Researchers Unlock Fiber Optic Connection 1.2 Million Times Faster Than Broadband (popsci.com) 49
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: In the average American house, any download rate above roughly 242 Mbs is considered a solidly speedy broadband internet connection. That's pretty decent, but across the Atlantic, researchers at UK's Aston University recently managed to coax about 1.2 million times that rate using a single fiber optic cable -- a new record for specific wavelength bands. As spotted earlier today by Gizmodo, the international team achieved a data transfer rate of 301 terabits, or 301,000,000 megabits per second by accessing new wavelength bands normally unreachable in existing optical fibers -- the tiny, hollow glass strands that carry data through beams of light. According to Aston University's recent profile, you can think of these different wavelength bands as different colors of light shooting through a (largely) standard cable.
Commercially available fiber cabling utilizes what are known as C- and L-bands to transmit data. By constructing a device called an optical processor, however, researchers could access the never-before-used E- and S-bands. "Over the last few years Aston University has been developing optical amplifiers that operate in the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum but is about three times wider," Ian Phillips, the optical processor's creator, said in a statement. "Before the development of our device, no one had been able to properly emulate the E-band channels in a controlled way." But in terms of new tech, the processor was basically it for the team's experiment. "Broadly speaking, data was sent via an optical fiber like a home or office internet connection," Phillips added. What's particularly impressive and promising about the team's achievement is that they didn't need new, high-tech fiber optic lines to reach such blindingly fast speeds. Most existing optical cables have always technically been capable of reaching E- and S-bands, but lacked the equipment infrastructure to do so. With further refinement and scaling, internet providers could ramp up standard speeds without overhauling current fiber optic infrastructures.
Commercially available fiber cabling utilizes what are known as C- and L-bands to transmit data. By constructing a device called an optical processor, however, researchers could access the never-before-used E- and S-bands. "Over the last few years Aston University has been developing optical amplifiers that operate in the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum but is about three times wider," Ian Phillips, the optical processor's creator, said in a statement. "Before the development of our device, no one had been able to properly emulate the E-band channels in a controlled way." But in terms of new tech, the processor was basically it for the team's experiment. "Broadly speaking, data was sent via an optical fiber like a home or office internet connection," Phillips added. What's particularly impressive and promising about the team's achievement is that they didn't need new, high-tech fiber optic lines to reach such blindingly fast speeds. Most existing optical cables have always technically been capable of reaching E- and S-bands, but lacked the equipment infrastructure to do so. With further refinement and scaling, internet providers could ramp up standard speeds without overhauling current fiber optic infrastructures.
what? (Score:3)
any download rate above roughly 242 Mbs is considered a solidly speedy broadband internet connection.
So many questions. Why 242, why not 240 or 245? Is it some average of consumer broadband offerings?
what is 'solidly speedy', in terms of standard. How can speed be solid? How does solidly as adjective for speedy compare to more traditionally paired words like 'very', 'quite', 'extremely', or 'somewhat'?
Someone is letting the LLM be responsible for to much of the copy, I suspect.
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I mean...
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Hollow core fiber [linkedin.com]
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Re:what? (Score:5, Interesting)
okay 242 is a average taken from speedtest.net data, apparently after following an explained link in the TFA.
I suspect thought that skews very fast; because the sort of person that goes to speedtest.net is probably heavily biased toward the sorta person paying for high-end broadband offerings.
I am not saying nobody needs it - so back off - but I still think that unless you some type of enthusiast (and there are lots of stripes there) most consumers have little use for more than 100Mbps on a residential line in 2024.
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I'd argue that 100Mbps is woefully inadequate for a household where there are multiple users.
For example, if one person starts downloading a 50GB day one patch, it is very likely to interfere with streaming and interactive applications like gaming and video calls, when the line can only sustain 100Mbps. It can be mitigated a little with heavy traffic prioritisation, but the only real fix is a lot more bandwidth.
For reference, YouTube 4k is up to around 50Mbps, although the average is lower.
It also makes upl
Re: what? (Score:3)
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Indeed, and with so little of it something like uploading a video to YouTube or cloud storage can cripple the connection for every other user.
