High Speed Internet

Posted on March 4, 2008

Ok, you’ve already got me beat with your 10Mb pipe. But just you wait till I get my really hi-speed connection. Ok again, you’ll probably have yours first, but check these numbers for jaw-dropping.

Bell Research, along with Alcatel-Lucent has hit a new land speed record for optical data transfer.

The speed? How about 2 Terabytes per second over 1500 miles?

If you put that into real world numbers it means:

You could transfer a DVD in 2.3 milliseconds
You could transfer a Blu-ray disc in 24.4 milliseconds
You could transfer a 500-gigabyte hard drive in 244 mlliseconds — less than 1/4 of a second

How did they do it?

“Several new technologies were used,” they said in a statement, “including a highly linear, balanced optoelectronic photoreceiver and an ultra-compact, temperature-insensitive coherent mixer.”

I guess now we can wait for at least four companies to fight out the standards battle for this in the new hardware that will be required, thereby pushing the implementation to 2017.