Nokia to demonstrate a technique for terabit-speed data over optical-fiber

http://www.zdnet.com/article/think-google-fibers-fast-nokia-to-show-off-tech-thats-1000-times-faster/

by wallflower • 10 years ago

104 49 10 years ago

DigitalSea• 10 years ago

I am barely able to get a 20mb ADSL2 connection here in Australia, let alone 100mb. I know I won't live to see even a 1gb connection speed becoming available in Australia in my lifetime. Lab conditions and real world conditions are two different things. You can have a fast connection, but if the bandwidth isn't there to meet the demand, then you just end up with a fast link to the exchange and then from there, it's plain old slow internet.

colechristensen2• 10 years ago

This is all about core networks, the comparison to residential surface is just bad journalism.

It seems, reading between the lines, that they were able to make 10x bandwidth improvements over existing fiber with fancy new physical layer encoding (QAM with some statistical magic)

And it's not in a lab, they're experiments between major German cities.

visarga• 10 years ago

If it means replacing much of the current fiber optic equipment it's not going to be popular soon.

boyter• 10 years ago

If you voted liberal in the last election then sorry you made your bed, otherwise I sympathise. This if for backbone infrastructure though and I think it's likely you will see gigabit connections in the next 10 years just at an enormous cost to the taxpayer or through 5G or some such.

scurvy• 10 years ago

Well, you do live in probably the most Internet-hostile part of the world.

amazon_not9• 10 years ago

I can think of a few more hostile places. Cuba is doing well to qualify, but North Korea is still king of the hill.

z3t4• 10 years ago

its a community management problem. If only you connect it will be costly, but if a few hundred people come together it will be cheap.

Keyframe• 10 years ago

Have you lived through 9600bps or 14.4k to 20Mbps?

rasz_pl2• 10 years ago

problems in Australia are entirely of political nature (corruption/collusion).

There is absolutely ZERO reason for national fiber backbone to enforce data cap limits and encourage metered plans, but there it is, in Australia. Countries considered an ass of Europe like Romania roll on the floor laughing at you ($15 unmetered 1Gbit home connections).

amazon_not9• 10 years ago

I agree with you that the nature of the problem in Australia is political, but not that the main root cause is corruption/collusion.

The main problem is that the politicians made promises they cannot keep: cheap fiber to everyone at the same price, at no cost to the state since it will pay back itself.

Well, turns out it's not cheap to build out fiber to everyone, costs differ enormously between the city and the bush and there isn't enough revenue coming in to pay for it.

Since no politician will ever admit they were wrong, consumer prices can't be raised and the buildout cannot be stopped.

Desperate to save money and face, the politicians opted to switch to DSL from fiber, bought up all cable tv companies to substitute CATV for fiber, forbid any competition with the national fiber company and proceeded to squeeze every last penny out of the Internet service providers, since they couldn't touch the consumer prices.

While there are zero reasons for data caps and metered plans, the national fiber network is so expensive to use, ISPs have no other option but to use data caps and metering so as not to go out of business immediately.

The end result is very poor and very slow service on the national fiber network with customers complaining and wanting to stay on old ADSL connections, which is ironic. Unfortunately they can't since the copper network is being decommissioned, so as not to compete with the national fiber network and to bring in more money to the government owned company.

willvarfar• 10 years ago

Ok this is interesting tech and I like the light being shined on the remnants of Nokia occasionally, but the headline is misleading clickbait. They compare the new speed against today's fast consumer fiber, even though they say in the article that this is a new tech for backbones. It feels like the headline just tries to work "Google" into it as an adversary to get the clicks :(

Go go Nokia Bell, go away zdnet ;)

fulafel2• 10 years ago

"Researchers will this week demonstrate a newly-refined data-transmission technique that can deliver one terabit per second (Tbps) over optical fiber"

We already had 10 Tbps per fiber pair: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/231074-googles-faster-un...

Svenskunganka• 10 years ago

There's supposedly a 255Tbps multi-mode cable[0] as well.

[0] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fas...

amazon_not9• 10 years ago

Just to clarify this is not regular multi-mode fiber, but a single fiber with seven cores.

A singlemode fiber is limited to about 100 Tbps per fiber at 10 bits/s/Hz. It is not obvious to me how much bandwidth usage has to grow until it becomes more economical to deploy this new kind of fiber rather than multiple (existing) singlemode fibers. For example, for high bandwidth applications MPO connectors with 12 or 24 fibers per connectors are used.

JonnyaiR• 10 years ago

the main difference is, this demonstration uses cables within Telekoms Network - so it's no laboratory but a real-world-test. (german source: http://www.golem.de/news/saser-muenchner-forscher-uebertrage...)

fulafel2• 10 years ago

According to the article, FASTER has already entered service. It's the name of a deployed submarine cable, not a lab demo of new fiber technology.

DannyBee• 10 years ago

uh, the parent is talking about an in-operation undersea cable. So it's no laboratory, it's a cable deployed in really harsh conditions.

hodgesrm2• 10 years ago

What technology determines how cable bandwidth is segmented to different tenants on fiber optic trunk connections? In theory 10 Tbps would divide out to something like 1,000 dedicated 10Gbps L2 connections but I'm guessing there's a lot more to it than that.

Either way it's pretty cool to see the increases in trunk capacity. This is enabling for a huge range of applications.

(Edit: Bad math on bandwidth, must.have.coffee!)

amazon_not9• 10 years ago

Bandwidth can be segmented off using multiple technologies. Basically you can either dedicate wavelengths per tenant (typically 96 wavelengths on a DWDM system) or dedicate lower bitrates per customer (for example 1 Gbps) and mux them together with other traffic until you fill up a 10G or 100G wavelength.

perseusprime11• 10 years ago

Just a thought - maybe Google will buy the new Nokia this time to expand Fiber...

blisterpeanuts• 10 years ago

I'd love it if Google Fiber would come to my area (suburbs of eastern Mass.) regardless of speed! One gigabit sounds so much better than what we have now.

amazon_not9• 10 years ago

Google's problems in rolling out fiber is not with the equipment, it's in putting the actual cable on poles and in ducts. Buying Nokia would not help one bit with this.

jbi• 10 years ago

Too bad, Deutsche Telekom is blocking fiber built-up for customers in Germany by pushing VDSL vectoring.

tormeh• 10 years ago

Is that the reason for the slow fiber roll-out in Germany? I just looked at Berlin and there's a small neighborhood in Mitte that has it, otherwise there's nothing. Can't any other company than Telekom lay out fiber?

kayoone3• 10 years ago

Telekom are toying with (super) vectoring and g.fast to avoid having to roll out fiber to every household. I guess it makes financial sense because the are still moving the Network Access points closer to homes and these are usually connected with fibre. However this will work until 500-1000Mbps at best and probably only for a few people, so at some point they have to do FTTH especially because cable providers are already pushing 400Mbps in many places in Germany.

DNS.NET and Versatel (now 1&1) have their own fibre network in some areas of Berlin and they actually do FTTH if you are one of the lucky few. I live in a pretty dense and central area of Berlin and all i get is 50Mbps VDSL, because i want to avoid the cable providers that have an inferior network. For private usage it's still okay and i have access to 1Gbps at work, but i still can't wait for Vectoring to arrive.

qaq• 10 years ago

If memory serves there have being commercial multiplexers that could do that for a long time.

givinguflac• 10 years ago

I'm excited to hear the new BS excuses for data caps existing once common infrastructure can handle this bandwidth.

Nokia to demonstrate a technique for terabit-speed data over optical-fiber

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