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The Internet Technology Hardware

Good News From The High-Speed Networking Front 175

Posted by timothy from the two-scoops-of-bits dept.
Degrees writes "Over at Small Times there is an article about two Danish companies that want to make deploying fiber optic lines easier with MEMS-based packaging technology. (MEMS is Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems - described here). Also mentioned is that the big three U.S. telcos are working on fiber to the home plans." And punkmac points to this eWeek article which begins "An Intel Corp. backed startup, SolarFlare Communications Inc. said Monday that it has developed a working prototype of a chip that will permit 10G-bps communications over standard CAT5e copper wiring. SolarFlare's chip will be used as evidence that 10G-bit over copper can be done, in anticipation of a draft IEEE standard to be developed later this year."
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Good News From The High-Speed Networking Front More

Good News From The High-Speed Networking Front

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  • Damnit (Score:3, Funny)

    by iibbmm ( 723967 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:43PM (#8658837)
    Still not fast enough to beam my body from my bedroom to the office to hooters to the office to the bedroom.. all the while allowing at least marginal performance from the Vonage piggyback.
    • Still not fast enough to beam my body from my bedroom to the office to hooters to the office to the bedroom. piggyback.

      I think what you're looking for is a very large version of those sucking tube things at the bank drive through. That should get the job done.

      Good luck getting it approved though, I tried to get one put in at my college so I wouldn't have to walk outside in the winter. They told me no and made up some crap about 'fiscal responsibility.'

  • this and turbocode (Score:1, Informative)

    by Jotaigna ( 749859 )
    will boost the communications businness heaps on 2004 since with no big investment we get a performance upgrade. Way to go folks. and the rest of our should pay attention to the stock market.

  • Sign me up! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:45PM (#8658859)
    But only as long as it's nothing to do with a TELCO. I'm extremely happy with the QOS I get from RR and was VERY PISSED as the LACK OF QOS I got with DSL..

    • Re:Sign me up! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You must be doing it wrong then. My cable modem disconnected for hours several times per week, usually on Fridays when a technician couldn't be dispatched until Monday or Tuesday. They (Charter) sent out several guys to try to fix it, and always made excuses that it was our fault/problem (plus tried to bill us for the trip to boot, even though we weren't getting what we paid for). We switched to DSL, and SBC made NO excuses. They simply provided us with a rock solid, reliable connection that hasn't gone
      • I guess that it really depends upon your carrier, because we have had cable here in Oregon through AT&T, and then Comcast that has been down only once that I can remember. The service was quick and it worked. We are much happier with our cable connection than with the earthlink dial-up that we had earlier.
      • I had problems like this, and it all turned out to be because there was a turf war going on between my local cable company, and the satellite TV company that had wired my apartment building. They were fighting over who got to do what on the box outside, and so no-one was doing a good job.

        Every time the wind changed something in the box would move, and I would lose my connection. After 3 weeks of this (working from home) I switched to DSL and was very happy.

    • Re:Sign me up! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:55PM (#8658983)
      That's funny, I'm quite pleased with the SLA I have with Worldcom, and quite turned off by the lack of SLA with any non telco options.

      There's a difference between DSL and shitty DSL. Pick a company that *guarantees* the quality.

      Now, if this stuff they're planning involves any encapsulation like PPPoE, or any "value added" services beyond a gateway and a block of static IP addresses, they can keep it, but I'd much prefer the phone company over the cable company any day otherwise. It's a lesser of two evils thing. When the phone company sells you something, you get what they sold you. Cable companies have a habit of changing the service you signed up for on a whim, and regularly. That combined the willingness to take responsibilty for problems (provided you pay for the right agreements) makes the phone company a no-brainer choice between those two options.

      • Re:Sign me up! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Inuchance ( 559556 )
        True, but the last couple random decisions @Home/ATTBI/Comcast/whatever made were pretty good, I think. A while back, they increased the upstream from 0.13 Mbps to 0.26 Mbps (Numbers obtained directly from my modem's configuration pages), and recently from 1.8 Mbps downstream to 3.2 Mbps.

