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The Internet Networking

25 Gigabit Per Second Fiber Retail Broadband Service Demoed in New Zealand (www.crn.nz) 69

25 gigabits per second — both downloading and uploading. CRN reports broadband infrastructure wholesaler Chorus demonstrated those speeds over their existing passive optical fiber network [PON]. The demonstration in Auckland achieved 21.4 Gbps throughput, tested simultaneously on the same strand of fibre that ran an 8 Gbps symmetric HyperFibre connection, and a 900/550 Mbps UFB link.... Chorus uses Nokia's Lightspan FX and MX access nodes for multiple types of fibre service, including standard GPON, the XGS-PON behind HyperFibre, point-to-point Ethernet, and envisages the 25 GPON service to run on it as well. It is based on the Quillion chip set line cards, which Nokia says are 50 per cent more energy efficient than earlier models.

Currently, Chorus has no wholesale 25 GPON product, with its fastest offering topping out at 8/8 Gbps HyperFibre. The wholesaler expects to develop a 25 GPON based services within the next two to three years, with a Nokia optical network termination unit that supports either 25/25 Gbps or 25/10 Gbps options. Kurt Rodgers, network strategy manager at Chorus, said the faster broadband service would come into its own for industrial metaverse applications, the Internet of Things, and low-latency cloud connectivity....

Chorus chief technology officer Ewen Powell said the 25 GPON service demonstrated "a future-proofed technology." Although two-wavelength 50 Gbps service is appearing as a choice for providers, with 100 GPON on the horizon, Chorus is betting that the 25 Gbps variant will offer the best cost benefit overall for providers, as it can use existing optics equipment.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Bismillah for submitting the article.
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25 Gigabit Per Second Fiber Retail Broadband Service Demoed in New Zealand

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  • And a side order of fush and chups. Have you ever played rugby with a herd of sheep?
  • Wow that's a big number!
    • I can still remember my excitement when I was finally able to get a 56kbps modem for my dial-up networking activities. I should note that, at the time, when on the road I usually had to use an acoustic couple, a device useable with any phone, but which gave a typical speed of 300 bps (bytes per second!) sometimes better, sometimes worse. The progression in speed of networks available to consumers in the last 40 years has been extraordinary. Today's speeds were unimaginable in the 1980s.

      • I saved for 3 months to afford a 28.8kbps Trailblazer modem. I needed the speed because I was running an FTP site from my bedroom.

  • Oops? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Random361 ( 6742804 ) on Saturday May 28, 2022 @09:38PM (#62573908)
    Does anyone not see the inherent problem with this? So they have 25 billons per second but not with the rest of the world. Great for their Kiwi porn I guess.
    • What a party you could have.

      That said, following the trends, you will need to download a gigabyte or two just to view a basic web page in a few years time. We passed thousands of lines of JavaScript long ago, will not be long before it is millions. Just because it can.

    • Cache Netflix, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Most people access very little unique content.

    • What is this rest of the world you speak of, and why should my local CDN / Netflix datacentre, or other local cashed service care?

    • 8K Kiwi pr0n! 8K!
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Japan has had 20Gbps fibre widely available in several cities, and 10Gbps nearly universally available in all cities, for some years now. We can learn a few things from them about how useful it is.

      Firstly most computers only have a 1Gbps network port, and most consumer grade routers can't handle 20Gbps of traffic. Even if the network is fast enough, most computers will struggle to handle that amount of incoming data. It's 2.5 gigabytes/second, which only NVMe SSDs can handle.

      Secondly the server on the other

    • by jd ( 1658 )

      So, anything that is on a caching proxy (you remember Squid, right?) will be at 25 gbps. Any IPTV and VoIP will be 25 gbps. Any storage of photos or videos on any server nationally. It'll make NZ a great place to develop any new games, virtual worlds or similar, because you will have a larger beta testing group with adequate access.

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Bird porn or fruit porn?

      But I admit that I don't see why you'd need that kind of bandwidth for fruit porn. Even for bird porn, you'd need a big flock of the little critters to use the bandwidth.

    • > So they have 25 billons per second but not with the rest of the world.
      "Southern Cross NEXT" is going live in a couple of months which will deliver an additional 72Tbs of capacity from NZ to Australia and US, optimised for low latency.

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday May 28, 2022 @10:03PM (#62573920)

    I have 1 Gbps symmetrical and could upgrade to 10Gbps symmetrical for just the cost of the fiber terminator. But what for? There are very few occasions where I can even use the 1Gbps, simply because the other side is too slow. I would also have to upgrade my network cards and switches.

    • Think they do it to piss off Americans. "Sure it is useless, but so is a 1mbit internet connection."
    • But what for? There are very few occasions where I can even use the 1Gbps

      I remember this exact same argument used when DSL came out. 56kbps was more than enough to run the internet. There's no possible reason we need to develop faster links.

      • That is definitely not the exact same argument.

        Maxing out your consumer 56kbps download speed was a fucking breeze when connecting to university and corporate servers. Al lot of those servers will definitely not provide you with a 1Gbps stream today. In my experience, your best chances at maxing out your 1Gbps download are Steam downloads and torrents with lots of beefy seeders.

