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Hardware

Internet Heading to Light Speed 239

Posted by CmdrTaco from the we've-gone-plaid dept.
dbaker writes "Wired Magazine has a very interesting article about the future of optical networks and the barriers we face before this technology is commonplace."
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Internet Heading to Light Speed More

Internet Heading to Light Speed

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  • A "light" transistor to the rescue! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by erick99 ( 743982 ) <homerun@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:33PM (#9993016)
    The buckyball layer produces what sounds like a transistor of sorts:

    The gluing process creates a material composed of larger electron-rich molecules with sufficient power to cause light that passes through to control the direction of other light, providing the switching capability, Sargent said.

    With switching occuring at the speeds available through a layer such as that, there would be an incredible decrease in cumulative latency across the 'net. That is, if all or most of the switches are as above.

    Superconnect's Lehenbauer agrees that "it's fascinating" to have material for an optical switch, but warns "it could be awhile until an all-optical network is possible."

    I wonder what the cost of those type "devices" will be - both direct in terms of the devices and indirect in terms of whatever infrastructure is required to implement them. Well, either way, it's great sounding technology.

    Cheers,

    Erick

    • Re:A "light" transistor to the rescue! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, either way, it's great sounding technology.

      Cool! You must have the freakiest ears evah.

    • Re:A "light" transistor to the rescue! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TrumpetPower! ( 190615 ) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:48PM (#9993191) Homepage

      "Light" transistor, indeed!

      One of my first thoughts upon reading the article was that that's exactly what they've created--an optical transistor.

      It gets even better. The original transistor originally played a huge role in replacing human operators in telephone network switches. That also seems to be the first target for this new breed of transistor.

      Surely, the optical computer just became much more of a possibility. Yeah, we're still a long way from an optical IC, but this is a big step on that path.

      Cheers,

      b&

    • The gluing process creates a material composed of larger electron-rich molecules with sufficient power to cause light that passes through to control the direction of other light, providing the switching capability, Sargent said.

      With switching occuring at the speeds available through a layer such as that, there would be an incredible decrease in cumulative latency across the 'net. That is, if all or most of the switches are as above.

      Although I am by no means a router expert, it would seem logical that

      • Although I am by no means a router expert, it would seem logical that a majority of the latency in the network is caused by the actual reception and subsequent "analysis" of the packets. After all, the "response time", or "spped" of electricity is at best close to the speed of light.

        This is a common misconception. Electrical transistors have a speed (read latency) that is mostly dependent on the voltage applied to them. (Hence over-volt on CPUs)

        This technology would in effect change the rate that the t
    • What I don't get- couldn't you accomplish the same thing by encoding the addressing into the color layer and just using a prisim for a switch?
      • I don't know exactly what you are thinking of, but I'm pretty sure the answer is no. "Splitting with a prism" is called Wave Division Multiplexing in fiber terminology. The number of frequencies that a single fiber can carry is partial dependant on the quality of the fiber, but mostly dependant on the devices transmitting and recieving the light. Regardless, there are a finite number of frequencies that can be utilized.

        If you are suggesting to give each IP in the world it's own frequency - well, there are
        • So Wave Division Multiplexing DOES work- but the number of frequencies is limited? So what was all that about temporal multiplexing being the current technology?

          Still, I'd expect a given backbone to only have data on it that relates to hosts reachable from that backbone, and that would be far more limited than just IP. I don't see a need particularily to have one single fiber backbone going to every computer in the world- it'd be physically impossible, because you can only have two encoder/decoder sets o
        • Stupid me, should have kept up with the conversation and realized the AC and the guy with the doppler stuff were just asshats.

          I really wasn't considering anything quite so complex- if your purpose is routing ONLY then you don't even need IP2- you just need to know that the encoder on the other end of the fiber said that this packet is in the range that goes to such and such router down the line. Even if you only have two frequencies available, this is enough to switch millions of packets for millions of i

  • magnetic media (Score:3, Funny)

    by TedCheshireAcad ( 311748 ) <ted@fUMLAUTc.rit.edu minus punct> on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:34PM (#9993032) Homepage
    A lightning fast transmission medium is no match for a mechanical data access sytem, i.e. your hard disk.

    I have a fast internet connection but a slow hard drive. Sigh.

  • Light speed posting (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:36PM (#9993043) Homepage
    I was going to try for a first post - but the speed of light barrier slowed me down.

