Comments on: How Fast Can Optical Networks Go? How About 170 Gbps?

By: Telcos Need to Ramp Up R&D to Stay Competitive

Telcos Need to Ramp Up R&D to Stay Competitive — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:32:16 +0000

[...] their commodity status. When optics breakthroughs are coming from companies like Infinera or at universities and useful wireless technologies are built by startups or the equipment vendors, carriers are [...]

By: dg6464

dg6464 — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:29:58 +0000

Two Words: Cisco Onstage :)

Holograph + Audio. Pretty cool. 14,000 miles away, real time…

This optical technology could, with more research and improvements improve the speeds in the ISP core, which in turn gets passed down to the consumer and business.

I would say in a few years we will see things like Telepresence and Onstage in the home.

Considering we are already seeing companies save millions of dollars not only in travel costs, but think about the amount of money it costs a company to fly an executive across the world for a few days (in lost productivity; how much are they worth per hour…) just to have one or two meetings.

With technologies like these this can happen ad-hoc, and from their office or home.

I personally can’t wait to see what will be twenty years from now (if the world hasn’t blown itself up yet).

By: Stacey Higginbotham

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:44:09 +0000

Dee, I’m so glad someone made that joke :)

By: Dee

Dee — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:10:39 +0000

Infinera is putting up some pretty fast numbers on systems in Europe already – this speed is no pipe dream.

By: Craig S

Craig S — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:00:35 +0000

Dang! That is fast!

By: Core

Core — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:46:55 +0000

Very interesting.

By: raymond borowiak

raymond borowiak — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:21:59 +0000

Well they going to need mo than that when holographics comes out real soon. They are going to be tossing tachyons down a fiber really fast. With unheard of bandwidths.
Don’t forget in 1968 Startrek had the handheld communicator. Now we have the cell freaking phone. And netbooks.
Lots of peeps may say no way, but I say real soon.

By: Stacey Higginbotham

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:32:07 +0000

Andrew, I was mainly thinking of the HD images so people could see what exactly they were snipping, but latency would also be a huge factor.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:35:32 +0000

Purely optical processing pathways are an important area of development, in part because you can (relatively) easily do things like wave mux-ing to scale up the bandwidth. Good stuff and interesting to see progress being made.

I would think that remote surgery is more limited by latency than bandwidth.