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New Data Transmission Speed Record 262

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sixty-dvd-minus dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmag is reporting that a team of German and Japanese scientists have collaborated to shatter the world record for data transmission speed. From the article: "By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower."
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New Data Transmission Speed Record More

New Data Transmission Speed Record

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  • 2.56 Terabits = ? (Score:4, Funny)

    by mattydont ( 849321 ) <mattydont@hotmail.com> on Sunday March 26, 2006 @02:40AM (#14996710)
    Anti-Slashdoting for a webhost.

    • Re:2.56 Terabits = ? (Score:3, Informative)

      by bioteq ( 809524 )
      Not true, actually.

      Most slashdotting happens because of hardware issues, not upstream bandwidth.

      Although, 2tb of bandwidth would be freakin' amazing for some stuff for a botnet to get ahold of..

      Quick! Everyone call up the nearest script kiddie and get to work!

  • Terabits per second!? (Score:4, Funny)

    by SillySnake ( 727102 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @02:41AM (#14996714)
    What kind of measurement is that? Why can't we use something everyone understands like u-haul trucks full of dvd's driving 100 kilometers per fortnight*10^(-6)?
    For the uninitiated, that's a microfortnight.

  • How much in terms of (Score:3, Funny)

    by anandpur ( 303114 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @02:44AM (#14996719)
    How much it is in terms of "a station wagon full of magtape" or Library of Congress.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_strange_units _of_measurement#Books_and_Bible [wikipedia.org]
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_strange_units _of_measurement#Library_of_Congress [wikipedia.org]

  • 60 DVDs per second (Score:5, Funny)

    by craXORjack ( 726120 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @02:46AM (#14996726)
    (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs)

    Wow, converting to MPAA units that's 300 years of jail time per second! Smokin!

  • Why is bandwidth measured in Kb (Score:4, Interesting)

    by b00m3rang ( 682108 ) * on Sunday March 26, 2006 @02:47AM (#14996727)
    and storage in KB? It's not like we measure radio waves in cycles per second and sound waves in cycles per 8 seconds. What's the advantage?

    • Re:Why is bandwidth measured in Kb (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blazer1024 ( 72405 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @02:57AM (#14996757)
      One reason is because it's serial data generally, and you don't know exactly how many of those bits are going to be data.. (you could have start or stop bits, etc)... but I don't know the details of that, so I'll just mention my other possible reason.

      It's that throughput is generally what actually matters when sending data. In other words, that how much actual payload is being send, minus any overhead. If you've got a decent amount of overhead, your actual throughput might be a bit less. So it makes more sense to talk about bandwidth in bits per second, so as not to confuse it with actual throughput.
    • Kilobits sounds faster to the masses, as the number is eight times bigger. My 4Mbit line sounds pretty pathetic when called the 512Kbyte line that it is. Of course, it would make a stronger case if it was an 8Mbit/1Mbyte line so the unit prefix is the same, but you get the idea.

      In short: marketing.

    • Mainly ISP marketing/competition, its much more impressive to offer an 8 megabit connection instead of a 1 megabyte connection... Joe User would pick 3Mb over 1MB because 3>1, even though the 1MB connection would be much faster.
    • Because if you measure an early modem's bandwidth in KB it sounds really really pathetic. It's just a marketing thing that's stuck, like how hard drives are measured in fake smaller GB (yeah, yeah, ISO, GiB, suck my balls) even though RAM and so on are in real GB.
    • A byte, or octet, is a higher-level concept. When you do the math for communications channels, you work with bits and symbols, not bytes. Also, the prefixes for units are proper SI prefixes, not the non-standard powers of 2 used in the computer industry.
    • One thing that measuring in bits makes easy is conversion between Mb and bits is on a power of 10 basis. 1000000bs is equal to 1Mbs instead of .95Mbs or so. For this reason alone I prefer it over a byte measurement.

  • And so it begins (Score:3, Funny)

    by Darby ( 84953 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:00AM (#14996769)
    Well folks, time to gear up.

    We know what happens when the Germans and the Japanese collaborate ;-)

     

    • We know what happens when the Germans and the Japanese collaborate ;-)


      The Italians are already trying to find ways to use this technology to make the trains run on time.
    • Don't look now, but I think the French just preemptively surrendered.
      This was shortly before the Italians announced their adoption of the new method. Which was shortly followed by their switch back to the Western standards.
    • The historical accuracy can not be conveyed so easily. Here goes:

      Germany and Japan had a secret alliance. Japan agreed that whomever Germany declared war against, Japan would follow suit, and vice versa. Japan delcared war against the United States of America on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. The following day, the United States declared war on the country of Japan. Because of the secret reciprocal agreement between Germany and Japan, Germany was forced to declare war on the United States.
      At this t
      • So technically, it was the Japanese who liberated Europe?

        • Re:And so it begins (Score:3, Insightful)

          by swillden ( 191260 )

          So technically, it was the Japanese who liberated Europe?

          If you want to look at it that way, it was the Soviets who liberated Europe. Hitler's decision to attack Russia was the beginning of the end for Germany. The Eastern Front diverted and tied down much of Germany's military power, in a conflict that they were almost certain to lose. No one will know for sure, of course, but it's probable that the allies eventually would have liberated Europe even without the direct involvement of the US. The end

      • Germany was no longer fighting a dual-front war, with Russia at the east and England at the west. Germany was now fighting a three-front war, with the third front being the United States.

        A "front" is a geographical region along which a fight is taking place. When you count fronts, you count the number of regions in which substantial (for the conflict) fighting is taking place. The number of opposing nations or organizations doesn't matter.