        I agree with you that it is worthwhile to keep increasing our data bandwidths, but I definitely also agree with GP that for the ave

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          , but I definitely also agree with GP that for the average consumer and even the prosumer the marginal utility of >1Gbps down speed is very, very low and will probably not go up any time soon.

          Indeed. Should my current equipment fail, I will look at prices and may upgrade step-by-step if 10Gbps is only moderately more expensive. But before that there is simply no reason to as more speed is strongly subject to diminishing returns and at some point it is simply enough. Same as generally you do not need bigger electricity lines or water pipes as well, because what is in place is enough for all applications.

      • I don't. Sure, I was thrilled with the speed improvement 56k brought over my 14.4 modem I upgraded from. But it was never 'I can't imagine needing faster.' Images took long to load, mp3s took painfully long. Large applications took *really* long, and video was still basically impossible. Nobody had any trouble imaging what they'd do with more bandwidth. I envied my friend with a T1. Now, I can't imagine needing faster until there's brand new uses, since even an 8K stream wouldn't saturate my line, not that
    • by jd ( 1658 )

      Because Elite: Dangerous, that's why. Honestly.

    • Future-proofing, mostly. Get this in place now, maximizing the existing infrastructure capabilities, and when new technologies do become available to the end user, they're ready for it.

      A lot of new stuff comes with multi-gig ports now, 1, 2.5, and 5 gigabit Ethernet. The future is coming, and it is more bandwidth hungry and than ever.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Future-proofing, mostly. Get this in place now, maximizing the existing infrastructure capabilities, and when new technologies do become available to the end user, they're ready for it.

        Well, the infrastructure is in place. The fibers running to my home are probably enough to connect a major data-center with the right equipment at the end. Same for most of the city. The fibers to the home are the part that is expensive and hard to replace. I do not expect they will have to upgrade them ever again.

    • by trparky ( 846769 )

      And I have 500/500 (that acts like 600/600 due to over-provisioning) and I just don't see the need for any more than that. Heck, there are times my speeds exceed that with downloads from the big guys like Steam, EA Origin, GOG, and Epic Games that reach download speeds as fast as 100 MB/s (800 Mbps). Again, I just don't see the need for anything more than what I have.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. Maybe in 10 or 20 years there will be a case for 10Gbps at home, but that is in no way assured. And with the fibers to my home, I could run a major data-center if needed.

  • So can you imagine, if the datacenter only uses 100Gbps connections for its own bandwidth, how fast these lanes will become clogged with only a few households? So I am calling this a pipe dream for the near future but it will happen someday.

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      Of course, 100Gbps may be as fast as your datacenter goes, but it's not the maximum available speed. OSFP ports are currently out there for 400 Gbps and expected to support 800 Gpbs per port, and not every connection must be a single port. So one could imagine beefier equipment. It could be also a matter of banking on lack of coincident network demand to deliver good peak performance, despite being unable to deliver sustained aggregate performance

      Though to be honest, I don't know that in practice this rea

    • by amorsen ( 7485 )

      They won't become clogged, because the utilization will be practically zero. It will get the data to the user quicker, but the user is unlikely to need significantly more data. Once you hit 50Mbps or so, a doubling of speed will generally only cause a linear increase in bandwidth used per month.

    • by Nkwe ( 604125 )

      So I am calling this a pipe dream for the near future but it will happen someday.

      You mean tube dream, right?

  • by Swervin ( 836962 ) on Saturday May 28, 2022 @10:27PM (#62573958)
    If I was running a business I'd be hesitant to put 25Gb of important traffic on a PON. I was involved with running subscriber services on a GPON network and one piece of mis-functioning equipment on a PON can be enough to knock everyone else down. The "passive" in PON is passive optical splitters, so everyone else on your splitter is either divided up by time slot, wavelength, etc. If someone's busted equipment steps on your time slot you're just out of luck until your provider sees this and removes it from your splitter. Not sure about newer *PON technologies, but I think GPON could allow for 128 or 256 splits, and the more thrifty your provider is the higher your split.
  • When you've absolutely, positively got to download every melon farmering link on the page all while handling 37 torrents and streaming three UHD movies and a "movie", accept no substitutes.
  • by hjf ( 703092 ) on Saturday May 28, 2022 @11:15PM (#62574012) Homepage

    99% of people use wifi and not a wired connection so they can sell 1Tbps if they want, people will be lucky to get 30mbps from the shitty router downstairs.

    • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      So run one cable upstairs drop in an ap an the problem is solved, if you connect that ap to a poe port, or use an injector downstairs yo don't even need power at the ap.
      • by hjf ( 703092 )

        And that's exactly the point. Those people you mention (the ones running wires, especially with PoE), are not in the 99% I was talking about.

    • And most of those WiFi hubs are just 5G modem backends. Sure they'll do 1Gbps. Until the autistic little brat down the street wants to play Final Fantasy or something and hogs all the wireless bandwidth.

      A lot of the fiber nay-saying is from the wireless companies marketing/astroturfing departments trying to convince us that they are the only viable technology left.

