It’s compared to the average broaband speed in the UK, so it’s not quite as exciting as it might sound …
So it’s barely faster than my phones internet when I’m traveling through nature.
My docter said i needed more fiber.
Broadband is not a speed.
according to the FTC or FCC whichever one it was recently raised the defined speed of a broadband connection.
It’s not symmetrical yet though. Which is weird.
It’s not symmetrical yet though. Which is weird.
Eh, I would say it’s to be expected. A lot of infrastructure still relies on coax/DOCSIS which has its limitations in comparison to an all-fiber backbone. (This post has some good explanations.) However it wouldn’t surprise me if some ISPs argue that “nobody needs that much uplink” and “it helps restrict piracy” when really it’s just them holding out against performing upgrades.
There are limitations to the technology, similar to saying 3 times faster than sound.
Also broadband as a regulated term would have speeds tied to that definition.
Do you know how fast you were going?
Faster than broadband…
First of all some corrections:
By constructing a device called an optical processor, however, researchers could access the never-before-used E- and S-bands.
It’s called an amplifier not processor, the Aston University page has it correct. And at least the S-band has seen plenty of use in ordinary CWDM systems, just not amplified. We have at least 20 operational S-band links at 1470 and 1490 nm in our backbone right now. The E-band maybe less so, because the optical absorption peak of water in conventional fiber sits somewhere in the middle of it. You could use it with low water peak fiber, but for most people it hasn’t been attractive trying to rent spans of only the correct type of fiber.
the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum
No, it does not, the S-band is between them. It goes O-band, E-band, S-band, C-band, L-band, for “original” and “extended” on the left side, and “conventional”, flanked by “short” and “long” on the right side.
Now to the actual meat: This is a cool material science achievement. However in my professional opinion this is not going to matter much for conventional terrestrial data networks. We already have the option of adding more spectrum to current C-band deployments in our networks, by using filters and additional L-band amplifiers. But I am not aware of any network around ours (AS559) that actually did so. Because fundamentally the question is this:
Which is cheaper:
- renting a second pair of fiber in an existing cable, and deploying the usual C-band equipment on the second pair,
- keeping just one pair, and deploying filters and the more expensive, rarer L-band equipment, or
- keeping just one pair, and using the available C-band spectrum more efficiently with incremental upgrades to new optics?
Currently, for us, there is enough spectrum still open in the C-band. And our hardware supplier is only just starting to introduce some L-band equipment. I’m currently leaning towards renting another pair being cheaper if we ever get there, but that really depends on where the big buying volume of the market will move.
Now let’s say people do end up extending to the L-band. Even then I’m not so sure that extending into the E- and S- bands as the next further step is going to be even equally attractive, for the simple reason that attenuation is much lower at the C-band and L-band wavelengths.
Maybe for subsea cables the economics shake out differently, but the way I understand their primary engineering constraint is getting enough power for amplifiers to the middle of the ocean, so maybe more amps, and higher attenuation, is not their favourite thing to develop towards either. This is hearsay though, I am not very familiar with their world.
Cool I’ll be able to download CoD in just a few hours.
xfinity will advertise 100 Tbps lines with the abysmal 1.5 TB/mo data cap anyway
I hate Comcast as much as the next guy but I feel like 1.5TB a month would be reasonable. Even at those speeds you probably wouldn’t be downloading more, just downloading whatever you do now but faster.
Why the fuck would I want that speed if I can only fully use it for less than a second before hitting the data cap? I’d rather have 100 times less speed with 100 times more cap, so I can actually fully use it however I want.
Also it’s just ridiculous anyway because I don’t even think hard drive write speeds are that fast.
I think you meant no data cap.
I’m on pace for 0.60 TB this month and I’m no heavy user. I only have 1 4k TV and a laptop for work that I use all day. My wife is mostly on her phone but is a heavy TV user in the evening. I can imagine people who download and/or torrent most of the content they consume can easily hit 1.5TB
Data caps are simply false advertising - if your infrastructure can only handle X Tb/s then sell lower client speeds or implement some clever QoS.
There are plenty of users for whom 1.5TB is quite or very restrictive - multi member households, video/photo editors working with raw data, scientists working with raw data, flatpak users with Nvidia GPU or people that selfhost their data or do frequent backups etc.
With the popularity of WFH and our dependence on online services the internet is virtually as vital as water or electricity, and you wouldn’t want to be restricted to having no electricity until the end of the month just because you used the angle grinder for a few afternoons.
Florida man fails math, yet again
There shouldn’t be any data caps on wired connections, especially fiber.
The only thing data caps should affect is if there’s abnormal congestion.
Tell that to my (nonexistent) off-site backup.
Don’t be silly son, the free market will signal there is opportunity and prices will drop and quality will go up.
🤪
100Tbps downloads speeds (5Mbps upload)
Speeds not guaranteed…
Isn’t the phrase they use “up to” the promised speed? So if it is 300bps, that is not above 5Mbps, so they technically met their promise.
Aren’t fiber lines typically symmetrical? At least that’s how I’ve usually seen them advertised.
You underestimate the fuckery that ISPs will go through to offer the least amount of services for the most possible money.
Mine at least lets me adjust the upload and download ratio for my plan. I’m currently on 50/20, but I could upgrade my plan and get 100/20, 70/50, or whatever I want. But 50/20 has been plenty for me, and we’re getting municipal fiber soon so I’ll have more options as well.