        Then again, I have had some troubles with my modem, mostly outage related. For example, the @Home to ATTBI transition lasted about half a week IIRC, and so my modem was down that entire time. Also, every now and then,

  • Faster downloads!!! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sweet!!!!

    More porn at the speed of light and more carpel tunnel syndrome claims at your local hospital!!!

  • Bandwidth available?? (Score:4, Informative)

    by DRUNK_BEAR ( 645868 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:47PM (#8658890)
    Getting ?fiber to the home? ? telecom?s long-sought solution to the problem of directly delivering high-quality and high-speed video may cause some more problems. Alright, this would be able to bring high bandwidth lines to homes, but how about backbones? The current technologies are still pretty much limited at 40Gb/s for one single fiber. And since all-optical networks are still developing, I believe it may still be a while before we can profit from this.
    • There is so much dark fiber in the ground right now leftover from telecom bust, that we'll be lighting it up for years to come before we run out of it.
      • Most of this so-called plentiful dark fiber is long-haul stuff, though (cross-country, major-city-to-major-city).
        • I know that, I was replying to the original poster's remark regarding the backbones. It still costs too much money to install fiber to each home. Hopefully this is just the beginning of a series of innovations making fibre-to-the-home a much more feasible option.
          • Actually, this isn't quite true.

            The real issue is that there isn't a 'killer app' for the home that would justify fiber to the home.

            My ex-company has been trying for years to get investors to realize that putting HDTV to the home over IP is really the only way to go. This is the only 'killer app' in the near term that I can see. This company even had the digital rights figured out with studio contracts to prove it.

            As you may know, coax and satellite won't handle a full channel lineup with HDTV. And, w
      • But you have to ask yourself why the fiber is dark. A lot of it is because it is in areas where it isn't useful/needed.

        Sure, it'd be cool if there were a terabit of dark fiber that could open up better networking to Bucksnort, TN (pop. ~30), but it would hardly be useful to light it.... ;-)

    • "The current technologies are still pretty much limited at 40Gb/s for one single fiber."

      That's true, so then you deploy DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) to multiplex 50 or 100 (or more) wavelengths of light, each carrying 10 or 40 Gb/s in traffic.

      Add to that all the dark (unused) fiber deployed in long haul terrestrial networks in the U.S. and we have a lot of backbone fiber capacity. Typical fiber counts on the long-haul cables deployed in the late 1990s were 144 to 288 fibers or more.

    • Re:Bandwidth available?? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No, the distance limit cited is 100 meters. This is not 10G to your house from the CO over copper. It's 10G from your L2 switch in the closet to your other switch in the office. "Over copper" does not mean "last mile access".

      current technologies are still pretty much limited at 40Gb/s for one single fiber

      Well, no. Here's [nortelnetworks.com] a typical commercial 800 Gbps-per-fiber long-haul DWDM product (80 wavelengths x 10 Gbps/wavelength):

      This one [cisco.com] supports 120 10Gbps channels, designed for 160 at 50 GHz spacing.

      OC-

  • 10Gbps over Cat5e (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ray Radlein ( 711289 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:48PM (#8658898) Homepage
    Obviously, this ain't coming to the home for a few more years (heck, Gigabit switches are only just now getting home-use priced), but it'll sure be nice to not have to re-pull all that Cat5e cabling we ran all over our house, especially since we'll probably be in our fifties by then.

    At that type of transfer speed, the network should effectively vanish completely, even if we're streaming HD video to or from the downstairs entertainment center (I'm assuming that the internal bus bandwidths in the computers will have improved proportionally as well by then).

    • (heck, Gigabit switches are only just now getting home-use priced)

      I agree, we won't see them for awhile. But I always cheer the newest and greatest being released, because that means whatever used to be the newest and greatest (Gigabit switches in this case) will experience a nice price drop. The product hasn't lost any value. In fact, it probably getting better. But since it isn't the best you can get any more it doesn't have the extra price hop that comes with top-of-the-line status.
    • Anyone know what the theoretical speed limit of copper cable is? 10Gbs seems faster than copper can go to me.
      • Anyone know what the theoretical speed limit of copper cable is?

