

April 24, 2013 by Arthur Lowery, The Conversation in Technology / Telecom
Speed limits were made to be broken – in internet terms, anyway. Credit: JRFreemanJr


To put that in more practical terms, a 2Gbps connection means you could download an episode of HBO's hugely popular drama Game of Thrones in seconds. And given the first episode of the current season was illegally downloaded more than a million times, that would presumably be a welcome development.



Optical fibres comprise a core, surrounded by another layer of purer silica, the cladding.



Imagine a glass window 5km thick and only losing 50% of the light; this is how transparent an is!


This is a single-mode fibre, and as there is only one "path" (mode) for the light to travel along, its velocity is very precise.



Optical fibre capacity


Even Sony's 2Gbps announcement pales in comparison to recent research.

Reports have shown rates of 26Tbps (that's terabits a second, where one terabit equals 1,000 gigabits) from a single laser source along a standard fibre, to more than 1,000Tbps along a 12-core research optical fibre.


Given that the total average download rate of the world is forecast to be only 250Tbps in 2016, then a single strand of this new multi-core fibre could carry all of the world's internet traffic!

These reports generate consternation for internet users: why can't we all have these download speeds now?



And while research will bring down this cost, it's not doing so as rapidly as demand is increasing.

The sharing of networks limits . All telecommunications networks are shared, somewhere, so if other users are using it, then you will have a slower connection.




Widening the bottlenecks




It's the "widening the freeway" argument. After spending billions, we eventually get stuck at the entrance to the car park.





There are also simple software solutions for sharing services.


Unfortunately, technologically simple solutions are difficult to market: it's easier to promise the world for $50 a month.



Source: The Conversation

"Faster-than-superfast Internet, and why we can't have it (yet)" April 24, 2013 http://phys.org/news/2013-04-faster-than-superfast-internet.html