AFAIK, cable doesn’t offer that, you get 5mbps on pretty much every plan, or you upgrade to some ridiculous tier to get faster upload.
5Mbps is absolutely bonkers. I had 30/5 back in like 2006. And TCP has an overhead of about 5%, some protocols ever more.
I lost my symmetric gigabit fiber recently after moving and I miss it dearly. Might have upgraded to 3Gbps by now 😭
All fed to you on the not updated data line that caps at 800 MBps
Distances though? I’ve seen similar breakthroughs in the past but it was only good for networking within the same room.
It’s optical fiber so it’s good for miles. Unlikely to be at home for decades but telcos will use it for connecting networks.
Optical fiber is already multi gigabit so the article comparing it to your home connection is stupid.
It’s optical fiber so it’s good for miles.
OM1 through OM4 have full rate distances of less than 800 meters.
Yes there is faster stuff that goes for literal miles but saying that optical fiber can always go miles is incorrect.
To be fair it’s obviously meant that they’re talking about singlemode and not multimode.
No one said “always”; original comment is correct that fiber can literally go miles
I wonder what non-telco applications will use this
I wonder if something like a sport stadium has video requirements that would get close with HFR 8K video?
To be fair, it all trickles down to home users eventually. We’re starting to see 10+gbps fiber in enthusiast home networks and internet connections. Small offices are widely adopting 100gbps fiber. It wasn’t that long ago that we were adopting 1 gigabit ethernet in home networks, and it won’t be long before we see widespread 800+ gigabit fiber.
Streaming video is definitely a big application where more bandwidth will come in handy, I think also transferring large AI models in the 100s of gigabytes may also become a large amount of traffic in the near future.
Yup, my city has historically had mediocre Internet, and now they’re rolling out fiber and advertising 10g/s at a relatively reasonable $200/month.
I’m probably not getting it anytime soon (I’m happy with my 50/20 service), but I know a few enthusiasts who will. I’ll see what the final pricing looks like and decide if it’s worth upgrading my infrastructure (only have wireless AC, so no point in going above 300mbps or so).
Disaggregated compute might be able to leverage this in the data center. I could use this to get my server, gaming PC and home theater to share memory bandwidth on top of storage, heck maybe some direct memory access between distributed accelerators.
Gotta eat those PCI lanes somehow
Its not stupid at all. “Broadband” speed is a term that laypeople across the country can at least conceptualize. Articles like this aren’t necessarily written exclusively for industry folks. If the population can’t relate to the information well, how can they hope to pressure telcos for better services?
So it’s fine if an article says Space X develops a new rocket that travels 100x faster than a car?
Because that implies a breakthrough when it’s actually not significantly faster than other rockets: it’s the speed needed to reach the ISS.
10X faster than existing fiber would be accurate reporting. Especially given that there are labs that have transmitted at peta bit speeds over optical already. So terabit isn’t significant, only his method.
Those are two completely unrelated things.
Then give me a related analogy you would accept and I’ll easily twist it into a misleading comparison exactly the article did.
How about this, “British Telecom develops high speed internet 1700x faster than previous Internet service technology. Availability is today!”
The above statement is completely true.
Comparing to home Internet when it isn’t home Internet technology is misleading. Ignoring that there are already faster optical Internet speeds in other labs around the world is misleading.
“A bus on average can hold ten times as many passengers as private vehicles.”
remember kids, commit arson against your local ISP, and you will only be arrested for probably 20 years.
And 1.2 million times less likely to be available to the public
Also 1.2 million times less likely to leave the research stadium because even if this is true (very big if already) it’s still “new and exciting and revolutionary improvement #3626462” this week alone. Revolutionary new battery tech comes out twice a week if you believe the pop sci tech sites, it’s 99.9% crap
Battery advancements aren’t crap. We’ve gotten 5-8% improvement in capacity per year, which compounds to a doubling every 10 to 15 years. Every advancement covered by over sensationalized pop sci articles you’ve ever heard has contributed to that. It’s important not to let sensationalism make you jaded to actual advancements.
Now, as for broadband, we haven’t pushed out the technologies to the last mile that we already have. However, this sort of thing is useful for the backbone and universities. Universities sometimes have to transfer massive amounts of data, and some of the most efficient ways to do that are a van full of hard drives.
No normal consumer user would have any reasonable use case for this kind of bandwidth.
This is data center and backbone network stuff.
ultimately the end consumer is going to run their connection through it SOMEWHERE, or something very similar more than likely.
It’s not going to be FTTH levels of connectivity, but interconnect to ISP it very well could be.
I’m highly suspicious about group dispersion over long distances. Today’s infrastructure was developed for a certain range of frequencies. Broading it right away wouldn’t be applicable that easy - we would need to introduce error correction which compromises the speed multiplier.
Too lazy to get the original paper though
The zero dispersion wavelength of G.652.D fiber is between 1302 nm and 1322 nm, in the O-band.
Typical current DWDM systems operate in the range of 1528.38 to 1563.86nm, in the C-band.
Group dispersion in the E-band and S-band is lower than at current DWDM wavelengths, because they sit between O-band and C-band, and it pretty much linearly increases from it’s zero dispersion wavelength.
With further refinement and scaling, internet providers could ramp up standard speeds without overhauling current fiber optic infrastructures.
Don’t worry. They’ll find some way to use this to justify massive rate increases.
We must make ISPs a public service owned by the people. Who can argue that internet isn’t essential to being a regular member of society? These companies rob us and use their monopolies to manipulate us.