        Not sure, but . . .

        10Gbs seems faster than copper can go to me.

        . . . it likely won't be on a single cable. For example, Gigabit Ethernet on Cat5 uses four pairs and PAM5 signalling [techfest.com] to acheive 1 Gb/s.

      • Anyone know what the theoretical speed limit of copper cable is? 10Gbs seems faster than copper can go to me.

        It's bound by the same laws of physics as fiber or air, and the answer is a definite "well, that depends". Read up on Shannon's Law [google.com].

        • The problem is that the maximum bandwidth of Cat5e is 350MHz for cable that actually reaches the spec (many don't, even if labeled as Cat5e). This means that the noise floor for sending 10Gbps has to be so astronomically low as to be unobtainable in many real world situation, not to mention that the bit time will be so small that you won't be able to run at 100m even if the S/N ration is high enough. So we will be back to the situation we were in with the origional GigE over copper spec (1000Base-CX), runs

      • Re:10Gbps over Cat5e (Score:3, Informative)

        by stecoop ( 759508 )
        Remeber that Network lines (CAT) are in paris of 4. So the speed of 10gbs is over 4 cables 2.5gbs each. I know that RG6 operates at 2200 MgHz. We have a room to grow from Cat5e (350 MgHz).
        Well' get there - Looking forward to Cat6 and Cat7. Here is the current rating for network lines:
        CAT-3 = Category 3, 3 pair 24 ga. solid wire - up to 16Mhz (No twist)
        CAT-5 = Category 5, 4 pair 24 ga. solid wire - up to 200Mbps. (avg. 13 twists per foot)
        CAT-5e = Enhanced Category 5, 4 pair 24 ga. solid wire - up t
        • 10 Gbps over copper is here. Cisco will have a xenpak out by the end of the month for $600. It does not use Cat5 or Cat6, it uses infiniband cable. According to:
          http://www.intel.com/design/network/products / optic al/serdes/txn17431.htm
          It is a "4X (8-signal pair) electrical connector. The connector is a shielded structure for low cross-talk"

          Of course you need something to plug the xenpak into, and that is where the money will be spent. Cisco is also releasing a 16 port 10/100/1000 switch with one slot for a

      • Re:10Gbps over Cat5e (Score:5, Informative)

        by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:51PM (#8659664) Journal
        Anyone know what the theoretical speed limit of copper cable is? 10Gbs seems faster than copper can go to me.

        Depends on its length, thickness, surrounding dilectric, shieling/balance/discontinuities, and the speed of the carrier/modulation. (For any given design of wire it's mainly the length.)

        Copper, not being a superconductor, has resistance. The resistance combines with the stray capacatance between the conductors to form a distributed RC low-pass filter/delay line, which attenuates and delays higher frequencies more than lower frequencies - progressively more as the wire gets longer.

        It gets even worse for REALLY high frequencies, because they create eddy currents in the copper that impede the penetration of current into the conductor, restricting the current to the outer part of the conductor (the "skin effect") and thus raising the effective resistance and exaggerating the frequency-selective attenuation.

        This selective attenuation and delay weakens the signal - more at high frequencies than at low. As the wire gets longer the signal gets weaker and competing noise pickup gets stronger, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio and thus the amount of signal that can be carried.

        But the selective attenuation and delay also distorts the waveform, creating "intersymbol interference" (stored charge from previous bits affecting the latest bit). This can be compensated for.

        Current technology using SERDESes (fast serial bit streams), with some compensation for the selective attenuation (both preemphasis at the transmitter and compensation at the receiver), can get 3 Gbps through about a yard of printed circuit, or several yards of wire. More advanced devices (using tricks like four-level encoding to get two bits per modulation perios and feedback from the receiver to the transmitter by a return path) can go faster and a bit farther. (A transciever using all four pair of a Cat-5e, as of last year, could get gigabit ethernet across 30 meters.)

