10 mo. ago • 99%

Japanese Institute breaks optical fiber speed record with 22.9 petabits per second — 1,000 times faster than existing cables

www.tomshardware.com Japanese Institute breaks optical fiber speed record with 22.9 petabits per second — 1,000 times faster than existing cables

Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.

69 comments

Yay I can't wait for Comcast to implement this so you can blow through your 1.2 TB data cap in a second so they can charge you $10 per every 50 GB that it goes over.

114
- It still shocks me that they cap usage. There is no reason at all to do this. Why are they doing it?
  
  56
  
  Their network is under provisioned. They sell an apartment building 300mbps connections to all 8 tenants, but only have a 1Gb connection. To make sure that link isn't always saturated, they impose a data cap to make you not want to use the bandwidth you're paying for. On top of that everyone's connection is crippled during hours like the evening when everyone is using it. As a bonus, they can sell you cable TV on top, so you don't hit your data cap watching shows.
  
  48
  
  Are you kidding? Lol. It's money. The answer is always money.
  
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  The only reason its ever been, money
  
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  Because businesses exist to make money, so they have to balance charging as much money to the customers as they can without losing them to a competitive company. That used to mean that they had to treat customers with respect and make them want to stay with the business, but now they've realized that they can just pay lawmakers to let them have a monopoly, allowing them to charge as much money to the customers as they want without worrying that they'll leave, since there's either no competition for them to leave to, or the competition is using the same strategy, so leaving wouldn't fix anything anyway. Free market, baby!
  
  6
  
  ISP shittiness aside, ISPs do actually pay for Internet backbone access by the byte. Usually there are peering agreements saying "you take 1tb of traffic from us, and we'll take 1tb of traffic from you", whether that traffic is destined for one of their customers (someone on Comcast scrolling Instagram), or they're just providing the link to the next major node (Comcast being the link between AT&T's segment of the US backbone and Big Mike's Internet out in podunk Nebraska).
  
  And normally that works pretty well, until power users start moving huge amounts of data and unbalancing the traffic.
  
  5
  
  It’s illegal for them to cap it in some jurisdictions (e.g. Massachusetts, where I live).
  
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- /thread
  
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This'll bring their fax machines up to the current century for sure.

75
For those wanting a bit of a summary.

transmitting up to 22.9 petabits per second (Pb/s) through a single optic cable composed of multiple fibers

The breakthrough isn’t things moving faster but more fibers per cable. So you can transfer more bits in parallel.

That’s still a good breakthrough because, for lots of reasons, packing more fibers in isn’t as straight forward as one would think.

70
- The breakthrough isn’t things moving faster but more fibers per cable.
  
  No, it's actually more cores per fiber, and using those very well for space division multiplexing on top of the normal wavelength division multiplexing. They are talking about 22.9 Pb/s per fiber, not cable, the Tom's Hardware article is just wrong.
  
  Cables can already contain hundreds of fibers, for example 576 here or into the thousands if you use stacks of ribbon cables in the subunits, for example 3456 here
  
  81
  
  Here's a source that backs up what you're talking about and proving that the TomsHardware article is wrong: https://www.nict.go.jp/en/press/2023/11/30-1.html
  
  61
  
  Am I to understand that the cable use has multiple cores within a single cladding? Interesting approach..
  
  Now we get to classify them as singlemode, multimode, and multiestmode.
  
  8
  
  This is really interesting. Thank you for providing good insight!
  
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What's the use of high speed when videos are pixeleted 😅😅😅😅😅

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- haha the joke is porn haha guys get it i have a porn addiction look at me ahahhaahha
  
  -3
  
  How did you extract that from the post lmao
  
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Wallstreet just put in a bulk order.

33
- The financial types are generally more interested in hollow core fiber, to get their latencies even further down for high frequency trading. Because light travels at almost c in hollow core but only at 2/3 c in fiber core.
  
  29
  
  So is hollow core fiber a vacuum or is it just hollow? I've never heard of that tech.
  
  3
- Actually Wall Street intentionally increases their latency
  
  Some guy figured out that trades were getting sniped due to some locations having more latency than others relative to the trade location, so he developed a solution that intentionally lags the connection on different wires so that everyone gets their trade updates simultaneously and can't snipe each other to up the prices on other people's buys.
  
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Is this a Portal reference? I remember hearing it from GLADOS!

20
- Indeed it is
  
  11
  
  Yay for Portal and Portal 2!!!
  
  1
- I heard the voice line as I was reading it. Excellent and memorable game series.
  
