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submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 145 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

xfinity will advertise 100 Tbps lines with the abysmal 1.5 TB/mo data cap anyway

"you can drive this super sport car for $ per month - but only for 10 miles"

[-] wildbus8979 102 points 3 months ago

100Tbps downloads speeds (5Mbps upload)

[-] sugar_in_your_tea 46 points 3 months ago
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[-] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

Aren't fiber lines typically symmetrical? At least that's how I've usually seen them advertised.

[-] wildbus8979 52 points 3 months ago

You underestimate the fuckery that ISPs will go through to offer the least amount of services for the most possible money.

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago

Don’t be silly son, the free market will signal there is opportunity and prices will drop and quality will go up.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago
[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

All fed to you on the not updated data line that caps at 800 MBps

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[-] [email protected] 76 points 3 months ago
[-] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago

Do you know how fast you were going?

Faster than broadband...

[-] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Faster than "[...] the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"?

(Quoted: Tanenbaum, 1981)

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[-] [email protected] 51 points 3 months ago

Distances though? I've seen similar breakthroughs in the past but it was only good for networking within the same room.

[-] [email protected] 62 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It's optical fiber so it's good for miles. Unlikely to be at home for decades but telcos will use it for connecting networks.

Optical fiber is already 100 gigabit so the article comparing it to your home connection is stupid.

So the scientist improved current fiber speed by 10x, not 1.2 million X.

[-] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago

Note they did not say 1.2 million times faster than fiber. Instead they compared it to the broadband definition; an obvious choice of clickbait terminology.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It’s optical fiber so it’s good for miles.

OM1 through OM4 have full rate distances of less than 800 meters.

Yes there is faster stuff that goes for literal miles but saying that optical fiber can always go miles is incorrect.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

To be fair it's obviously meant that they're talking about singlemode and not multimode.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

No one said “always”; original comment is correct that fiber can literally go miles

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

It’s much more than just 100Gb/s.

A single fiber can carry over 90 channels of 400G each. The public is mislead by articles like this. It’s like saying that scientists have figured out how to deliver the power of the sun, but that technology would be reserved for the power company’s generation facilities, not your house.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Its not stupid at all. "Broadband" speed is a term that laypeople across the country can at least conceptualize. Articles like this aren't necessarily written exclusively for industry folks. If the population can't relate to the information well, how can they hope to pressure telcos for better services?

[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

So it's fine if an article says Space X develops a new rocket that travels 100x faster than a car?

Because that implies a breakthrough when it's actually not significantly faster than other rockets: it's the speed needed to reach the ISS.

10X faster than existing fiber would be accurate reporting. Especially given that there are labs that have transmitted at peta bit speeds over optical already. So terabit isn't significant, only his method.

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[-] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago

And 1.2 million times less likely to be available to the public

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[-] [email protected] 35 points 3 months ago

Cool I'll be able to download CoD in just a few hours.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago

With data caps, you can now go over your limit 1.2 billion times faster!

[-] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago

It's compared to the average broaband speed in the UK, so it's not quite as exciting as it might sound ...

[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

So it’s barely faster than my phones internet when I’m traveling through nature.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago
[-] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago

I remember the early 90's when fiber connection was being developed in research centers.

Researchers had found a way to transmit all of a country's phone calls' bandwidth through a simple fiber cable. Then, they wondered: what could we use this for?

This was a few years before the explosion of the internet...

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

With further refinement and scaling, internet providers could ramp up standard speeds without overhauling current fiber optic infrastructures.

Don't worry. They'll find some way to use this to justify massive rate increases.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

We must make ISPs a public service owned by the people. Who can argue that internet isn't essential to being a regular member of society? These companies rob us and use their monopolies to manipulate us.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

Wow! That site sucks on mobile.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

PopSci in general has seen better days. I tried subscribing again to their physical magazines and it's just a mess... There were more full page cigarette ads than interesting articles.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

remember kids, commit arson against your local ISP, and you will only be arrested for probably 20 years.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

I'm highly suspicious about group dispersion over long distances. Today's infrastructure was developed for a certain range of frequencies. Broading it right away wouldn't be applicable that easy - we would need to introduce error correction which compromises the speed multiplier.

Too lazy to get the original paper though

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[-] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

First of all some corrections:

By constructing a device called an optical processor, however, researchers could access the never-before-used E- and S-bands.

It's called an amplifier not processor, the Aston University page has it correct. And at least the S-band has seen plenty of use in ordinary CWDM systems, just not amplified. We have at least 20 operational S-band links at 1470 and 1490 nm in our backbone right now. The E-band maybe less so, because the optical absorption peak of water in conventional fiber sits somewhere in the middle of it. You could use it with low water peak fiber, but for most people it hasn't been attractive trying to rent spans of only the correct type of fiber.

the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum

No, it does not, the S-band is between them. It goes O-band, E-band, S-band, C-band, L-band, for "original" and "extended" on the left side, and "conventional", flanked by "short" and "long" on the right side.

Now to the actual meat: This is a cool material science achievement. However in my professional opinion this is not going to matter much for conventional terrestrial data networks. We already have the option of adding more spectrum to current C-band deployments in our networks, by using filters and additional L-band amplifiers. But I am not aware of any network around ours (AS559) that actually did so. Because fundamentally the question is this:

Which is cheaper:

  • renting a second pair of fiber in an existing cable, and deploying the usual C-band equipment on the second pair,
  • keeping just one pair, and deploying filters and the more expensive, rarer L-band equipment, or
  • keeping just one pair, and using the available C-band spectrum more efficiently with incremental upgrades to new optics?

Currently, for us, there is enough spectrum still open in the C-band. And our hardware supplier is only just starting to introduce some L-band equipment. I'm currently leaning towards renting another pair being cheaper if we ever get there, but that really depends on where the big buying volume of the market will move.

Now let's say people do end up extending to the L-band. Even then I'm not so sure that extending into the E- and S- bands as the next further step is going to be even equally attractive, for the simple reason that attenuation is much lower at the C-band and L-band wavelengths.

Maybe for subsea cables the economics shake out differently, but the way I understand their primary engineering constraint is getting enough power for amplifiers to the middle of the ocean, so maybe more amps, and higher attenuation, is not their favourite thing to develop towards either. This is hearsay though, I am not very familiar with their world.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago
[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

More bandwidth. The physical Bit already travels at the speed of light inside the cables

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[-] Steamymoomilk 5 points 3 months ago

My docter said i needed more fiber.

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this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
447 points (97.3% liked)

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