        Frequency-domain techniques (like ADSL) can do still better. And coding schemes have been developed that get within 50% (turbo codes) or even 90%+ of the Shannon limit bit rate.

        But what IS the shannon limit bit rate: It depends on a LOT of things. The biggest are:
        - Length of the wire.
        - Thickness of the wire.
        - Quality of the dilectric around the wire.
        - Interference coupled into the wire (i.e. how many other wires are in that bundle, what signals they're carrying, {for twisted pair} how tight the twists are and how they vary from conductor to conductor), how hot the wire is, etc.

        You should be able to get gigabit rates to a box on your block with copper pair, with a small router there and fiber to the rest of the net. (This is "fiber to the curb".) For 10G or beyond you'll probably need CO-AX (ala cable TV) or fiber from the curb box as well - otherwise the curb boxes would need to be so close together that they get too costly - and you might as well have strung fiber from the one-per-neighborhood boxes.

        (Maybe they'll push it a little farther. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Remeber that, in the US at least, you've typically got Cat-3 to the "curb" box which serves no more than 100 homes. If you're going to spring the bux dig it up and string 5e or 6 you might as well string some fiber. Later that can easily be upgraded to Tbits and beyond by transciever changes at the ends.)
    • Until the pipes coming into the homes are a lot faster (i.e. fiber-to-the-home, or fiber-to-the-neighbourhood), most consumers will not have a use even for 1Gbps Ethernet.
      • Until the pipes coming into the homes are a lot faster (i.e. fiber-to-the-home, or fiber-to-the-neighbourhood), most consumers will not have a use even for 1Gbps Ethernet.

        Well, sometimes when I'm bored I send large files back and forth between computers on my home network. And I'm always looking for ways to be more efficient...
        • when I have a large file to move to different computers in my home network, I always first create a tracker for local use, and then copy it to all my computers.. the best thing is the decreased load on the original PC!
          you should see my share ratios! it's just ever so much more efficient!

    • Re:10Gbps over Cat5e (Score:3, Informative)

      by -tji ( 139690 )
      Okay, let me nit-pick the example on your otherwise correct statement..

      > even if we're streaming HD video to or from the downstairs entertainment center

      I'm currently streaming HD video from my entertainment center to/from my 450MHz G4 Cube using 100Mb Ethernet and el-cheapo $30 switches.

      Broadcast HD video is an approximately 20Mbps MPEG2 stream. So, it is not a burden on even modest hardware. Other HD formats, like cable, satellite, and HD-DVD might be a bit faster in the future - like maybe 40Mb
      • I'm currently streaming HD video from my entertainment center to/from my 450MHz G4 Cube using 100Mb Ethernet and el-cheapo $30 switches.

        Broadcast HD video is an approximately 20Mbps MPEG2 stream. So, it is not a burden on even modest hardware. Other HD formats, like cable, satellite, and HD-DVD might be a bit faster in the future - like maybe 40Mbps. But, it won't go much beyond that.

        I agree that a good 100Mbps network should be able to handle it -- that's what we have now, with our current cheap-swit
    • You seem to be forgetting we only get under 10mb/s (average) to the home. There's a huge gap between 10mb/s and 10,000mb/s, so they don't have to adopt the top speed to make it interesting for customers - just a small increase (say, up to 20mb/s) would be a phenomenal service to offer. They can then use the 10gb/s links to feed the smaller ones, keeping everyone happy.

  • Cool but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DR SoB ( 749180 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:48PM (#8658902) Journal
    "SolarFlare's chip will be used as evidence that 10G-bit over copper can be done, in anticipation of a draft IEEE standard to be developed later this year." "

    Copper breaks down to easy, picks up to much interference, and is no good maintaining the speed over longer distances. They should concentrate on new technology instead of constantly trying to upgrade the old, now matter how much work you put into a '68 Mustang, it's always going to weigh a ton...