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again that is really 'enthusiast stuff' though. Like I said lots of stripes. I agree a lot of people, can see value from better than 100Mbps connection. I am not sure that is the average house hold though by any stretch.
My son has a Switch and some of my older game consoles. I have never seen the Switch even when installing a AAA title from the e-shop come anywhere 20Mbps let alone a 100.
I don't know if the device can't handle TLS + compression and unpacking http messages fast enough or if the upstream o
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The Switch is rather slow. The PS5 and XBOX can saturate a 100Mbps connection easily. They also have built in features for capturing and uploading video to social media, so it's fairly mainstream now.
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I agree its fairly mainstream but the only stats I can find for the current gen consoles show its about 26 percent of households.
I would not care speculate on what percentage of those want to live stream gaming on social media etc; but I am sure its not a 100.
Again I am not saying there are not lot of residential users that can make use of >100Mbps broadband, there clearly are. I still suspect its a minority though. If you take it the next threshold where and say of those folks how many do have some acti
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I'd argue that 100Mbps is woefully inadequate for a household where there are multiple users.
...
For reference, YouTube 4k is up to around 50Mbps, although the average is lower.
I think GP was accurate: "most consumers have little use for more than 100Mbps on a residential line in 2024."
Your own example would support 2x 4k streams of 50Mbps with no issue. And yet, 4k streams are generally around 25Mbps (https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/how-much-speed-do-i-need-to-watch-netflix-and-hulu), and are not the norm. Most content is streamed at a lower rates, like:
SD is 1 - 3 Mbps
HD (1080p) is around 5 Mbps
4k is 16 - 25 Mbps
You could have 10 active HD streams going and still hav
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A 100mbps line won't support 2x50Mbps streams without issue. The moment Windows or your smart TV decides to check for an update or download a new ad, it's going to buffer.
It's not just the raw bandwidth or download times, it's latency under heavy load. If someone is downloading on a 100Mbps connection you really notice it, no so on gigabit even when they are pulling in excess of 100MBps (megabytes per second).
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A 100mbps line won't support 2x50Mbps streams without issue.
If it doesn't, then it's not 100mbps. The streams always buffer out some, so they'll be fine, even while you check instagram on your phone.
You also neglected to consider anything past the first sentence I wrote. 4k streams are generally around 25Mbps and are not the norm. Most content is streamed at a lower rates, like:
SD is 1 - 3 Mbps
HD (1080p) is around 5 Mbps
4k is 16 - 25 Mbps
Outside of the huge streams and occasional giant game download, a tiny little T1 would suffice for everything else. Just how many
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and your upstream is unlikely to be delivering a 50gb day one patch to all users at those rates anyway.
Only if the person dumping such a huge patch out is so ignorant of internet distribution as to not use a CDN.
This is like 2002-era stuff.
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I'd argue that 100Mbps is woefully inadequate for a household where there are multiple users.
Sounds like some folks never grew up in a home with 1 TV and-or 1 phone line.
The art of learning to share used to be a real life skill, sadly no longer.
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YT uses AV1 and VP9 for 4K, and even shitty VP9 tops out at less than 30mbs in the following example, with 4K options in the ladder at a lower bitrate than this (down to 12mbs for AV1). This is the for the "Peru" 8K60 video, with anything below 1080 in the ladder removed:
% yt-dlp -F 1La4QzGeaaQ
[youtube] Extracting URL: 1La4QzGeaaQ
[youtube] 1La4QzGea
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Limited Article (Score:1)
Unfortunately the article and the source statement [aston.ac.uk] have no details about the most interesting parts, how the amplifier works or how they overcame the attenuation problems in the E-band with their equalizer.
I find it's easier just to report network innages. (Score:2)
Predictable result (Score:2)
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+1 Facts
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This!!! In San Diego, for some *reason*, all the high speed Internet providers have a floor of roughly $50 +fees+taxes for the lowest grade of Internet. This low grade speed is around 250mb and has continued to increase but that seems to be the lowest price you can get without being on a special low income program.