  • Universal access first (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:36PM (#9993045)
    Can we have universal access and better content first please?

    -Johan

    PS> Oh yeah, contribute to wikipedia.
  • Do you really think that people are going to give up the ease of ethernet when your typical broadband maxes out at 1.5Mbit/s? I predict a painfully slow death of ethernet, which will probably go the way of the floppy drive.
    • Floppy direves arn't done yet! I just got an HP with a floppy drive installed.

    • Re:What about Ethernet? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:46PM (#9993166)
      "Do you really think that people are going to give up the ease of ethernet when your typical broadband maxes out at 1.5Mbit/s? I predict a painfully slow death of ethernet, which will probably go the way of the floppy drive."

      Eh? You seem to be very confused. Ethernet is not limited to the dinky little 10/100 network I assume you'r running. The gigabit fiber optic network I've got is also ethernet.

      • Er, my copper based ethernet is 10/100/1000... Who needs fiber for 1Gbit?

        • Re:What about Ethernet? (Score:2, Informative)

          by Bri3D ( 584578 )
          You USED to need fiber for Gbit Ethernet. Copper gigabit came later. The only real reason to use fiber now is distance and reliability(no matter how you look at it, electricity is less reliable than light).
        • Gigabit fiber is physically smaller than Gigabit copper. Multimode fiber is about the thickness of a human hair. Single mode fiber is about 1/10 the thickness of a human hair. Surprisingly, single-mode fiber can carry more bandwidth for longer distances than multimode.

          If you work in an office building, tilt up one of the ceiling tiles and look around. You will probably see bundles of cat-3 and cat-5 cable ranging from the thickness of your leg, to the thickness of an average human's torso. That same b
    • What did I just tell you [slashdot.org] about floppies.

      Stop it with this 'floppies are dead' nonsense.

    • I predict a painfully slow death of ethernet, which will probably go the way of the floppy drive.

      Apple is already introducing something called Xsan [apple.com]. A quote from their site...

      "Xsan storage networking eliminates the bottlenecks of Ethernet-based network file servers, whose performance will only get worse over time as denser formats such as HD become more common. Using Fibre Channel multipathing, in which two Fibre Channel cables connect a computer to the SAN, an Xsan client can theoretically achieve t

  • CONTENT!! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:38PM (#9993070)
    Whats the point of blazing high speeds without the content???

    Net's content value improvement rate is trending downwards ..

    • Re:CONTENT!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ra5pu7in ( 603513 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <ni7up5ar>> on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:46PM (#9993172) Journal
      For the same reason we can now get hundreds of TV channels ... with a similar downtrend in content. Of course, a large part of the problem (IMHO) is that more people want to be content consumer than content creators. Where is that quality and quantity of content supposed to come from? Someone else. There are too few "someone elses" out there compare to all the wanna-be critics who chew up the content that exists and spit it out.

    • Re:CONTENT!! (Score:5, Funny)

      by liquidsin ( 398151 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:57PM (#9993291) Homepage
      Net's content value improvement rate is trending downwards ..

      And you're not helping the situation any...
    • I've answered this same type of comment dozens of times.

      It's not the content value (on TV or the internet) that is going down, it is just that there is more available, which means there is going to be more of what you don't like.

      I think if you what to compare the content value of any growing medium, you should look at the amount you liked in the past vs. the amount you like now. I don't see how that number could be going down.

      Reality is often distorted by perception.

    • Whats the point of blazing high speeds without the content???

      You'll be getting HDTV porn on-demand. As usual, the adult industry will be the first to test the technological limits of the internet.

      • It's funny but the porn industry is the true test barrier and pioneer for the computer industry. Yet when people p2p porn, no one defends them.

        • I know- they were one of the first to do massive amounts of credit card transactions over the internet, did video on demand, spoofed the search engines, they propagate spam, trojans... they tested the capacity and security of the Internet in both good and bad ways that the rest of the "legit" computer industry had to keep up with. In fact I think one of the big secrets about the .com boom is that some of the major success stories were actually porn sites, but nobody wanted to mention that on the news.
    • "Whats the point of blazing high speeds without the content???"

      The other day I had to upload 500 digital photos to an online photo printing/sharing service. It took a few hours even on a decent cable connection.