    • Re:Cool but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mystery_bowler ( 472698 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:53PM (#8658957) Homepage
      Yes, but for a telecom, re-wiring is a pretty heavy investment. Depending on what state they are operating in there are different requirements for using unionized labor, there's literally tons of mechanical equipment involved, etc.

      I'm not sure where the point of diminishing returns is, but it's still quite important that someone concentrate on taking the utmost advantage of copper since a lot of people are going to be stuck with it for a while.
    • Agreed.

      The way to go is wireless and that's that. In Michigan, small wireless ISPs such as Speednet [speednetllc.com] are really taking off.

      ...if we get some free peer2peer networks up and running around here, then we'll be talkin'...

      • Re:Cool but... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Garak ( 100517 )
        Wireless is fine if your only serving a few customers but once you get over a certain point it becomes very slow.

        Wireless is open air is basicly the same thing as cable modems. There is only so much useable bandwidth in the spectrum. Cablemodems are atleast limited to a coax, while wireless can interfear with everything and everything can interfear with it.

        Fiber to the home is a long ways off, we need better faster backbones yet. Cable modems and DSL can go faster than the 1mBit that most are capped off a

      • The way to go is wireless and that's that

        There are things that wireless is great for, but they basically come down to an "is it a pain or impossible to run wire here instead" decision. Mass broadcast is a possible other reason. Running a wire to most people's houses is pretty easy - you probably already have electricity, phone, gas, water, sewage, etc. etc. It's about time the internet connection was treated the same as any other utility.

        The frequency spectrum is a finite resource (cf: Shannon), we ough

    • Re:Cool but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:12PM (#8659186)
      Copper breaks down to easy, picks up to much interference, and is no good maintaining the speed over longer distances. They should concentrate on new technology instead of constantly trying to upgrade the old

      It's funny but, that's what people said when networking vendors:

      Increased modem speeds each time from 300bps to 56Kbps.
      Introduced xDSL and then increased its speed.
      Moved Token-Ring from 4Mbps to 16Mbps and then 100Mbps.
      Move ethernet from 10Mbps to 100 Mbps to 1Gbps.
      • Introduced xDSL and then increased its speed.

        Did they? which DSL did they increase?
        AFAIK ASDL is still limited to 7Mbit. Dunno much about what's going on with SDSL though.
    • The new technolgy (i.e. fiber) is already developed, and they're designing kludges like 10Gbps over copper at the same time. Buy whichever one you want.

  • Very cool (Score:2, Funny)

    by Kushy ( 225928 )
    Now I can transfer gigs of p0rn from my server in my home office to my laptop in my bedroom quicker, for when it is really needed.

    • You know, that's the real selling point of those wifi equipped laptops: You can stream porn from your server to the toilet even if your wife is home.

      Right? ;-)

  • Helps Apps (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doesn't_Comment_Code ( 692510 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:51PM (#8658935)
    There are a ton of applications out there (some good, some bad) that require high band width to operate. I'm personally intersted in piping virtual reality environments to other computers over the internet. But most of these new ideas never come to full fruition because few people have high bandwidth.

    When I make a webpage, I make it for someone with dialup so everyone can see it. I even have dialup.

    I know many people are changing to DSL/Cable. But the adoption of new bandwidth-hungry applications is really lagging because most people can't handle them.

    We would sure get a big boost if we could impliment much higher speeds over already existing infrastructure. That would allow a lot of applications that are already out there to be used.
    • My question is when are upstream speeds going to go up?
    • The "killer app" for many FTTH projects is -- get this -- responsive, locally-based, reliable service.

      U.S. municipal power utilities are currently building FTTH networks to serve 100,000s of customers.

      Most of these are built in small towns that have endured wretched service from their incumbent telephone and cable TV incumbents. Local residents want an alternative and turn to local government.

      For a decade, small towns have successfully built and operated cable TV systems using HFC (hybrid fiber coa
  • Will you still be blocking port 80 so I can't run my own server?
    • easy enough to get around, set your http server to use a different port.

