Bell Labs Break Record With 31Tbps Via a Single 7200km Optical Fibre 125
Mark.JUK writes "Alcatel-Lucent's research and development division, Bell Labs, has successfully broken yet another record after it used 155 lasers (each operating at different frequencies and carrying 200Gbps of data over a 50GHz frequency grid) and an enhanced version of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) to send information at a staggering speed of 31 Terabits per second over a single 7200km long optical fibre cable. Previous experiments have been faster but only over shorter distances or by using a different type of fibre optic cable entirely."
Too bad (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad the bandwidth cap is only 1 GB per month.
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I think you east coasters need to learn what uncapped means.
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
'Uncapped' means 'there is a monthly limit, but we won't tell you what it is. And we call it a fair usage policy.'
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For consumers, capping typically refers to limits on the total transmitted and/or throttling applied, not to the channel bandwidth. It's perfectly reasonable to have a ceiling on the channel bandwidth for the service as advertised, and still call the service uncapped, so long as you don't artificially limit the consumer use of that advertised bandwidth and also make reasonable efforts to provide it.
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You are joking, but this is exactly how NBN in Australia works. Nationwide fiber network .. with data caps on INTERNAL traffic.
This is what internet is made of (Score:4, Insightful)
Not wifi, wimax, 3g, 4g, ethernet, satellite, etc.
All those tecnologies are just "last-mile" ways to bring data from this big pipes to the users. Internet is made of optical fibre.
Wrong (Score:1)
Everyone knows the internet is a series of tubes.
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of course it's a series of tubes, tubes with optical fibres running through them...
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Everyone knows the internet is a series of tubes.
You mean it's not a big truck?
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... small box... blinking led on top... sits on top of Big Ben...
So... the TARDIS?
COOL
Postscript: I've tried getting into that I.T. Crowd show, but it doesn't seem to be able to hold my attention.
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Last decade called and want their post back, this decade fiber is your last mile. The rest is just for in-house distribution or on the go.
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I work for an ISP. The vast majority of homes are still fed by copper/coax for the last mile. Fiber's expensive to install and it will be at least 10 to 20 years before it replaces significant portions of the copper out there.
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Here in Norway we're up to 20% last year, it increases by about 3% per year (11->14->17->20) and all major rollouts (ex-DSL, ex-cable, ex-power companies) are doing fiber for new apartment buildings or housing areas. We're expecting major investments in fiber over the next years as the copper network has officially been declared a phase-out technology to be shut down in central areas by end of 2017 (first tiny test county has already shut down, it's now all fiber + mobile), it'll still exist as a l
Wonderful! (Score:3, Funny)
Wonderful! Now my porn collection will download in mere MINUTES!
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Your porn collection is obviously inadequate and pathetic.
The question is (Score:4, Insightful)
...whether a special type of cable was used, or whether just fitting different transmitters and receivers at each end of the cable will do the job without the need for putting down an entirely new fibre optic cable?
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They used old Cat-3 cable they found in the basement.
How far is 7200 KM? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's over 4 million smoots!
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and how do they make single fiber optic cables 7200 kilometers long? seems impossible
obligatory NSA tie-in (Score:5, Funny)
For your "Staggering stat of the day" (Score:4, Interesting)
The switching is so dense and so fast, that the 7200km of cable has *in flight* 146 gigabytes of information at any given time. You can back up your typical "150GB" (143GB actual) OS hard drive and user data, and be done sending it before it starts reaching the other end (if you could buffer it to send that fast, naturally). Is that some crazy shit or what?
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The switching is so dense and so fast, that the 7200km of cable has *in flight* 146 gigabytes of information at any given time. You can back up your typical "150GB" (143GB actual) OS hard drive and user data, and be done sending it before it starts reaching the other end (if you could buffer it to send that fast, naturally). Is that some crazy shit or what?
Now that. That is impressive. It reminds me of those old mercury delay lines.
Re:For your "Staggering stat of the day" (Score:4, Interesting)
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I can't see light in an old system being much slower, light is light right. If the fiber is fatter I guess it bounces more, taking a longer path.
Data speed has of course improved, though, but that isn't strictly related. (speed of light affects the latency across the cable, whereas the data speed is all about modulation of the light).
So light is 300,000km/s, I think they usually say speed in fiber is about 2/3rds.. so 200,000km/s... passing through 5km of cable in 25uS... which is fast, but ages in modern c
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Reminds me of my first day (literally) on the job, out of school (EE/CE).
Tech lead held up a one-foot segment of wire (about 30cm for you metric-minded folks).
"Know what this is?"