  • Meh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Shadow Wrought ( 586631 ) <shadow.wrought@g ... minus herbivore> on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:39PM (#9993088) Homepage Journal
    Call me when they reach ludicrous speed. Here's hoping the data doesn't all turn to plaid;-)

  • Imagine... (Score:4, Funny)

    by databoing ( 259158 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:43PM (#9993123)
    A Beowulf Cluster of.....

    AAAARRRGHH! My Eyes!!

  • Service in Texas (Score:5, Informative)

    by samtihen ( 798412 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:43PM (#9993136) Homepage

    I few weeks ago I saw that Verizon is starting with some 15mbps lines in Kellar, Texas.

    http://news.com.com/Verizon's+fiber+race+is+on/210 0-1034_3-5275171.html [com.com]

    I heard the price was going to be only 44.95 a month. With this kind of speed VoIP and Video communication, as well as video on demand, finally seem pretty feasible.

    • Re:Service in Texas (Score:3, Insightful)

      by div_2n ( 525075 )
      I find it amusing that they are rolling these high speed services. If you have 50,000 people in a reasonably sized city all with 15mbps connectivity, do you really think they will all get that? I don't know how much ATM bandwidth is coming into any one CO, but I will bet it isn't 750,000mbps. Or better yet, wherever those DSL ATM connections terminate, I bet they don't have that much bandwidth available.
  • You think it's hard getting a win32 broadband box on the net now? Wait till there are all-optical switches! You'll be hosed before the light from the screen reaches your eyeballs!

  • Faster! (Score:4, Funny)

    by MarcoPon ( 689115 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:46PM (#9993167) Homepage
    We can do better than that.
    What we need is Bistromathic signaling tech!

    Bye!

  • That's some fast 'bots (Score:4, Insightful)

    by grunt107 ( 739510 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:47PM (#9993178)
    Optical-networking company Infinera is taking another approach... has developed a photonic integrated circuit, a hybrid of optical and electronic technologies... the technology combines discrete functions into a single chip, and can transmit data at speeds of up to 100 Gbps.

    Although the 100Gb/s is the max, it would be interesting what the sustained rate would be.
    This technology seems to have a better light/energy conversion than the 'bucky ball' solution, since it lists 40Gb/s as the transmission rate.
    Perhaps the Inifera solution is limited in distance.

  • The next step in optical networks: (Score:5, Funny)

    by homeobocks ( 744469 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:52PM (#9993233)
    $ beam me up, eth0
    I sure hope none of my packets are lost.

  • The Bottleneck (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Louis Savain ( 65843 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:53PM (#9993242) Homepage
    Superconnect's Lehenbauer agrees that "it's fascinating" to have material for an optical switch, but warns "it could be awhile until an all-optical network is possible." Lehenbauer said switches and routers must identify individual packets and route data intelligently, tasks that are not possible using a simple optical switch. "Unless you have an optical computer inside the switch to make these decisions, you'll still need electronic components."

    Therein lies the bottleneck. Unless we develop optical computers (not for a while), we still need electronic switches and computers to analyze the content of the optical data in order to make intelligent decisions as to which direction the data should be channelled to.

    Not to minimize the importance of this development, but until we do have optical computers, we are condemned to live life in the slow lane. But then again, someone may think of a clever way around this problem without using optical computers. One never knows.

    • Re:The Bottleneck (Score:3, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Or someone may think of a clever way around this problem with using optical computers. A poster above suggests using prisms [slashdot.org], I think this is a better idea now (a few moments after reading it) than I did at first. Part of the design of IPv4 is that it is designed to be processed in eight bit chunks at a time and to be calculated using trivial and atomic operations which take few cycles to complete. For instance the very use of netmasks lets you determine based on very simple procedures like an xor whether o

    • "You do not need *light* to get *speed of light*! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PaulBu ( 473180 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @02:35PM (#9993742) Homepage
      ... as my former advisor Prof K. Likharev used to say. When you send a sharp electrical pulse down a matched transmission line/waveguide it propagates with, you guessed it, speed of light in the medium. If your insulator is the same SiO2 they use for optical fiber you will get the same speed as in the fiber!

      The problem with traditional voltage-based electronics at 40G speeds is that when you drive a SiGi/InP/GaAs transistor that fast it dissipates LOTS of power (measured in Watts per handful of transistors). Moreover, CV^2f/2 power dissipation when you constantly charge/discharge line capacitance to ~1V operating voltage is significant. And of course the maximum operating speed of any substantial logic is determined not by transistor speed but by RC constants of the wiring.