        Although Germany was involved in the conflict in Africa and in

    • Re:And so it begins (Score:4, Funny)

      by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @11:23AM (#14997953) Homepage
      Well folks, time to gear up.

      We know what happens when the Germans and the Japanese collaborate ;-)

      Yeah, breaded and deep fried sushi, dark beer in small cups, and Teryaki sausages, LOTS of cabbage, and bubble-tea streusel.

      Oh, the humanity of it all.
  • for when you get this at your place :

    http://www.onzin.nl/internetdownload/ [onzin.nl]
  • I'm calling my cable company to see if I can pay $25,000/month to get the data rate. Needless to say this will increase the downloads of my extremely intelligent blog.

  • A 160-kilometer link? (Score:3, Funny)

    by __aawfbm2023 ( 870942 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:56AM (#14996884)
    Equivalent to 160,000 metres and 160,000,000 millimetres!
  • Vista will require this much bandwidth as a minimum, to download security patches and have them rendered in erotic 3D by the compulsory 4Tb graphics card, when it is released in THE YEAR 3000.
  • The researcher assumes the transmission capacity on the large transoceanic traffic links will need to increase to between 50 and 100 terabits per second in ten to 20 years. "This kind of capacity will only be feasible with the new high-performance systems."

    160 kilometers? large transoceanic traffic link? When 10,000 kilometers of non-repeated distance can be achieved, I'll be impressed. Until then it's nothing but a bragging right.
    • Optical fiber gives you a loss of approx a quarter dB per km (0.25 dB/km) - which is very close to the theoretical limit of current glass optical fibers. At 160 km, that gives you an attenuation in your optical signal of about 40 dB. All-optical amplifiers - EDFAs - (without signal regeneration, just plain amplification) can give you a good boost in power and you can cascade many before the signal becomes too distorted (because each amplifier amplifies both the noise and the signal). An other type of al
  • "...researchers have now managed to squeeze more data into a single pulse by packing four, instead of the previous two, binary data states in a light pulse using phase modulation."

    Is this similar to DDR memory where they pack info into the upward swing of the wave, and on the downward swing, as well as the troughs and peaks of the waves?

  • 60 DVD:s per second... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MadTinfoilHatter ( 940931 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @04:22AM (#14996932)
    ...and in related news, the spokesman for the MPAA is currently unable to comment due to suffering a heart attack.
  • i could be wrong, but isn't that like faster than the communications between parts in a computer including RAM? is there a computer that can feed that much data that fast?

    • Re:faster than ram (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @05:38AM (#14997099) Journal
      The target use for something like this is Internet backbone traffic, so the question is whether Cisco will be able to deliver a router that will keep the line busy. Cisco's web site says "the innovative 12000 Terabit System scales to 5 Terabits (Tbps) per second ".
    • No, the speed of electronics limits the overall transmision rate on an optical channel. But, scientists know that optical fibers have a very wide available bandwidth. How can we exploit it, even though the electronics are slow? We use different colors of light. Each color sends a signal of, let's say, 40 Gbps, and electronic components can deal with that. If we have hundreds of different light colors going into a single fiber, we multiply the bit rate and the transmission capacity is increased signific

  • Single-channel only (Score:3, Informative)

    by Soft ( 266615 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @05:25AM (#14997066)
    To be sure, I believe this is a single-wavelength transmission record. For WDM (multiwavelength), I believe Alcatel's 2002 record of 10 Tbps over 3 x 100 km still hasn't been topped (Frignac et al, OFC 2002 [ieee.org]).
    • Yeah, the article is not clear on that detail, but I am aware of the record you are talking about. Nevertheless, 2.56 Tbps is nothing too impressive nowadays if it is using WDM.
  • This will...
    A.) Make internet (connection fees) 50x cheaper.
    2.) Finally still western telecoms complaining about the difficulties of offering fast service.
    3.) Be considered too expensive to implement until someone who can't be bribed or bough enters the telecom game.
    4.) Never see the light of day.
    5.) Be implemented perfectly showing the telecommunications industy has a commitment to quality!
  • I'm not sure what the utility of this is right now. In theory I could send 5.12 terabits/sec down a cable by getting the laser to flash on and off twice as quickly. That doesn't mean I've encoded any data or that I've been able to process that data at the other end in a meaningful way.

    It's great that the transmission hardware is up to silly speeds, but until you can take that incoming data and packet switch/route it properly, until there are servers that can process even a tenth of that data in a meaningful
  • The article says nothing about how long they can *sustain* it for. I mean, great. They can transfer 282 GByte in one second. If they can only do it for one second before the system breaks down, then I really don't care. Call me when they make a system that can transfer that data rate indefinitely.
  • In other news, it was reported that top officials of the RIAA and the MPAA were planning aggressive litigation to halt this progress citing 'Won't someone please think of the rampant piracy this technology will foster'. 'We believe that consumers cannot be allowed access to this kind of bandwidth'.
  • DSL stinks and Cable Co's aren't interested in providing more unless there's more competition.

    This is public muni FTTH FIOS is important . More transmission speed and better value.

    The cable co's don't want anything to compete against their channels. That would be stupid. They are holding everyone back.

    The internet backbone also doesn't want more transmission speed. They are just phone companies that want to gouge people.

    If we could bypass all of them with a national fiber network.........
    • Doesn't seem like a problem to me. Here in VA ("Commonwealth" USA), the state has begun the process of deregulating cable and allowing for competition. As soon as the state lawmakers began the discussion, Cox, the local cable provider, began providing new "services" for free. Coincidence? Capitalism wins the day...

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