instantaneous transport of material objects) This is just using electric current to push an atom thru a tube. Even if (big if) you could do it with large objects (i.e. whole humans), the acceleration (and also the deceleration) would squish you into a jelly or buttery substance (apologies to PBJ eaters). One really has to deconstitute the object at the start end, and send the info about the matter (metamatter??), not necessarily the matter itself, to the other end. Then you still have the problem of reconstituting said object at the other end, no mean trick. Read Niven, he has a good long article on teleportation in All the Myriad Ways (its a book, basically lots of bits of paper stuc together and no hyperlinks).
  • Current splicing technology involves rotating fibers to align the splice. (As in
  • We cant make a vacuum! It is impossible to make a vacuum. There is no way today that we can possibly pump every particle from inside something, besides, if we could, how could it sustain itself without collapsing from the pressure? We can however make reasonable facsimilies of vacuums, but still it is very hard to make these and keep them from collapsing.

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