      Now, if one departs from traditional transistor logic design, say, to superconductor electronics (which I've spent all my life designing up until the beginning of this year, when my current employer decided to "discontinue that effort"), you can start from a clear sheet of paper. In superconductor case, first of all you lose R in RC, not bad! Second is that when temperatures are that cold, thermal noise (~kBT) is small and operating voltages (pulse amplitudes in our case) could be ~1 mV, not ~1V, and Josephson junctions are pretty happy generating ~1ps wide pulses.

      The downside is having to deal with refrigiration, one would not see this technology on the end user's desktop any time soon, but for the telco switching center it is almost doable.

      My personal estimates (well, down to the complete circuit diagrams ;-) ) showed that we could make a 128x128 non-blocking self-routing packet switching matrix at 60Gbps/line that could fit on the palm of one's hand, and after packaging with refrigerator fit on half a rack.

      The "packet" feature is important, often when "optical computing" people talk about their switches they conveniently omit the fact that while switch might be fast enough for some 120GHz of bandwidth the re-configuration of that takes milliseconds (think long-haul traditional SONET lines), we were talking about routing/re-configuration at ~256 bits packet length (think TCP/IP).

      Oh, well, it's a pity that I can not work on this stuff now, it was -> |- THIS close to actually coming up with a viable demo/product. Maybe some day...

      Paul B.

      pbunyk (at) lycos (dot) com

      P.S. Google for SFQ/RSFQ for more info

    • "Unless you have an optical computer inside the switch to make these decisions, you'll still need electronic components."

      I can recall reading years ago about the excitement of optical computers being developed, and I can even recall that someone made a large prototype of an optical processor. I presume that there are some implementations in the current industry, but I'd still love to see a fully optical computer. Still waiting :(

    • Re:The Bottleneck (Score:3, Interesting)

      by interiot ( 50685 )
      The issue that this is trying to solve is to reduce latency (*). It's about 2450 miles from New York to Los Angeles. If you're sitting in New York, and traceroute a computer in Los Angeles, then the difference in time between your ISP's router (which could potentially afford to upgrade to all-optical) and Los Angeles's router should be approximately 13 milliseconds [google.com]. Right now, it's MUCH higher than this.

      Imagine if you could play first-person-shooters with anyone in the world, and it would seem like the

    • Re:The Bottleneck (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kryzx ( 178628 ) *
      It's an interesting problem, but not unsolveable.

      Consider this: You use traditional (wires) bandwidth to do DNS resolution and tracert to plan the route your data will take, this inlcudes all the routers it will go through, and the instructions you need to give each. Then you build your data transmission with the instructions for each optical router at the head, which they will strip off and use.

      This way, you have a very small amount of overhead work in traditional bandwidth, and the bulk of your data go

      • Except that optical "switching" is slow... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by PaulBu ( 473180 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @04:06PM (#9994709) Homepage
        Your solution would require all-optical (what they call, "transparent") switch to re-configure itself on each of the packets that you are sending down. It's OK if one packet length is a complete ISO image, but is you are just sending 256 bytes to update your position in the game on other player's computer -- well, tough luck! ;-) Did you know that like a third of the packets on the Internet at any given time are under a couple hundred bytes long -- mostly TCP/IP ACKs.

        Paul B.

  • Smokey the Bear says... (Score:5, Funny)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:57PM (#9993289) Homepage Journal
    When using your 100Gb fiber-optic internet at the campgrounds, always practice safety. Surround your network card with rocks to keep the fire from spreading. Be sure when you're done with your internet to put it out with a bucket of water and make sure it has stopped smoking before you leave the area.

    Remember what Smokey the Bear says. Only you can prevent your 100Gb fiber-optic internet connection from starting a forest fire.

  • Optical has lots of tricks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ElForesto ( 763160 ) <elforesto&gmail,com> on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:58PM (#9993295) Homepage
    Ever heard of wave-division multiplexing [wikipedia.org]? The idea is to transmit light packets that contain different wavelengths (or colors) at the same time. I'd like to see that in wide-spread practice as well.

