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Nokia Says It Can Deliver Internet 1,000x Faster Than Google Fiber (engadget.com) 75

An anonymous reader writes: Verizon Fios has topped Netflix's speed index for quite some time now with its 500 Mbps up and down internet speeds. When compared to dial-up speeds of about 56 Kbps, Fios is roughly 1000 times faster (since 500 Mbps is equivalent to 500,000 Kbps). Google Fiber on the other hand offers 1 Gbps speeds, but it's not as widely available as Fios as of yet. In a statement made to ZDNet last week, Nokia said it has figured out how to deliver internet that is 2,000 times faster than Verizon Fios, or 1,000 times faster than Google Fiber. Their technique is called Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS), which can deliver 1 Tbps speeds over a fiber connection. "The trial of the novel modulation approach, known as Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS), uses quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats to achieve higher transmission capacity over a given channel to significantly improve the spectral efficiency of optical communications," Nokia explains. "PCS modifies the probability with which constellation points, the alphabet of the transmission, are used. Traditionally, all constellation points are used with the same frequency. PCS cleverly uses constellation points with high amplitude less frequently than those with lesser amplitude to transmit signals that, on average, are more resilient to noise and other impairments. This allows the transmission rate to be tailored to ideally fit the transmission channel, delivering up to 30 percent greater reach." Nokia's demonstration is described as being achieved in "real-world conditions," though there is no timeframe as to when the technology will be deployed in real networks.
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Nokia Says It Can Deliver Internet 1,000x Faster Than Google Fiber

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  • by JustNiz ( 692889 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @04:42PM (#52934341)

    Google are actually out there doing it.

    • by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @04:49PM (#52934397)

      Perhaps I misread this but this seems to be referring to the modulation technology that the light traveling over the fiber uses. So Google fiber and Verizon FIOS could license the technology from Nokia and increase the speeds... am I wrong?

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Your interpretation is probably right, however the claim is still laughable as using said technology for last mile will require mass replacement of equipment on customer premise AND building a core network thats thousands of times faster than the 1tbps last mile

      • by Shatrat ( 855151 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @05:24PM (#52934629)

        The hilarious thing about this summary is that both Google Fiber and Verizon FiOS already use Nokia equipment.

      • by msauve ( 701917 )
        No, you're not wrong. If they can standardize/commercialize it, it would first appear in backbone interconnects - and presumably at great relative expense (profit?), since it would offer 10-25x the performance of what's currently available (40-100 Gbps).

        They're comparing it with consumer speeds because it makes the numbers look bigger, which makes for a better press release.
        • by zlives ( 2009072 )

          i think not, i am ready to replace my X2 modem and this technology should fit an end user like me.

        • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          Currently commercially available is 32Tb/s with 6km ranges, and has been for 5+ years now. There is little demand because backbone bandwidth supply has completely outpaced demand. No point in increasing the backbone's bandwidth if it's mostly idle already. They are expecting 100Gb/s FTTH over 5Tb/s shared fiber by 2020. I'm sure that will start to drive up demand.
          • by msauve ( 701917 )
            Apples and oranges. This is a single frequency modulation scheme, you're talking DWDM. Additionally, this has been demonstrated at distances on the order of 200 km.
    • The real appeal with Google Fiber and Fios is that they are priced so average middle class people could afford such speeds.

      1Tbs unless offered at a good price, would be useless for most homes and would be more important for VPN across good sized companies.

      My home internet is only 30mbs and that is more than enough for me and my family. Perhaps if I had a 4k TV it may be more important, or many people streaming at once... However we need technology that will utilize such speeds before we need to consider upg

      • by JustNiz ( 692889 )

        I'm not so sure about 4k needing much more then regular HD, because sites like Netflix are always gonna have to support people with the least bandwidth, so that means they're gonna compress the hell out of everything.
        I'm betting that the only way 4k is ever gonna look noticeably better than 1080 is if you have a 4k BluRay, or an OTA antenna and the TV companies ever start producing/broadcasting in 4k.
        TV over cable or the internet is gonna be compressed to hell for bandwidth reasons (like it already is), so

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        1Tbs unless offered at a good price, would be useless for most homes

        Comcast will offer unlimited* 1Tbs for a perfectly reasonable price.

        *Capped at 1 GB/month. Comcast programming excluded from the cap.

      • 1Tbs unless offered at a good price, would be useless for most homes....Perhaps if I had a 4k TV it may be more important

        Try 40,000 4k TVs: Netflix 4k takes 25 Mbps. I don't expect to see this technology in the home anytime soon except perhaps in some selected test areas. There is no 'killer app' which needs this much bandwidth in the home at the moment. If it is cheap enough to act as a home link they would be better off marketing it as a replacement for 10Gb network links and switches. I could easily imagine using that sort of bandwidth for analysis of research data on a cluster in a data centre. Why would you aim it at ho

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        My girlfriend had the cheapest, crappiest internet connection available to her. It's gigabit in both directions.

