DailyDirt: Speedy Connections In The Future
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Who doesn’t like a fast broadband connection? The faster, the better! The only problem seems to be that there are some capacity limits with current technology. Details, details. But what if there were some technologies that could vastly increase those capacity limits? There might be some awkward situations where fiber-based internet service wasn’t as fast as a wireless connection. Perhaps ingrained data cap pricing tiers would still stick around? Here are just a few developments that could bring much faster broadband (someday, maybe).
- Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs set a broadband record of 10 Gbps over traditional copper telephone lines in 2014. There are some practical limitation, such as the distance couldn’t be too far and the copper line quality probably needs to be a bit better than the 100yo stuff running into some homes. Still, the work is pushing the limits of copper further, and there are some predictions that 40 Gbps speeds over copper are on the way. [url]
- Researchers at Columbia University have created full-duplex radio integrated circuits that could effectively double frequency spectrum resources. Devices made with this technology could transmit and receive data over the same frequency at the same time, but obviously this capability is going to take some time to get into commercial gadgets. [url]
- The orbital angular momentum (OAM) property of electromagnetic waves could provide nearly limitless data capacity. It might take a really, really long time to see this get out of the lab and into commercial products, but when/if it does, we might never hear about exoflood FUD again. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: bell labs, broadband, copper, data cap, exaflood, fiber, oam, orbital angular momentum, wireless
Comments on “DailyDirt: Speedy Connections In The Future”
Fantastic work as always.
Sheer fantasy.
Re: Fantastic work as always.
Heh, this setup unblocked for that one shot. We’ll see if Masnick can continue to censor me.
Re: Re: Fantastic work as always.
OH, you didn’t know Masnick censors? Yes, he’s sneaky at that too.
Re: Re: Fantastic work as always.
Have you had the decency to thank him for giving you meaning and purpose in life?
Now, here's an interesting item:
http://antiwar.com/blog/2015/03/18/google-disables-all-ads-on-antiwar-com/
Begging the question
Sorry, but if we’re talking about speed, we’re generally talking about “throughput” which is a function of bandwidth and latency.
There is _NO_ necessary tradeoff between any element of the three. [The exception being geostationary or low-earth orbit satellites].
Anyone who says “I can get you lots of bandwidth but you have to give up [anything including latency]” is lying.
Anyone who says “I can give you lighting fast connections but you have to give up [something including bandwidth]” is lying.
Throughput is what WE as human users of the Internet see. When you quantify it we know what we are buying. When some charlatan tells us there’s a tradeoff — the tradeoff involves that charlatan not selling us what he/she promised, and instead doing an oversell model and THEY are choosing to trade off one of the three.
If you purchase good throughput, you’ll have good throughput (bandwidth, latency, etc.)
If you follow these charlatans’ stories you will pay more for less. That’s ok. It’s the American way. Just don’t confuse it with ‘the reality of things’.
E
Re: Begging the question
Just to be clear, you’re saying there is such a thing as high speed low latency connections, right? That doesn’t mean such a thing is always available on any given infrastructure.
Re: Begging the question
“Anyone who says “I can get you lots of bandwidth but you have to give up [anything including latency]” is lying.”
That’s not true as an absolute statement. As an example, any parcel delivery service can be used as an extremely high bandwidth, extremely high latency network connection.
As the old saying goes, don’t underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CDs.
I feel sorry for all the writers who invested so much of their time telling us over and over about how BPL would be The Next Big Thing in broadband.
The real question is what good would those connection speeds be when at best there will still be stingy bandwidth caps (and therefore not make the most of otherwise blazing speed) and at worst doing just about anything that even mildly annoys the establishment would be illegal?
Extra bandwidth never hurts but I believe the future is about replacing copper with something better for communications. Maybe it’s fiber idk. Still, on places where it may not be feasible or on the last mile it may be a cheaper alternative so such researches are very welcome.
Wireless
I didn’t understand it all, but in the OAM story I saw mention of a 32GBps wireless link. That was only 2.5 meters, but even if it ends up being just a small fraction of that speed at long distances, it would still be a huge improvement.
32GBps...
32GBps? Capital B for Bytes so x8 = 256Gbps? lol.
> even if it ends up being just a small fraction of that speed at long distances, it would still be a huge improvement.
A huge improvement over what?
You can’t use it.
The fastest NIC you have is 1Gbps. The fastest home router NIC is 1Gbps. If you wanted to spend $5-$50K to get a Cisco Nexus 5000 or a Juniper MX-80 you can have 10Gbps links.
There’s *NOTHING* you can get that will support or use 32Gbps.
It would not be a huge improvement. You’re just a sucker for someone’s marketing department that put stupid-big numbers in front of you.
THROUGHPUT is what we humans care about. If you don’t like big words it’s “the web page loads super fast man.” That’s what we want.
32Gbps? lol.
Re: 32GBps...
32GBps? Capital B for Bytes so x8 = 256Gbps? lol.
Sounds nice, huh? No, that should have been a lower case b.
A huge improvement over what?
Over what we have today.
You can’t use it.
We couldn’t use HDTV broadcasts before we had HD TVs either. Couldn’t use 4G before we had 4G devices. And so on, and so on. This would be no different.
You’re just a sucker for someone’s marketing department
Perhaps you didn’t read the article (or even the summary of it?). This isn’t marketing, it’s research.
32Gbps? lol.
Exactly what many people have said about many technologies we now use daily. Will this be one of them? Beats me, but it sure sounds interesting, and I hope it goes well.