      I use 8124, and its simple enough to use with DNS, just tell your domain name provider to use http://12.34.56.78:8124 instead of just http://12.34.56.78

      i guess that keeps some bots from visiting you, but oh well, and in my case i dont necessarily want them...

      cheers
      • The Terms of Service still stipulate you cannot run servers. You can be disconnected at any time they feel like it. Sure, they haven't been Nazis this year. What about next year? However much I HATE SBC, their TOS are better. Unfortunately, in my zipcode, RR and SBC are my only options.

        -l

  • Great! Now my neighbors... (Score:3, Funny)

    by flinxmeister ( 601654 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:52PM (#8658939) Homepage
    Great! Now my neighbors can flood the first hop router with adware and Paris Hilton DIVX' at fiber speeds!

    Might as well dial up.
  • The limmit used to br 56kbs for our modems
    then came isdn and got us up to 128kbps
    then came adsl and got us up to several MegaBits per second. all on the same old phone lines.

    This latest isn't the same phone lines
    but it is still copper wiring and find this very impressive.

    however I think it is likely to be a while before
    we need this kind of bandwidth.
    even though a while back I had a need to send an
    uncompressed video stream and 100Mbps was not enough.

    Me.
    • This latest isn't the same phone lines but it is still copper wiring and find this very impressive.

      But if you have to dig up the yard or string a new overhead wire, why the HELL would you string COPPER? You can string glass for the same price and get data rates so far beyond ANYTHING you can push through a couple hundred feet of copper that there's just no comparison.

      "Downloading the (whole) internet" would potentially be more than a marketing joke.
  • Yes! I've been having problems with regularity at home lately!

    What!! This is not what the poster meant! WTF do you mean!!! I'm stopped up here! Too much Atkins', ya know!!
    Hey! Help me here!!!

  • EETimes article with more technical details (Score:5, Informative)

    by pm ( 11079 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:53PM (#8658948)
    The EETimes carried this same story with more technical details and a few criticisms as a cover story in the week's paper edition. It's also available online here [eetimes.com] at the EEtimes website.

  • traditional simpsons quote (Score:4, Funny)

    by AnonymousCowheart ( 646429 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:54PM (#8658961)
    Nerd 1: "Now you can download porn 500 times faster"
    Marge: "Does anyone need that much porn?"
    Homer: (drooling) "aghghghghghgh 500 times faster"

  • This is a mixed blessing. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blcamp ( 211756 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:56PM (#8658990) Homepage

    I'm happy at the prospect of fatter pipes, but... ...will it mean improved QOS for my connection? ...will it mean more spam, pr0n, worms, et al? ...will it mean more transparent (less detectable) spyware stealing my bandwidth? ...will it mean I really pay less, long-term, for my fatter pipe... or will it simply make it cheaper for the bandwidth to be delivered, thus providing only a better margin for my ISP? ...will it mean EVERYONE will bombard each other with more information overload, thus precipitating network brown- and black-outs? ...will it lead to another dot-com goldrush and flame-out?

    I wish I had a time machine...


    • As has been the case for a long, long time, the cabling isn't going to be the limitting factor, it'll be the routing.

      Sure, we can wire up a 300-house neighborhood with 100 mbit fiber connections. But there's a potential for 30 gigabits/second of traffic in the pathlological case. Switching 30 gigabits/second can be done, but routing 30 gigabits is another story - and it'll have to be routed several times to get it along and out of your network.

      Let's say that a medium-sized city with 100,000 hom
    • How many of those things are currently capped by your bandwidth? Yes, there is a difference in how much evil some types of malware can do between broadband (as it exists now) and dialup. However, are you aware of anyone getting more spam, installing worse trojans, or suffering from more "information overload" in the wake of, say, comcast's recent doubling of their downstream residential bandwidth?

      No.

      People already have more bandwidth than they can fully utilize on an individual basis. Faster download

  • This keeps getting rehashed. (Score:5, Informative)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:04PM (#8659101)
    10Gbps over copper was done, over limited distances, by Nortel three years ago. It's not new. In fact they are working with 40Gbps now, though not over copper, yet.