  • by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Sunday May 29, 2022 @05:36AM (#62574372) Homepage Journal

    There was a hospital-hospital linkup for telerobotic medicine. Eye surgery, I believe it was. Bandwidth was reserved, I suspect, which you could do for UDP traffic back then, on some routers. (RSVP protocol)

    These days, with 128-lead wearable ECGs exist. These are sufficiently good that they'll give you a 30 minute warning before a heart attack. That's a hell of an early warning system. The problem has been that this is a lot of information and, if they were widespread, the bandwidth reservation you'd need to guarantee a reliable connection to a hospital would place a huge strain on systems. Encrypting the data is now easier, so security is less of an issue. 165,000 NZers have heart disease.

    (The bandwidth for 128-lead ECG + bandwidth for a response for injecting drugs and/or inducing electrical shocks + VoIP phone bandwidth) x (largest gathering likely for a support group) reservable using some modern equivalent of RSVB in every location likely to have such a gathering, so that there's guaranteed zero packet loss, would be extremely handy. You wouldn't want that in every household, or even most, but it would definitely be something that would reduce the risks of heart disease.

    So why make it available for every household? Because making it an easy-to-obtain commodity makes it something that people can practically get without having to buy dedicated lines. It also makes it much, much cheaper, and the underlying network requirements mean that regular Internet becomes much faster and smoother.

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      This seems like the sort of application where you'd want to have analysis of the input local to the device, rather than streaming all the raw data to a remote system. If the connection is so demanding that's one issue, another is that you want a high guarantee of correct behavior in the face of the internet connection going down.

      We don't need to 'cloud' up every service and stream all the minutia of raw data from gobs of sensors into datacenters, we should have local response loops with ability to sample a

      • by jd ( 1658 )

        True enough, though as I recall there was terror on Slashdot when these devices came out, because of the concern of having devices injecting drugs or delivering shocks to the heart without supervision.

        • by Junta ( 36770 )

          Even if medical review is required, the device could locally determine that the time for such a review had arrived, transmit the relevant data leading to the determination and await remote intervention. It's not like doctors would be continuously watching ECG data stream by to manually identify the time, there would be some software crunching that data and only raising exceptional situations to review anyway, whether centralized or at the edge.

          Of course, we have implants that automatically decide to shock a

    • This paper speaks about bandwidths of ~4kbit/s for ECG data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
      Even (naively) times 128, that's only 0.5 mbit/s per user. That is definitely not a bottleneck in the developed world nowadays.

      • by jd ( 1658 )

        When you have to have a drop rate of 0 and a flat latency, it really is quite significant. You can't guarantee that much spare bandwidth at any given point in a network. And, no, you can't consider per-user. You have to consider the worst possible case. You can prove anything, if you pick favourable enough circumstances.

        And that's still not including VoIP on top of that. If you have a health crisis, you want one person calling an ambulance and you want a doctor to be able to call in and give advice on what

        • Why are you making the demands so ridiculously high?
          By your own words, these things give a 30 minute warning and you're demanding zero-latency zero-loss connections? Yeah, 100ms of latency is going to make the difference between life and death here.

          It is extra silly because you started out with a calculation based on bandwidth:

          (The bandwidth for 128-lead ECG + bandwidth for a response for injecting drugs and/or inducing electrical shocks + VoIP phone bandwidth) x (largest gathering likely for a support group) reservable using some modern equivalent of RSVB in every location likely to have such a gathering, so that there's guaranteed zero packet loss, would be extremely handy.

          I argue that the required bandwidth isn't that high using a proper research paper and you move the goal posts to 'zero-latency zero-loss connections'.

          Also, how the fuck would there by

      • by jd ( 1658 )

        That absolutely has to be zero loss on those skype calls, too. A moment of breakup and you mishear an instruction with fatal consequences. Telemedicine MUST be loss-free. Equally, it has to be a constant - low - latency. So no using delay-tolerant networking. Latency is equivalent to sending the wrong instruction at the wrong time to any medical vest, which would be Really Bad.

  • I have 5gb from AT&T Fiber.

    Now you'd say "wow, that's very cool"--but keep in mind when the fiber hits my house, the data is handled by a modem which then has an Ethernet connector out the back which you then can plug into your computer or into a switch.

    "So what," you say.

    Well, the problem is the vast majority of Ethernet switches--even business class Ethernet switches--can only handle 1gb data. (In practice even the best switches only have about 900mb of bandwidth.)

    I wound up paying about $2k to upgrad

  • So as an actual kiwi who's been using the internet in NZ since "the internet" consisted of using a 1200 baud modem, have some background.

    Go back 15 odd years, our internet was pretty shit, cable was a latecomer to NZ and for all intents and purposes was only really widely deployed in two main cities. DSL was the main technology for most people and dialup was still a thing. Politics in NZ like in many places, mainly consists of two main parties, Labour and National (nominally left of centre and right of cent

    • That's a great summary. Also note, "Southern Cross NEXT" is going live in a couple of months which will deliver 72Tbs of capacity from NZ to Australia and US, optimised for low latency. Only going to get better...

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