        I understand that it's actually 2Gb on the fibre side, but the Ethernet port on the modem is only gigabit. It's shared between multiple apartments in the same block, but I've never seen it slow down.

      • Only because you are already entrenched into an environment that has been tailored for that type of set up. Imagine having a Xbox/PS with next to no storage capacity where all (your) games are loaded directly from the cloud. How about an "unlimited" DVR where your DVR stores everything in the cloud? Full system backups to the cloud? How about moving your entire CPU/GPU to the cloud where what is rendered is set to you for displaying locally much like Nvidia was attempting with their grid architecture.

  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @04:44PM (#52934351)

    Good for backhauls and maybe some DC uses.

    Not to the home but maybe to an local hub / node.

    10GB e-net stuff is still mostly priced at enterprise levels.

    • Good for backhauls

      Nearly all long distance links are single-mode fiber, because multi-mode fiber results in dispersion and low signal quality at longer distances. You can't run QAM over single-mode fiber. Assuming the breakthrough here is a new modulation technique that allows for such longer distance links, you would still need to run all new fiber.

      • by Shatrat ( 855151 )

        All optics > 40gbps are running some sort of phase shift modulation, up to 16 and larger QAM constellations. These are referred to as 'coherent' optics, although all lasers are coherent so I'm not sure who came up with that as the standard way to refer to them.

    • by Shatrat ( 855151 )

      You can actually get 10G residential service now, using a different Nokia equipment using NGPON2 from EPB in Chattanooga.
      You're right about this Terabit announcement summary though, this is an idiotic summary comparing a train to a shopping cart.

    • I'm annoyed that consumer gear doesn't have 10 gig ports on it yet. It's really not that much more expensive to implement anymore.

      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        The last few workstations I purchased come with 10GbE (mostly SuperMicro) but I understand some desktop motherboards have it as well. It's not that expensive to buy a NIC either, most 'homes' only have 1Gbps and are mostly relying on wireless.

        • And where are all the home routers/switches with 10g?

          • by guruevi ( 827432 )

            There are plenty of gigabit switches with 2-4 10GbE uplinks sub-500 and there are even some full 8 or 12 port 10GbE switches sub-1000.

            • I'm talking about linksys, tp-link, d-link (ugh), etc. commodity shit.

              Those guys paved the way (however shittily) with wireless standards, especially in the early days of 802.11n ("Pre-N" routers were everywhere), 5 GHz, and 802.11ac. The business grade support for those new shits didn't really happen at any sane prices or across all products until well after the consumer shit blazed the trail.

              For 10 gig Ethernet, the reverse is happening. It's been readily available at the business end for ages but there

    • by Khyber ( 864651 )

      I could think of plenty of uses for 1T-bit connection in the home.

      Camfrog Video Chat, if they hadn't fucked up and removed your own ability to host your own server.
      4k broadcasting of multiple video cam angles for things like live from-home guitar education, lapidary education, etc.
      Being able to back up your stuff to whatever silly online cloud provider you have thank to our ever-increasing data glut.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      10GB e-net stuff is still mostly priced at enterprise levels.

      The 10 GbE card would be the least of my worries. We have had two operators offering it for "consumers" here because apartment buildings typically have a single connection but most pro routers have dual uplink ports so it didn't really cost them anything to offer it - but the price has been ~10x their gigabit price at $1800/month and $700/month respectively. From what I've understood it's extremely few clients, but... there's always that guy working with 4K dailies both from home and work or whatever and th

      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        I can only get gigabit for $1200/month and $10k installation cost even though the fiber is right in front of my house. I'm still on TWC 15/1Mbps.

    • Indeed, stupid clickbait article ... comparing state of the art research to home equipment, comparing technology providers to ISP, ... that's ridiculous.

      The original article (http://www.zdnet.com/article/here-comes-the-terabit-per-second-network/) was about the next generation of fiber going running at 1TB/s instead of 100GB/s currently. This is used by datacenter, high performance computing ... very expensive stuff. The fiber is usually not the problem here, the optic transmitter being the key.

      If we're t

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      10GbE is priced for small business, you can get 24 port switches for ~$2-5k (even from overpriced shops like Cisco) and 10GbE NIC's for $200 or less. 40GbE is being priced for your largish office building and 40/100GbE is considered 'standard' in new data center designs. Development of 400GbE has been going on since 2013 and 800GbE and beyond is expected around 2020.

  • by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @04:57PM (#52934465) Homepage Journal

    By my count, 500,000 is about 10,000 times more than 56.

