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Researchers achieve optical data transmission speed of 44.2 terabits per second
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoAnd even it that speed, I bet pre-roll ads on videos still end up buffering.
- 6510 6y agoYes, we will find ways to spoil the gains arguing it doesn't matter.
- Denvercoder9 6y agoYes, we need better software (engineers).
- tudorw 6y agoAnd we need better consumers, kidding, we love you.
- rbinv 6y agoLink to paper (PDF): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16265-x.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16265-x.pdf
- martonlanga 6y agoAbstract: > Micro-combs - optical frequency combs generated by integrated micro-cavity resonators – offer the full potential of their bulk counterparts, but in an integrated footprint. They have enabled breakthroughs in many fields including spectroscopy, microwave photonics, frequency synthesis, optical ranging, quantum sources, metrology and ultrahigh capacity data transmission. Here, by using a powerful class of micro-comb called soliton crystals, we achieve ultra-high data transmission over 75 km of standard optical fibre using a single integrated chip source. We demonstrate a line rate of 44.2 Terabits s−1 using the telecommunications C-band at 1550 nm with a spectral efficiency of 10.4 bits s−1 Hz−1 . Soliton crystals exhibit robust and stable generation and operation as well as a high intrinsic efficiency that, together with an extremely low soliton micro-comb spacing of 48.9 GHz enable the use of a very high coherent data modulation format (64 QAM - quadrature amplitude modulated). This work demonstrates the capability of optical micro-combs to perform in demanding and practical optical communications networks.
- bobajeff 6y agoI like like the bottle neck in the future will be Harddrive/SSD file read/write speeds. Honestly, I'd love to have my hands on a terabyte drive with 1TBps speeds.
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- dahfizz 6y agoI think latency of a network will always lag behind that of local storage. Even traveling at the speed of light, going around the circumference of the earth takes over 100ms. Obviously not all network requests go around the globe, but the fact that local storage is physically closer to your computer will always be a sizeable advantage.
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- hutzlibu 6y agoPlus the fact that cloud storage has to be stored on physical storage as well ...
- rayiner 6y agoIt’s not even the future. 40 gig Ethernet is already faster than most SSDs. And you can get a card on eBay for $200.
- IdiocyInAction 6y agoMemory access latency is already the biggest bottleneck when it comes to optimization, both disk and RAM.
- dasudasu 6y agoElectro-optic conversion is expensive in terms of power, so you better be sure it's necessary. There are still some people looking at hybrid computers with both optics and electronics. To be practical, you'd need both to be realized in the same platform, but they don't exactly work on the same scales, and laser integration is a big issue.
- amelius 6y agoThis is not directly internet related. The original title is better: > Ultra-dense optical data transmission over standard fibre with a single chip source As a compromise, I'd propose: > 44.2 terabit/s optical data transmission over standard fibre with a single chip source
- YayamiOmate 6y agoMuch better, because what the heck is "internet speed". The most sensible definition to me is payload over IP protocol possibly on an existing commercial link. That's the only way I see relation to internet and the internet.
- monocasa 6y agoIDK, I get it. WAN backbone rates over a single fiber rather than more typical LAN rates.
- jlgaddis 6y agoIn the past, the "Internet speed record" was measured in units such as "terabit meters-per-second": > ... they had managed to send nearly 840 gigabytes of data across a distance of 16,346 kilometers (10,157 miles) in less than 27 minutes, at an average speed of 4.23 gigabits per second. > This was equal to 69,073 terabit meters per second (or 69,073 trillion bits sent through one meter in a second), which exceeded the previous record set by CalTech and CERN earlier this year. [0] --- > The team successfully transferred data at a rate of 8.80Gbps, which is equal to 264,147 terabit-meters per second (Tb-m/s). [1] --- > Internet2 ... has this week announced a stunning new record speed of 9.08Gbps - equal to 272,400 terabit-meters per second (Tb-m/s) [2] --- No idea if it's still done that way or not but I don't see any mention of distance in this article (haven't looked at the paper). --- [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/internet-speed-record-broken/ https://www.cnet.com/news/internet-speed-record-broken/ [1]: http://www.startap.net/translight/pages/applications/2006/datareservoir.html http://www.startap.net/translight/pages/applications/2006/da... [2]: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/the-speed-fantasy/story-GiZC93UFUEql7xoz12d98O.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/the-speed-fantasy/story...
- The_rationalist 6y agoWasn't the last record (2014) of 255TBs? https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fastest-network-could-carry-all-the-internet-traffic-single-fiber https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fa...