    The technology ofr literally blistering speed is already available and hass been for some time. Additionally, it is not that expessive, relatively speaking, to offer speed that are significantly higher than todays broadband offerings. But, people keep bringing up the fibre to the home story and this is where the whole thing falls apart.

    While new developments may indeed get fibre to the home but, no provider is going to "rewire". If they already have copper in the ground they are not going to upgrade. Why? Because of the cost.

    Providers are already getting top dollar providing anything from 128Kbps (sometimes less) to 2Mbps. There is no incentive for them to make the massive capital outlay needed to bury fibre on routes that are already served by copper. It is unlikely that their customers will pay $100 per month versus the $50 that the providers already get for broadband so, there is no real demand to motivate the providers. Even new services like video on demand work adequately well over copper to negate the need for revamping the infrastructure.

    No, providers will continue to offer the same services over their copper infrastructure and when things become saturated they will start to penalize people that use it the most. This is already happening with Comcast and AT&T.

    • Actually, I've seen some rewiring. Our local phone company hasn't laid copper in a very long time. There are very large parts of the city that can't get DSL precisely because the only copper is from their house to the street's phone box, from which point it's all fiber.

      And while you're accusing ComCast, I spent some time last summer planting and grooming the most amazingly beautiful park strip. Then ComCast came in and re-cabled the entire neighborhood to use fiber instead of copper, digging up my
    • No incentive? What about the company that does it, and offers it for $50 a month, and then steals ALL of the other companies subscribers?

      You underestimate corporate greed; any opportunity to steal subscribers from other companies will be taken as soon as it becomes viable.
  • When I hear Fibre optics network a home it is just too good to be true. I can't imagine U.S. EVER getting 100mbits nevermind 1000.

    I have heard a rumor that it's mainly to slow piracy down. Anyone know if that's complete BS?

    • Re:Too good 2 be true (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NerveGas ( 168686 )

      You have to be careful with that. Remember, most homes already have a connection that could make 100 mbit look like child's play: A cable television connection. There's an awfully large amount of bandwidth there, it's just used for something other than data.

      Getting a 100 (or 1000) mbit connection into your home doesn't mean that you'll get a 100-mbit connection to the Internet. It just means that you *can* get whatever connection to the Internet you want, and that you can also get phone, video, a

  • Feasible, but where's the market? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fringe ( 6096 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:07PM (#8659141)
    Yeah, they've shown that they can get much more bandwidth out of our wires. The bounds of Moores Law and related "theoretical limits" fall every few years. But the problem with this particular solution is that we have a huge entrenched market and severe commodity pressure on broadband already.

    Maybe a new killer app will come along, but what companies are STILL rich from laying the old copper or even optic pipes? Most of them got sold off at a huge loss. Who made bucks beaucoup off of VoIP? It's heavily used, even when you don't know it, but that's the point - it became a commodity and you never even know you're using it.
    This is probably going to suffer the same problem - it requires an end-user actually pay some attention, install new hardware (not that it's a big deal, but it is for most people) and for an increase that they currently won't care about. It's a bigger win for the trunks, but I bet early adopters will wind up with more arrows in their backs.
    • Just because a particular technology *didn't* make money in the large scale doesn't mean that it doesn't for other companies. To use your example of VoIP, there are a number of companies making a good living at it. They're just not approaching it the same way the failed companies did.

      The largest problem is that investors want companies to jump on bandwagons - to do what they thing everyone else is doing, instead of doing what will actually make sense.

      If fourteen companies are spending $50 million each c

  • "overclocking" Cat5 (Score:3, Informative)

    by mrg123 ( 585233 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:14PM (#8659215)

    Check out this eetimes article for a little more detail than the article in eWeek:

    http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?article ID=18401022

    Understandably, the companies that manufacture the cable aren't enthusiastic about SolarFlare's technology, as they would prefer that everyone rewire with Cat6 or better to do 10Gig. They claim that SolarFlare is "overclocking" the cable (my own words), and that some installed Cat5 will work at 10 Gig and some won't. Cat5 is tested to 100 MHz; SolarFlare claims they can do 10G with 350 to 400 MHz of bandwidth and that Cat5 really supports this bandwidth. The cable manufacturers just need to test their Cat5 to this higher frequency.