Needless to say, as a solo person I just rely on my hotspot from my phone since it is unlimited but it's capped at 5mb. This is fine for zoom meetings, SD streaming, mild gaming (Wurm Unlimited wo
Why make that comparison? (Score:3)
This would be more appropriate to compare to current state of the art ethernet rather than average residential internet.
It is standardized to push 100 GBit/s over a single strand, which is still 3,000 times slower than this result so it's still impressive compared with what's in production, without all the red herrings of comparing to residential internet speeds.
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Now we wait for the hardware... (Score:2)
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It's the same fiber already being used, different transceivers and repeaters that essentially are doing frequency-division multiplexing with light wavelengths.
It's kinda right there in the summary.
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MaeWest– East get an upgrade (Score:2)
This changes the value assessment for CONUS since the existing plumbing doesn’t require mods. Backups by the dump truck full can move cross country
Over what distance? (Score:3)
TFA doesn't say. Kinda makes a difference (e.g., https://www.dintek.com.tw/inde... [dintek.com.tw])
While I can tell this is a big breakthrough, if the transmission was only over a few centimeters then maybe I'll temper my excitement.
Transoceanic (Score:2)
Also, 301 terabits per sec makes tapping them problematic.
Dark Fiber (Score:2)
From what I've read, when they laid the original fiber optic cables, they were bundles of hundreds of individual fibers. They are using a fraction of those. If they need more bandwidth they can rig up more parallel fibers, but they haven't had to as newer gear keeps getting faster and faster. More efficient use of existing fiber infrastructure is nice, but there is plenty of fiber capacity available if it's needed.
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From what I've read, when they laid the original fiber optic cables, they were bundles of hundreds of individual fibers.
That's correct for terrestrial fibers. The GP was talking about transoceanic, where there tend to be a lot fewer fibers. For example, Hibernia [wikipedia.org] from 2015 had six fiber pairs. The number of pairs for new transoceanic systems has crept up since then, but it's still a dozen or fewer.
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Undersea cables have optical repeaters to regenerate the signal every 100km or so. I would think these would need to be upgraded to work with the additional bands.
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Undersea cables have optical repeaters to regenerate the signal every 100km or so. I would think these would need to be upgraded to work with the additional bands.
That sounds costly & time consuming; laying new cable may not raise the cost of upgrading by much, in that case
Headlines for Nerds (Score:2)
Really headlines here should only be specified in LoC/s.
Multiples of average 2022 home broadband speeds in some contrived market with biased selection that just happen to match common 802.11n 40Mhz channel speeds are less useful.
Congress might even agree.
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I'd be surprised if Congress could even agree that water is wet or fire burns or the sky is blue, to be perfectly honest.
Thus enabling software-as-a-service (Score:1)
It won't be long before you won't own any software and it will only live in the cloud running on a damn browser and you'll rent it every month. Not on demand but every single month. BTW, if you think the Windows UX is garbage, try doing anything in a browser-based user-interface.
Poor reporting: E-band absorption peak (Score:4, Informative)
Fiber companies (Score:2)
A few extra details missing from the summary... (Score:3)
This was from a post deadline paper presented at ECOC last fall (2023). Some extra details:
The 301 Tb/s was over 50 km of low water peak SMF (they didn't explicitly say what type but from the numbers they gave I'm guessing it's something in the ITU G.652.D family of fibers).
The traffic was spread over 1,097 24.5GBd channels (technically they only measured one channel at a time but moved it across the spectrum to simulate a full fill).
An interesting result however this is not a fiber to the home solution, it is a backbone solution and it should be noted commercial solutions exist today that offer 75+ Tb/s of bandwidth over just the C and L bands. So this isn't quite the 1.2 millions times faster they claim. It's only about 4 times the bandwidth that you can buy today.
What?!?! "hollow glass strands" ?? (Score:2)
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One might even say they are like tubes....
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While the vast majority of optical fiber out there is solid core, hollow core fiber (HCF) is a thing (note the hollow part is still only microns wide in diameter). People have been working on it for over a decade now and it is poised to be the next big thing in communications (last year, Microsoft bought Lumenisity, arguably the leader in hollow core technology). On paper it offers several benefits over solid core: lower latency, lower/no non-linearities, and potentially lower loss (not yet realized).
In
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