- oarsinsync 6y agoThat was over 1km utilising 7 cores. Typical fibre plants use one core per direction (transmit / receive). This is over 75km utilising a single core per direction. IE this is actually something that has potential to be deployed in the world without having to replace all the existing fibre plants that already exist (eg undersea cables)
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- souterrain 6y agoIt would be interesting to see if EDFAs also do not require retrofit.
- fnord77 6y ago> The highest commercial internet speed anywhere in the world is currently in Singapore, where the average download speed is 197.3 megabits per second (mbps). what?
- notaplumber 6y agoYeah, this confuses me. Gigabit is available in several places in North America. I had to check the date on the article.. posted 20 hours ago. Yep. Still confused.
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- z3t4 6y agoIn Sweden we have 10Gbe consumer Internet for $40/month
- thejynxed 6y agoTo be fair, here we have some counties as large as Sweden with fewer people living in them.
- snovv_crash 6y ago... and then put a wifi router in front of it, am I right?
- keenmaster 6y agoIs anyone knowledgable on the implications of the underlying tech once it gets commercialized? Obviously things like game streaming would be improved.
- throwawaygh 6y agoWe will be able to make comments complaining about bloated JavaScript libraries at lightning speed.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoAren’t gamers primarily concerned with latency rather than speed?
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoThey said game streaming, which makes me think s/he's talking about things like Twitch and Mixer, livestreaming platforms that do depend on throughput for high quality video.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoSorry, yes, I see that now.
- thejynxed 6y agoWell, if you use things like nVidia Shield for remote streaming you want both.
- vaer-k 6y agoAccording to https://hpbn.co/primer-on-latency-and-bandwidth/#bandwidth-in-core-networks https://hpbn.co/primer-on-latency-and-bandwidth/#bandwidth-i... > As of early 2010, researchers have been able to multiplex over 400 wavelengths with the peak capacity of 171 Gbit/s per channel, which translates to over 70 Tbit/s of total bandwidth for a single fiber link! So why/how is 44 Tbps an improvement?
- detaro 6y agoThe improvement here seems to be "single chip" source.
- vaer-k 6y agoAh ok, so according to the article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16265-x.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16265-x.pdf), > To dramatically increase bandwidthcapacity, ultrahigh capacity transmission links employ massivelyparallel wavelength division multiplexing and > All of this is driving the need forincreasingly compact, low-cost and energy-efficient solutions and > The ability to supply all wavelengths with a single, compact integrated chip,replacing many parallel lasers, will offer the greatest benefits So it's not really so much news in the sense that existing speeds over fiber have been improved, but instead in the sense that the speed produced by this single chip is a viable compact, low-cost and energy-efficient alternative to many parallel chips
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- billme 6y agoGiven the cost of laying fiber lines across the ocean and this tech (appears) to double the capacity of an existing line, why would there not be a push to get this into use, what am I missing?
- detaro 6y agoThis is a field that's constantly being worked on, not sure why you say there isn't a "push" in it. This specific thing is not faster than previous results, but more compact. Long-distance fiber lines also have amplifiers along the way, so you can't just scale them up by changing the endpoints if it doesn't match the capability of the in-line hardware.
- billme 6y agoCost of swapping the amplifiers, not just the end-points, makes sense as an issue. Thanks! As for it being “only more compact” not a capacity increase, for a comparable single coherent optical fiber line, are existing fibers filled to capacity due to the limits of tech, economies, physics, etc. - if physics, then I assume all fibers are at capacity, right?