    • Indeed, and I guess the comparison was with 512k DSL, which is indeed 1000x faster. Honestly, 56k ? Does that still exist in any country also featuring Fiber ?
      • by tsqr ( 808554 )

        Honestly, 56k ? Does that still exist in any country also featuring Fiber ?

        Best Buy lists a 56k dial-up modem priced at $50 [bestbuy.com]. 133 reviews, 4/5 stars. So yeah, that still exists. Gotta say, though, that some of the customer questions are pretty hilarious (or maybe just sad): "Will this connect DSL line to a cable modem router?" "Can we use this for a USB port on the router to use as a phone line?" And the winner: "Can I connect it to a led flat screen TV to surf the internet. By the way, the TV has Roku streaming connected to it."

  • by MetricT ( 128876 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @05:17PM (#52934587)

    While I'm sure getting a terabit to the home would be wonderful, the real-world situation is most people are going to continue to have copper to the home for years/decades due to regulatory capture.

    Is the Probabilistic Constellation Shaping concept also applicable to twisted pair/coax copper? Because being able to get some people decent DSL would be a major advance. My parents still can't get 1990's-vintage 200 kbs DSL because in 20 years, AT&T still hasn't run fiber *to their own fucking cabinets*, much less the home.

    I know AT&T already has g.fast, but that's one of those things that's mostly only useful for short distances and "demonstrations", the actual real-world speed isn't much better than DSL after so many hundred feet, and it would have required the same AT&T who has refused to spend money on fiber to spend money to upgrade their existing cabinets.

  • ...they save the money shot until the end:
    "there is no timeframe as to when the technology will be deployed in real networks"

    • Of course not - an actual deployment schedule in the US would depend on the existence of actual competition driving incumbent companies to actually upgrade their infrastructure, and we can't have that because too many politicians are in the pocket of those incumbents.
  • ...since the speed of google fiber in my area is zero due to no availability.

  • I'm looking at wiring a house we might buy for Ethernet. Should I string some fiber in there too?

  • by Guy Harris ( 3803 ) <guy@alum.mit.edu> on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @06:57PM (#52935131)

    TFA [zdnet.com] doesn't claim Nokia said anything about Google Fiber. All it claims is that the number Nokia's talking about is 1 Tb/s, and that "For comparison on the consumer side, Alphabet's Google Fiber embryonic US fiber-to-the-premises service is offering 1Gbps connections.", so the comparison is being done by ZDNet, not Nokia.

    They also say "on the consumer side", so it's somewhat like Caterpillar saying some new haul truck can handle 500 tons and the article reporting on it saying "For comparison, on the consumer side, a Ford F-150 can handle 1 1/2 tons" - it's not as if somebody's going to use one of those big trucks to do residential construction, it's just there to give a sense of scale.

  • So, to reverse the common quote about paying later for hamburgers...

    You are promising me faster internet LATER? I suppose you'd like me to pay you for this now?

    Way to go guys... I can do this NOW... You just cannot afford it.... And who wants to drop 10 Gig onto their WiFi router anyway? Oh, you want me to WIRE everything back up? Thanks, but no..

    Call me when you can do that for what I'm paying now... I'm sorry but promises of way faster internet in the future get you a "Well Duh!" from me. Who does

  • If I recall the fiber telecom courses correctly, at 1 Tbs/s, we get close to the optical fiber maximum bandwidth.

    However, we have no switches that can handle that. The only way to actually use the huge fiber bandwidth is to use wavelength multiplexing, but when we do that, this Nokia groundbreaking innovation is of little use.

    And in any case, this innovation is not directed toward consumer's last miles link. It is not a possible competitor to Google Fiber and other similar services.

  • Hasn't this already been invented many years ago and is called DWDM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing) and can have speeds over way 1Tb via single pair of fibre?

    • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      DWDM does have great bandwidth, but can only transfer about 400Gb/s per channel right now. A single 1Tb/s channel, even if less than the 32+Tb/s DWMD can handle, still has its usefulness.
  • As mentioned in other comments, probably great for back-haul upgrades but for me doing average web browsing, the connection speed is irrelevant as 99.999% of the delay in loading web pages is due to the hundreds of ad-pushing/sniffing websites that the underlying web site relies on before completely loading. I could have a dedicated terabit connection and my load time would be the same.
  • >> Nokia Says It Can Deliver Internet 1,000x Faster
    The small drawback : it costs 15x more

  • When compared to dial-up speeds of about 56 Kbps

    Okaaay, crazy old man, back to bed and the nurse'll be round with the green pills.

    "Dial-up" indeed.

  • Considering google fiber isn't offered here or where anyone I know lives, I'm betting that Nokia CAN in fact deliver better than 1000 x 0.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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