"Yeah, a piece of wire."
"Yes, but it's also memory. This holds one bit." Then he held up a longer piece and said "And this holds a byte." Then he went on to explain (really, remind me) about propagation times, eye diagrams, etc....
The TRUE test (Score:2)
Units should probably be TerraBit / Sec / Km.
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Your station wagon's bandwidth isn't even in the ballpark. Even if you use those super experimental blu-rays that hold 1TB each you aren't even getting close to the bandwidth of this link.
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If we make it SD cards, it's about 64 GB per gram. That's 500*1000*64 GB or 32 million Gigabytes. That works out to the equivilent of a 494 gigabit link, so yeah, even if we use a more realistic speed of 100km/h, we're still talking 30 times faster. Fill a tractor trailer would be faster though and a container ship full of SD cards is much, much faster.
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But you still have to read them off on USB2 card readers.
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Ironically, I just installed a USB3 card reader in my tower yesterday...
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So how many station wagons would that be. Put it in terms we understand like "libraries of congress" storage, staion wagons of dvds for bandwith.
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Worth checking: 16g/disc = 31,250 discs per 500kg payload. at 50GB/disc, that's 1562 TB or 12,500Tb/per payload. At 50km/hr, or 0.014km/s, I get 174 Tb-km/s
So 31 Tb/s over 7200km is 223,200 Tb-km/s
It looks rather biased in favor of the fiberoptic line. Moreso since stationwagons have particularly bad speeds when operated under water.
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Optical media is less data dense than using magnetic disks or even SD cards. A micro SD card can hold more space than a blu-ray disk.
On reading the headline... (Score:2)
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I can has adapter card? (Score:1)
Tap (Score:3)
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Its built into each of the amplifiers stretched along the cable every 100km.
super duper hyper resolution video (Score:2)
Now we can get pr0n in 302976 x 170424 video at 25 fps. It will have to be uncompressed as I don't think we have anything that can compress it that fast.
No repeaters (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the first time that transoceanic cables can be made that don't need repeaters. The speed is nice, but no repeaters mean that the cable will be a lot cheaper to build and has far fewer parts that can fail. It also won't be enveloped in an electric field that attracts sharks. And finally, it becomes a lot easier to upgrade the cable later: you only need to install new equipment at either end, and don't have to worry about the repeaters being compatible with the new signalling.
Re:No repeaters (Score:4, Informative)
No its not. This cable uses amplifiers, and the article mentions a previous 10,000km cable that didn't require repeaters but only has a 4Tbps data rate.
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You're right. The wording in TFA suggested no repeaters were used, but the Alcatel press release mentions them. So my comment applies more to the NEC effort than this new record.
Meh (Score:3)
Talk to me when it's 31 Tera Bytes.
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Fuck off.
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Yep (Score:1)
It will never leave the lab.
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It will never leave the lab.
It will if it makes sense commercially. At the old STL (later Nortel) lab in Harlow England, where data transmission over fibre was invented back in 1966, we could show rates of up to 64 Tb were possible using DWM over a single fibre at least 12 years ago. But people weren't ready to pay for such data rates back then, and the telecoms market was crashing after the excesses of the late 1990's, so development was stopped.
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1 meter vs 7200km
Then again most LAN's are not 7200 kms long :)
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This is probably more applicable to ISP backbones rather than LANs.
I fear the first application will be high frequency trading, with links between bourses.
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I fear the first application will be high frequency trading, with links between bourses.
Why? This has nothing to do with lower latency.
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Why? This has nothing to do with lower latency.
Indirectly, it does. Latency is affected by bandwidth usage, and the wider your pipe, the greater the chance of achieving minimum latency.
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Um... NO.. NO.. NO...
Minimum latency is the issue and that is driven by the speed of light though the fiber. The stuff you are talking about deals with the overhead amount of time to get the data on and off the fiber and that is really more about the technology being used than the minimum amount of time you can get data from A to B.
Distance plays into this automated trading in a BIG way. Having a few microseconds on your competitor can be all the difference between making a bit of cash and walking home w
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latency of the processing gear is far higher than the time to travel through the Transatlantic cable.
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No it isn't. Latency through a switch is measured in microseconds.
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Minimum latency is the issue
Topsy-turvy, kiddo. For timing critical systems, it's maximum operational latency that matters.
Best case is for ricers who want to impress each other. Average and median values are what most pros are concerned with - bang for the buck.
And worst case is what those running timing critical systems look at, and spend big money on improving.
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Latency is how much time your data takes to get from A to B, not "how fast it takes you to ping the servers".