- dasudasu 6y agoIf you're going to lay a fiber across the oceans, then yeah, that capacity is going to approach the Shannon limit, but at some point there is a calculation to be made about how expensive it is to use all that capacity vs using multi-core fibers or just laying out more fibers. The economics of it are pretty interesting. A single fiber (non-submarine) is about ¢8 a meter in raw cost, and it said that they laid out so many during the telecom bubble of the late 1990s that there are still many unused (so-called dark) fiber networks throughout the US. See for example https://www.ofsoptics.com/lighting-up-dark-fiber/ https://www.ofsoptics.com/lighting-up-dark-fiber/
- cycomanic 6y agoThat is incorrect the amplifiers have the capacity to amplify lots of channels simultaneously. So it is sufficient to only upgrade the endpoints (unless your fibre is full, where full means the bandwidth of the amplifiers, ~100 Tb/s for a single fibre). This has in fact been the driver behind the tremendous growth in data rates we have seen in the last 30 years. Operators can incrementally upgrade links by upgrading the endpoints. To transfer a MB across the network was 100s of $ in the 90s and is now essentially free (it's like 10e-4 cents or sol
- ganzuul 6y agoI have this funny idea about a waveguide interconnect, where MIMO radios address each other inside the manifold. You could get pretty decent bus width through e.g QAM and with beam steering probably simultaneous data links. Of course it could be made to look cool as hell, complex microwave plumbing with integrated heatsink replacing a plain old mainboard. :)
- cycomanic 6y agoThis has actually been a big research topic over the last 8 years or so. The keywords are space division multiplexing (SDM) and in particular Mode division multiplexing (MDM)
- dasudasu 6y agoIt is not particularly hard to do a "hero" experiment like this. Shannon limits to fiber transmission have pretty much been reached experimentally a long time ago. Muxing several wavelengths together is also of course the backbone of fiber optics transmission since its very origin. The current buzz in the field is to use micro-combs like they did as opposed to an array of lasers to provide the multiple wavelengths - but it still comes with its particular set of challenges to make it practical. The micro-comb provides the other wavelengths from a single source through a nonlinear process. My understanding from just looking quickly at the paper is that they don't modulate all the wavelengths independently, meaning that they duplicate the info they send several times to reach that high terabit rate. The laser source is only one part of a transceiver, and once you have 400+ independent modulators/receivers, the laser source becomes a much smaller concern when it comes to make it practical. A conventional laser source can be made very compact too (in a semiconductor platform) and integrated with the rest of the transceiver on the same chip. This is still where the industry is putting its efforts. These micro-combs come with some disadvantages too, relating to stability, low SNR, and uneven power among the wavelengths (that then need to be equalized).
- cycomanic 6y agoI agree with you that microcombs come with their specific kind of challenges (and SNR is the big one), however making many semiconductor lasers so small as too fit 100 on a single chip poses lots of challenges (in particular thermal management and wavelength stability). That said, combs (not necessarily microcombs) over opportunities for additional functionality/optimizations. Because the comb lines are locked to each other (normally individual lasers have small wavelength fluctuations) let's you space channels even closer together, as well as process multiple channels at the same time. Regarding your comment about these hero experiments not being hard, I would argue it's actually the other way around, we are now so close to the limits that it is becoming incredibly hard to observe further gains. Also regarding not modulating lines independently, this is the common way how everyone (even the industry labs) demonstrates these systems, using 100 independent transceivers would be prohibitevely expensive, moreover research has shown that you actually receive a penalty from using this approach so the demonstration is a lower bound on what could be achieved with individual tx modules.
- acd 6y agoLooking forward to a 1 terabit/second home Internet connection.
- andarleen 6y agoOne can barely get 1Gbps connections in the UK, and in most parts even 10Mbps is a lot. TBps may have to wait a few eons.
- lostlogin 6y ago> The highest commercial internet speed anywhere in the world is currently in Singapore, where the average download speed is 197.3 megabits per second (mbps). I’m very surprised by this. I would have assumed the leading country would have had something a lot closer to gigabit. ‘Good enough’ must be the user reaction. Years of terrible connections have left me chasing down every last bit, even though fibre is now installed.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoI wonder if that figure includes WISPs and cellular, which would bring down the average considerably.
- ksec 6y agoBecause that assumption would means everyone is getting a GPON / Fibre Network. In reality even if 20% of the nation is still connected via ADSL, your average speed would have been significantly lowered. I still think we haven't fully solved the last mile problem yet. Fibre installation still sucks for most people. And vast majority of new home dont have additional pipes for Fibre built in.
- kneel 6y agoThe human penis still reigns supreme at 13500 terabits/sec
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agotl;dr: "chips with friggin laser beams attached to their head"
- rayiner 6y agoIt’s not “internet speed” if you can’t route at that speed.
- wbl 6y agoBundled links via ECMP or even round robin are a valid strategy.
- myrandomcomment 6y agoA single flow hashs to a single link, so a file transfer is at the speed of a single link in a ECMP group if ECMP method is normal Ethernet switching.
- mcnamaratw 6y agoThe article seems to be comparing a hero experiment to access rates. Why not at least compare to telecom backbone rates? You can do at least 1.6 Tbps per fiber, long haul, with commercially available gear. If we use telecom hero experiments as the standard, 44 Tbps is not the record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Standard_fibre_cables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Stan...
- kraussvonespy 6y agoEven this wouldn't be enough bandwidth for my clueless wifi users who complain when speedtests on their smartphone show 70mbps. "Is there enough bandwidth to do what you need to do? Yes? Then shut up."