5 ms·
As a point of comparison, apparently people have been able to do one-direction data transmission in the petabit per second range over a single strand of fiber o
by elihu 3y ago
As a point of comparison, apparently people have been able to do one-direction data transmission in the petabit per second range over a single strand of fiber optic cable over a relatively short distance.
https://newatlas.com/telecommunications/optical-chip-fastest-data-transmission-record-entire-internet-traffic/ https://newatlas.com/telecommunications/optical-chip-fastest...
Space-based communication advances are good news, and I suppose a lot of the same fiber optic techniques are also applicable to free-space optics and vice versa.
It's really weird how effective fiber optic cable is at doing what it does. It seems like a rare thing when some technology is developed that's so many orders of magnitude better than it needed to be when it was invented that the limiting factor many decades later is still the equipment at each end rather than the fiber itself. And it's super cheap too -- the vast majority of the cost of fiber is the cladding and installation.
I expect the vast majority of terrestrial traffic to be over fiber for the foreseeable future (save for "last mile" wireless devices of all kinds, including cell phones and Starlink) except for latency-sensitive applications for which the speed of light in glass and non-straight-line routing is deemed too slow. Lasers are great for where fiber isn't available though, and for extreme distances through a vacuum. Aside from the obvious advantages of not requiring a cable, inverse-square falloff is less bad than exponential decay in glass due to impurities -- even if we could string a fiber optic cable from Earth to Mars, we'd still need repeaters at regular intervals.
- Aromasin 3y agoAs someone who designs networking chips for a living it's always entertaining to me when people get very excited over their new fiber optic cables, despite the fact their PHY/MAC doesn't support much over 1GbE. You can use Copper all the way up to 10GbE without too many issues. Fiber has a theoretical maximum of about 44Tb/s [1]. It's going to be a long time before we need to worry about advancing the link technology itself. We're getting a lot of the big telecom companies churning out a lot of 400GbE designs now with custom silicon/FPGAs though. 800GbE and 1.6TbE specs in the works by IEEE too [2]. It's amazing how far we've come since the 1000BASE-T back in 1999. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16265-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16265-x [2] https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-membership-news/the-journey-to-800gbe-and-more https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-memb...
- tetris11 3y agoAs someone who has rigged up his house with MOCA everywhere, I just want to say that coaxial cable is an impressive piece of ancient tech. It's just a piece of copper that vibrates at specific frequencies but the sheer level of multiplexing that goes into a single wire is impressive, simple, and reliable.
- tjoff 3y agoNot sure I follow, isn't the reason you are excited about fibre that it implies a good connection to the "backbone". Compared to DSL, cable or wireless which are is really limiting even in the 50mbit range (in practice). And for the distances we talk about you kind of get fibre anyway since it makes the most sense. But many do have a copper connection to their fibre, just the last stetch.
- Aromasin 3y agoI was just making a commentary on the traps some of our end-customers fall into, when they upgrade the connection to fiber thinking it will improve their network speeds when the protocol is in fact the limiting factor.
- dale_glass 3y agoWhat protocol? I can get 10 Gbps internet service right now.
- Aromasin 3y agoOf course; telecoms are always pushing the leading edge of data transfer would need fiber for 10/25/40/50/100/400GbE. Some of our customers are still making designs using Triple Speed 10/100/1000Mbps though. For embedded use cases that's good enough, but they still often needlessly spend more on fiber cables, regardless of necessity.
- dale_glass 3y ago
- zeristor 3y agoSomewhat ironically the best optical fibres are made in space, ZBLAN. https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/flightopportunities/NASA_Supported_Optical_Fiber_Manufacturing_Arrives_at_Space_Station https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/flightopportunit... I guess the have better optical clarity and so need less repeaters to span the oceans.
- londons_explore 3y agoThe real question is if these fibers are sufficiently better to be worth making an industrial scale fiber factory in space...
- wolfram74 3y agoApparently some test plants have been on station since 2022[0], I interpret the report to be they are still working on ways to get it to operate meaningfully with sufficiently little babysitting. [0]https://www.factoriesinspace.com/zblan-and-exotic-fibers https://www.factoriesinspace.com/zblan-and-exotic-fibers
- londons_explore 3y agoThing is, If they want to manufacture tens of thousands of kilometers of fiberoptic, they're probably gonna need something at a scale bigger than can be done on the ISS. Which in turn means they will need to launch their own manufacturing spacecraft which is fully autonomous.
- x-complexity 3y ago> It's really weird how effective fiber optic cable is at doing what it does. When you can isolate the external noise away from the communication medium, it's astounding how much data you can cram in it.
- dylan604 3y agoFibre optic is kind of cheating as a comparison though. You don't have to precisely aim the laser at the receiver while moving at an impressive speed.