Still confused? Hint: Some packets are bigger than your standard ICMP ping.
More bandwidth == less-latent transfer, all else being the same, simply because it takes less time to transfer an entire packet of data.
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TFA says it is for undersea cables, not LANs.
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Microsoft already did this back in the 90's. They got over 80Tbps via one metre long cable. So there is nothing new.
I'm glad you read the fucking summary
don't fret it, it's the new gnaa.
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And I can throw a 90mph fastball... I did it before half the pitchers in the MLB, the problem is that I can only throw that fast for 1cm and not all the way to the plate.
Re:Microsoft already did this (Score:4, Funny)
What medium are you throwing it in, treacle?
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Re:Microsoft already did this (Score:4, Informative)
I can get 20,000Tbps over a 500 mile long cable right now if all I send are 1's or only 0's.
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What, are you shoving 3's down your pipes?
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No 3's the sharp edges get stuck on things.
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It appears you've also become immune to reading entire Slashdot summaries.
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Re:Not going to happen. (Score:5, Informative)
Do you think all the big-boys are going to tear up their existing long haul fiber and undersea trunks and replace it with something new? It'll never happen. These stories pop up on /. with disturbing periodicity and I've become immune to them.
What part of the story said they needed to tear up the existing fiber, or even lay new fiber? Sure, they would need to add new gear at the terminals, but that's cheap in comparison to laying cable.
And even if they did have to lay new cable, for this kind of bandwidth I imagine they'd have already begun planning it. The more you carry, the more money arrives.
Re:Not going to happen. (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong, this still requires amplifiers every 100km, just like today.
Re:Not going to happen. (Score:4, Interesting)
They don't explicitly say that there were no repeaters for this particular test, but that is strongly implied. (Sloppy reporting.) However, they do compare it to a test done recently over 10,000km with no repeaters:
I had no idea that those kinds of distances were possible without repeaters. This is, indeed, big news.
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A repeater is different from an amplifier. A repeater receives the signal, cleans it up in the electrical domain, and retransmits it. This has to be done channel by channel so in this experiment they would need 155 of them along with the associated mux/demux WDM gear to transpond all channels. An amplifier on the other hand amplifies everything between about 1520 and 1610 nanometers, all in the optical domain. All undersea cables have amplifiers in 'festoons' which are enclosures that sit on the ocean flo
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If I take the "single strand" mentioned in TFS very literally, then it is indeed a single strand without amplification.
(Unless you can amplify light on a single strand, without ever breaking it into two or more strands.)
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If I take the "single strand" mentioned in TFS very literally, then it is indeed a single strand without amplification.
(Unless you can amplify light on a single strand, without ever breaking it into two or more strands.)
Aha. I went to the Alcatel Lucent site and read The Fine Press Release [alcatel-lucent.com] where the actual truth* was published.
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So if we run it all through the bullshit detector: Cute and fast tech, doesn't break normal any distance limits.
Thanks for digging that up.
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(Unless you can amplify light on a single strand ...)
Which you can - look up Raman Amplifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier#Raman_amplifier [wikipedia.org]
Raman amplification is quite widely used in existing fibre networks, both to increase the distance between repeaters, and to increase the bandwidth of existing fibre runs, e.g. to allow 40 Gb/sec over fibre originally laid for 10 or 2.4 Gb/sec use. By increasing the signal strength Raman amplification can reduce the effect of the dispersion which limits the minimum pulse length detectable, and hence allow
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No, they'll just hook this new equipment up to the existing fiber. Thats how this works you know, right?
What do you think they are testing it on? Some new 7200km fiber they cooked up yesterday? They do this with existing trunks.
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Do you think all the big-boys are going to tear up their existing long haul fiber and undersea trunks and replace it with something new? It'll never happen.
Amps designed to work with 1 Gbps Ethernet will work with 100 Gbps Ethernet. So the theory is all you have to do is replace optics at the end to upgrade the speeds on the fiber in the middle. You don't have to "tear up" anything.
These stories pop up on /. with disturbing periodicity and I've become immune to them.
That you don't understand (and have actively worked towards an "immunity" doesn't mean they don't contain valuable information that some of us use on a regular basis. 100 Gbps was in the same "never gonna happen" camp for a while, but I'm personally "tearing up" 155 Mbps links to
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it is yet another chunk taken out of the ass of long haul optical fiber cable mfgs.
Lucent-Alcatel is itself a long haul optical fibre manufacturer, Alcatel having bought the Cable Division of STC when Northern Telecom (aka Nortel) bought the rest of STC in 1991. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Telephones_and_Cables [wikipedia.org]