400 DVDs per second
p2pnet news view | Cool:- Will this make corporate entertainment industry executives have accidents in their pants, do you think?
It’s faster than a speeding train, faster than a bullet —- a lot faster.
Scientists in Bell Labs, the research arm of France’s Alcatel-Lucent, have set a new optical transmission record of more than 100 Petabits per second.
That’s equal to 100 million gigs per second.kilometer.
Just think how many movies and music albums you’d be able to transfer. 
“This transmission experiment involved sending the equivalent of 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago,” says the company, going on:
“The transmissions were accomplished over a network whose repeaters, devices used to sustain optical signal strength over long distances, were spaced 90 kilometers apart. This spacing distance is 20% greater than that commonly maintained in such networks. The challenge of maintaining transmission over these distances was significantly heightened in these experiments because of the noise -perturbation of signals- that is introduced as transmission speeds increase.”
The researchers also increased capacity, “by interfacing advanced digital signal processors with coherent detection, a new technology that makes it possible to acquire details for a greater number of properties of light than the direct detection method commonly applied in today’s systems,” says the story, adding:
“Using this technique the researchers were able to effectively increase capacity by increasing the number of light sources introduced into a single fiber yet still separate the light into its constituent colors when it reached its destination.”
Alcatel-Lucent – Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs announces new optical transmission record and breaks 100 Petabit per second kilometer barrier, September 28, 2009
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September 30th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
With the pricing you get from Bell and Rogers for that, Canada Post is a BARGAIN!
September 30th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
so after bell adds their dpi to the network it will turn out 400 dvds a month??
September 30th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Yeah, I would like to see the entertainment corporations lobby to throttle accounts that download their “product” with this, Ha!
September 30th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
LOL at the DPI comment.
October 1st, 2009 at 3:55 am
But, is this bandwidth fast enough for teleportation of solid objects? I’m guessing not quite.
“Physicist Samuel L. Braunstein points out that a fairly coarse scan of the human body (one atomic length in each direction) would require 10³² bits of data [to be sent].”
Source: The Straight Dope, 1996 article
October 1st, 2009 at 5:01 am
Very cool news. Optical is still the future just as it has always been. With copper prices rising and that of optical technologies falling, a paradigm shift in how the general public uses telecommunications technologies, such as the internet, will be unavoidable. We’re seeing the beginnings of that shift already and I’m positive the entertainment industry will be the first to try to oppose it just like they always do with every new technology. Sadly I don’t think they will ever come to understand how progress is an ironclad part of human nature and thus can never be stifled. I just hope net neutrality will have become an unassailable reality by the time we see optical available to every home.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:57 am
and it’s yours for the bargain price of 29.99 a month… only it’s 999.999999999999 million times slower then advertised.
“The record-breaking figure was derived by multiplying the number of lasers by their 100 Gigabit per second transmission rate and then multiplying the aggregate 15.5 Terabit per second result by the 7000 kilometer distance achieved. The combination of speed and distance expressed in bit per second.kilometers is a standard measure for high speed optical transmission.”
On behalf of Bells seemingly absurd theoretical figures published in guise of actual measurements (someone please correct me if I’m wrong here- but as far as I can tell, there was no actual speed measurement that took place here, despite how it initially sounds when reading it- the achievement here is that the system is able to transmit 7k miles setup as it is… The speed as described though, is completely theoretical- and theoretical speeds on this kind of thing never come remotely close to real world performance… and to help avg joe that may have missed it, 15.5 terabits = ~1.9 terrabytes; so the claimed figure is a bit more then 400 SINGLE layer dvd’s @ 4.7GB ea- it’s slightly more then 200 dual layer dvd’s like the ones you buy movies at the store on- still impressive if true obviously…
None the less I’m inspired by Bells shining example of a modern press release, so I’m going to make my own:
I can multiply the number of hairs on my nutsack, by the length of the longest hair, and multiply that ‘aggregated result’ by the quanity of my seamen and then by the distance I can squirt it- this proves that I could impregnate every woman topica Kansas while squatting on the moon masturbating with a piece of moon cheese. Oh- and I”m 10x the man you are. Buy stock now!