    • Re: * WDM (Score:2, Informative)

      by nboscia ( 91058 ) *
      *WDM is very widely used today. Your major carriers all use them. Customers (universities, government, corporations, local ISP's) purchase (lease) individual wavelengths. It's quite a cool way of handling light (buying lambdas), and has been around for a quite bit now. Newer technologies, like MPLamdaS (that's lamba switching, not label switching), allow you to creative virtual wavelengths and do fun traffic engineering per lambda.

  • Planning for the Future (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Subliminal Kid ( 647767 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @01:58PM (#9993304)
    Redundancy may soon be more vital than speed.

    Once the internet was designed to withstand problems (a euphemism for a nuclear strike) at multiple nodes but since commercial interest like to keep as many things as possible in one building we see today that a small fire in a maintenance tunnel has a dramatic effect on the over all network latency. There just isn't as much redundancy as there used to be and that may be worse for us all than your download time for SP2.
    • Of course, enterprises with high bandwidth needs have typically had to pay through the nose to lease capacity (redundant or not) from the huge phone conglomerates. Now they can reasonably buy their own 100Gbps+ equipment to connect data centers and even justify redundant links due to the cost effectiveness of new enterprise-friendly applications of tried-and-true carrier-grade technology. Celion Networks [celion.com], for example, ships such systems.
    • How about more colleges become internet backbones... Or how about doubling the root name servers from 13 to 26? Why not? Why not have 100 root name servers?

  • Sounds great, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @02:05PM (#9993382)
    What happens when you put all the switches together and actually have to route the packets, and the next hop is "busy" on that light frequency already?

    You would either have to:

    a) shift the frequency to a different portion of the light spectrum, or

    b) somehow delay the light signal until the previous message is completely transmitted through the router.

    But without using a light-electrical-light conversion?

    I don't know how a) could be accomplished other than using one laser to pump another (but there would not be enough intensity for that), and using cryogenic sodium to slow the light pulse down long enough is not practical in a low cost router (yet).

    Any ideas? Or did I miss something obvious here?

  • More porn, faster!

  • Optical routers already exist (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cayblood ( 525703 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @02:25PM (#9993602)
    Bell Labs invented them [bell-labs.com] in 1999.
  • Great, now I'll get "Page Not Found" or "Bandwidth exceeded" errors at lightspeed. Too bad the server wait times won't change one bit either.

  • we don't need it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by yagu ( 721525 )

    The telcom industry is STILL reeling (I know, I'm a layoff casualty) from heavy investment in optic fiber still dark today. The technology to lube the internet to lightning speeds (whatever that means) is merely interesting, but unnecessary, and unlikely to come to fruition unless there is compelling evidence of a burgeoning market -- one I doubt exists. I wouldn't invest my money in it. Once bitten...

    Consider the comment from the article: Polishuk also questioned the need for higher-speed networks. "Wh

  • ..."light" or "Light"...now I'm confused.

  • Light speed is damn close. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2004 @02:59PM (#9993996) Homepage Journal

    1s. Minimal human decision time. Light travels 3e8m
    1e-1s. Minimal human reaction time.
    1e-2s. Minimal human recognition (sensory reaction) time.
    1e-3s (1ms). Sensible task switching time.
    1e-4s. in-task high level function time.
    1e-5s. in-task medium level function time.
    1e-6s (1us). Single microcontroller instruction; in-task low-level function time.
    1e-7s Single high-speed microcontroller instruction.
    1e-8s Single low-end CPU or DSP instruction time. Light travels 3m.
    1e-9s (1ns) Single modern CPU time, light travels 0.3m
    1e-10s A single modern CPU gate reaction time. Light travels 3cm, just above 1 inch.

    Using standard $8 24bit ADC you can get down to the 3cm level with a $3 1MHZ microcontroller.
    Using 1Gbit interface, your bits moving at light speed are 30cm away from each other.
    A 300m LAN won't allow ping roundtrip shorter than 2 microseconds.
    A 3000km (global network games) line WILL introduce perceptible delay.
    A CPU of 3 GHZ just has to have its cache built in. Memory placed 3cm away causes 1 cycle long request-response roundtrip.

    • Johnny von Neuman (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gelfling ( 6534 )
      Covered it in one of his books. If you want a computer to function with a one nanosecond cycletime, in a perfect universe it could be no larger than the cube root of one foot along any axis. You simply bump into the speed of light at that point.

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