4 ms·
This 'small scratch' can make Internet 60 times faster
- shawndrost 18y ago>sciencey_words/actual_content ERR: Divide by 0.
- ovi256 18y agoYeah, the article is a perfect example of what I call lolscience.
- wallflower 18y agoA little more content, still looking.. All-optical switching! Echoes of HAL2000. http://www.cudos.org.au/cudos/news/Jan08OpticsPhotonicsNews.pdf http://www.cudos.org.au/cudos/news/Jan08OpticsPhotonicsNews....
- wallflower 18y agoFound the paper!! Woohoo! Back to coding... "Error-free 640 Gbit/s demultiplexing using a chalcogenide planar waveguide chip" (small but tantalizing paper pg.8-9) > We have demonstrated, for the first time, error-free 640-to-10 Gbit/s optical time-division demultiplexing with a chalcogenide waveguide. Excellent performance is achieved with only 2 dB average power penalty. http://www.iceaustralia.com/aos2008/pdf/PDPProceedingsfinal.pdf http://www.iceaustralia.com/aos2008/pdf/PDPProceedingsfinal....
- sanj 18y agoHoly Orders of Magnitude, Batman! "except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks." picosecond = one millionth of one millionth of a second (0.000 000 000 001 seconds) "This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times." Huh? I thought it only took a picosecond!
- hugh 18y agoOrdinarily I'd blame journalistic innumeracy, but that's supposed to be a direct quote from the project head himself (a very smart guy, I used to work in the same building as him), so I assume it was a blunder by whoever prepared and sent out the press release.
- Retric 18y agoTime to switch is only part of the question you also need to send the data. If I where building a switch I would delay decoding the packet and just send the even packet's to one location and the odd packets to another and so you can double the time each location has to deal with a packet before it's got to decode the next one. Edit: and keep subdividing the packets like this until you can use fairly cheep processors to handle the load.
- sanj 18y agoExcept that the next sentence talks about terabit capacity, which does require picosecond switching.
- Retric 18y agoI don't think we are talking about the same thing, 1 picosecond * the speed of light = 0.2998 millimeters so a lightly longer cable and your packet is time shifted a few picoseconds. Anyway, The Switch 8800 has an impressive 1.44 Terabit-per-second backplane This does not mean it can route 1.44 trillion packets per second even if it can handle that many bits.
- hugh 18y agoAs I understand it, it's not really switching at all. Different signals are sent simultaneously down the same fibre at slightly different wavelengths. This device splits the signal into its individual components. This is the same as what's already done, except currently the splitting is done electronically -- here, it's all done in optics, which makes it a lot faster.
- TweedHeads 18y agoPatents and lawyers will never let it see daylight. Or they will make our asses bleed to pay for it.
- hugh 18y agoWhat, exactly, are you basing that on? Do you know of any patents which cover this particular area of innovation, or is that just your default response to any invention?
- jrockway 18y agoI think he thinks this site is Reddit, where you get instant mega-karma for saying anything cynical. Of course, the way to get karma here is to say something negative about Reddit :)
- maw 18y agoIt doesn't take much to get way faster than Telstra's network.