  3
  
  I heard GLADOS as I was reading that too. I loved both games. Took me a long time to beat the single player of Portal 2, but damn it was worth it
  
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that's a lot of floppies

18
This is just what I need for my goal of backing up both the Internet Archive and Wikipedia on local storage every day.

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- If you really are, then you should be doing daily incrementals and fulls every couple of weeks. I can't imagine the incrementals for those are more than a few dozen GB, but I guess I'm not familiar with the size of Internet Archive.
  
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22Pb/s FTTH when?

12
- You might have it in 20 years The question is... When will we get servers that support that speed? XD
  
  6
- in a few hundred years if ever. I doubt that the average person will ever need more than 1 Tb/s
  
  to give you crazy numbers:
  
  1 second of a raw 32k video with 12bit color at 60fps is around 50 GB/s
  
  1
  
  Aside from me obviously joking about home 22Pb/s. I'll tell you a story.
  
  In the early 90s. I was gifted a modem. I used it to connect to BBS systems. It had two outgoing call speeds. 300bit/s sync and 1200/75bps. And since I'd never connected my computer to the outside world, the whole thing seemed amazing. Many BBS' had modems that couldn't cope with 1200/75, it was an odd speed. So, I had to swap to 300 for those. But it was still an amazing time. But, file sizes were pretty small. It really wasn't a huge problem.
  
  In the mid 1990s, when I had a 28.8k modem (and later 56k) to connect to the internet (and by the way, paying for the phone calls too). The always on 64k leased line (£1k per month) seemed like a dream. The 10Mbit coax ethernet at the office seemed like light speed. Hell, it was faster than the local hard disk (caching improved that, mind you). I remember in the office where we had an ISDN modem setup, chaining them together to get 128Kbit seemed like light speed. Later we got a 256Kbit leased line in the office, and it was amazing in terms of speed. I actually ran effectively a mini ISP that some of us connected to, to get free internet. It had 4 USR Courier modems.
  
  Then, in 1999 I was lucky enough to be enrolled on a trial. A trial for 2Mbit ADSL. It was amazing, 2Mbit down, 256Kbit up. This was groundbreaking. Web pages loaded instantly. Everything was so much faster. LANs in the office and at home was up to 100Mbit, and that seemed pretty damn fast. We'd be sure we'd not need more than that.
  
  Then, 8Mbit DSL arrived. Again, amazing leap forward. Gigabit LAN became the norm, and again, who would have thought it would be too slow for anything? After all, we were all using hard disks, and they really weren't that fast after all. ADSL2+ arrived with speeds up to 24Mbit, and those of us unable to get the higher sync rates started to suffer the internet being just a bit too slow.
  
  Then we got VDSL and faster cable internet. 80Mbit, 100Mbit, 150Mbit. These seemed overkill for many. But pretty soon we were downloading 4k video and 150GB games onto 5GB/s+ SSD drives. This started to feel slow to some.
  
  Now we're at a place where FTTH 1Gbit is becoming quite common. Many ISPs here in the UK are offering packages with speeds between 2 to 5Gbit/s too. The tech they use is apparently good for up to 50Gbit/s.
  
  Now, with this history of speed increases leading to demand increases. Why do you think it will stop at 1Tb/s? Maybe we cannot currently imagine why we'd need such speeds. But, someone will find a way to fill such connections. Don't limit yourself to just expanding what we do now.
  
  Maybe you're right, but I honestly would never say never when it comes to computing.
  
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Isn't optical just as much about the end points as the cables?

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- Yes, to get their speeds they used the usual wavelength division multiplexing, except over an insane 750 wavelength channels, space division multiplexing over the 38 corse with 3 modes, and 256 QAM with dual-polarization in each
  
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  Yeah... mhmm... right. I know some of these words!
  
  6
- Yes, but the fiber has become an issue. They're doing QAM signaling in fiber now.
  
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optical fiber speed record

Isn't that simply the speed of light, always? ;-)

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- Nope, if we are talking about the actual speed of the signal optical fiber is relatively slow at ~1/3 c, compared to air or copper where it's almost c. They're using 'speed' meaning bandwidth. A van full of sd cards would have a massive bandwidth, but a very slow actual speed
  
  11
  
  Actually it's about 2/3 c, the refractive index of normal telco fibers (G.652 and G.655) is around 1.47
  
  11
- It is pretty confusing that we refer to the volume of data as speed in networks.
  
  4
  
  We don't. The measure is bits/s, which is a speed because it's measured relative to time. 1 TB is a volume/amount, 1TB/s is a speed.
  
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