  • Max cable length between nodes: 17 inches.

  • see also wireless data-transfer world record (Score:3, Informative)

    by i4u ( 234028 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:27PM (#8659338) Homepage
    320mbps on wireless UWB [i4u.com]

  • Great.. (Score:1, Funny)

    by thebra ( 707939 )
    now the RIAA can find me faster.
  • infrastructure that may still be outdated. My Mom lives in rural FL and can't get DSL because of the type of loop she's on. Yet, she's well within range of the nearest switch. :/ Those that need a solution are in rural areas (okay, so arguably does my Mom need 10G?) but they are also least populated.

  • Shut up about the last mile! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:35PM (#8659445) Homepage
    This article is about Cat5 cable. The last mile does not use Cat5 cable, so this article has nothing to do with getting a faster connection into your house. Let's mod all the "gee, I can download pr0n faster" comments as offtopic and get on with the real discussion about whether our processors are fast enough to drive 10Gbps.
  • Consumer routers and much less expensive then say a Cisco series router. Most home networks have routers that handle a few hundred Mbit/sec. Consequently, the network speed could not reach 10GB from the incoming WAN. So what's the point when you don't have $2000 to spend on a router to take advantage of all that speed?

  • Here is a thought (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MadWicKdWire ( 734140 ) *
    I seem to have a hard time thinking about this. Lets say you DO get this uber phat pipe of 1gb or even 10gb. What data are you going to fill the pipe up with even if you can use it to 100%? The hard drive speeds of today can't even keep up with 1gb ethernet. Unless you are caching all the porn you can download in RAM, I doubt your computer will have the ability to actually save all the data you are downloading at that rate. Has anybody even thought about this yet?
  • what I would really like, and believe me it would totally be kickarse is:

    laser beams (pinky to the mouth)

    laser hubs on every street corner, and a laser receivers/emitters on top of every building, connecting to the hub and to other receivers/emitters.

    barring heavy fog or heavy precipitation, of course... though I remember reading somewhere IR gets through fog pretty easily.
  • As the distance going from 100mbit to 1gbit over copper dropped, how is the distance going to 10gbit over copper going to be affected. If the distance is going to be lessened it doesnt seem very practical.
  • But it doesn't matter how great it is if your like me and simple can't afford it. All these graet gains in networking won't mean jack for the market unless it makes broadband chaper. Simple as that.
  • With the abundance of bandwidth available on cable, I don't think we'll need to switch to fiber to the home any time soon. This may be interesting as a replacement for T1 Lines to businesses and such, but nobody is going to pay the huge expense of running fiber to a neighborhood for at least another 5 years.

    There are other significant expenses apart from packaging related to making fiber-optic NICs compatible with long-haul or telecom systems. It's great that packaging may get cheaper, but that's only pa

  • Jumbo frames? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by spinkham ( 56603 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @03:54PM (#8660407)
    Perhaps in the upcoming standarization they will finally switch to so called "jumbo frames", aka raise the maximum amount of data that can be sent in one chunk. As the singaling rate has gone up from 10Mb-1Gb, there has been a 100x increase in signaling rate and therefore a 100x decrease in the amount of time it takes one packet to cross the network. Since we are still using the same paltry sizes, cpu usage goes way up and throughput is somewhat capped. Switching to a larger frame size would allow higher throughput and lower CPU utilization. Many networking vendors have started adding support for larger frame sizes into their products for these reasons, but being added to the official standard would greatly increase the adoption of such jumbo frames.
    For more info, see:
    http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/jumbo.html [wareonearth.com]
    http://www.psc.edu/~mathis/MTU/ [psc.edu]
    http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/0105tolly. htm [nwfusion.com]

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