GigaOM » fiber optics

3 tech breakthroughs that will help boost our digital & online future

Om Malik — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 22:07:43 +0000

The battle of photos filters that is raging between Twitter and Instagram is interesting and engaging, but there are folks out there working on some cool technologies, especially in the fiber optic and chip world, that are going to boost our online future.

Look ma, I shrunk the light beams: Waveguides are hollow tubes that help channel (light) waves and typically the width of the waveguide needs to be similar in magnitude to the wavelength of the guided wave. This has imposed limitations on the size of the optical devices. Now Caltech researchers, co-led by assistant professor of electrical engineering Hyuck Choo, have figured out a way to get around this natural limit. They’ve come up with a way to make light beams smaller and smaller by developing a new kind of waveguide device that can focus light to a few nanometers. What that means is that we can create even smaller optical components, which in turn can be used inside networking gear, data center equipment and even inside imaging devices. It also mean we can use current optical fibers to cram even more data inside them.

The waveguide device is made of amorphous silicon dioxide (much like common glass) and is covered in a thin layer of gold. As light passes through the device, photons interact with electrons at the interface between gold and silicon dioxide. The electrons oscillate and those oscillations propagate along as waves, carrying the same information as the light waves. The new device is built using traditional chip making technologies, thus making it easier to produce and bring to the market.

Move over Silicon, make way for new chip materials. Silicon might be the building block of our digital life, but researchers at MIT believe that it is time to pay attention to new materials. They have come up with what they describe as the smallest indium gallium arsenide transistor, which is 22 nanometers (a billionth of a meter) in length.

Indium gallium arsenide has already found use in fiber-optic communications and radar technologies, but the new small size transistor is aimed at computing devices and replacing silicon, according to Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who co-developed it with EECS graduate student Jianqian Lin and Dimitri Antoniadis, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering.

Why is this important? Well, MIT researchers argue that the since silicon transistors are getting harder and harder to shrink, the amount of current that can be produced by the devices is also shrinking, limiting their speed of operation. So, in order for Moore’s Law to go on, del Alamo points out that alternatives to silicon are needed. By building a tiny transistor using Indium Gallium Arsenide, they claim to have a viable contender.

Optics & Silicon get hitched: This marriage of optical and silicon is an area of immense focus, and IBM is spearheading the movement. IBM has come up with new chips that combine traditional silicon based electronic parts with optical components that will lead to much faster and beefier networks. Stacey has all the details.

[Bonus link] Fibers secured: Toshiba and Cambridge University scientists have come up with a way to boost the security of data over fiber optic cables, the New York Times reports. The fiber optic networks are prone to eavesdropping, but these researchers have come up with ways to make the networks more secure. Read more at the New York Times’ website.

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Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world

Wed, 30 May 2012 15:55:48 +0000

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DSL Trembles (a Tad) As Fiber Rumbles

Om Malik — Tue, 24 May 2011 16:45:57 +0000

Fiber Broadband is finally coming into its own, thanks to the growing number of fiber broadband deployments across the world. However, fiber broadband’s growing popularity is coming at the cost of DSL, one of the more widely deployed broadband technologies.

According to Infonetics Research, the worldwide Passive Optical Networking (PON) market jumped 20 percent in the first quarter of 2011 over the fourth quarter of the previous year, and is now over $1 billion, an all time high. PON is a technology used to deliver fiber broadband to our homes.
China, Korea and Japan are the reason why Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON), spending jumped a whopping 46 percent in the first quarter of the year over the previous quarter as Infonetics data shows. EPON is one of most widely deployed fiber broadband technologies with over 40 million subscribers using it as a basis to get super fast broadband.
During the first three months of 2011, Verizon added 207,000 FiOS fiber-to-the-home subscribers. Verizon is one of the largest fiber broadband providers in the US.
A double-digit sequential drop in DSL infrastructure spending in all regions led the overall market’s decline led by China shifting its broadband spending to fiber. China, according to Point Topic is the largest broadband country followed by the U.S.

Just to be clear, DSL isn’t going away anytime soon. At the end of 2010, there were 331 million broadband subscribers that used DSL-based connections versus 72 million who used fiber-based broadband connections. So fiber has a lot of catching up to do!

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In Japan, Many Undersea Cables Are Damaged

Om Malik — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:34:54 +0000

The horrific earthquake and the ensuing tsunami in Japan have caused widespread damage to undersea communications, according to data collected by telecom industry sources. Initially, it was thought that the damage to the cables that connect Japan and Asia to each other and other parts of the world was limited, but new data shows the extent of the problems.

According to research firm, Telegeography, the following cables have been damaged:

APCN-2, which is an intra-Asian cable, forms a ring linking China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan.
Pacific Crossing West and Pacific Crossing North, which are out of service.
PacNet has reported outages on segments of its East Asia Crossing network.
Korea Telecom reports that a segment of the Japan-U.S. Cable Network is damaged
NTT has reported damage to some segments of the PC-1 submarine cable system.

Most of the damaged network routers land in the Ajigaura or Kitabaraki landing stations, which are between Tokyo and Sendai (see map.) The tsunami and earthquake have not damaged Japan’s cable landing stations that are in the South of Tokyo, or on other side of the sheltered inlet that becomes Tokyo Bay, Telegeography said.

“We’re not aware of disruptions to any of the many cables that land here,” Stephan Beckart of Telegeography wrote in an email. “All of the cable systems that have reported outages also operate cables that land to the South of Tokyo, so no system appears to have suffered a complete outage.

A report from Dow Jones Newswires suggests most companies are working hard to fix the network problems. The Dow Jones report has the following additional details:

KDDI says its cable between the U.S. and Japan is broken and it cannot transmit signals.
NTT is using back-up cable systems.
PCCW says the Internet traffic to the U.S. is slow.

In a story on Friday, Stacey Higginbotham pointed out that Chunghwa of Taiwan had reported an outage on the APCN-2 system, while China Unicom had reported some unspecified damage to “two or three cables.” There is clear decline in Japan’s Internet performance, according to the data from JPNAP.

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Despite Quake Japan’s Undersea Cables Still Hold

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:30:33 +0000

Japan is a hub for trans-Pacific undersea cables that provide Internet access between many regions of the world. About 20 submarine cables land in Japan, giving Friday’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake the potential to disrupt communications around the globe. Luckily, so far, reports of cable damage have been low, according to TeleGeography.

Stephan Beckert, an analyst with the research firm, which tracks telecommunications, says that, so far, the quake has likely damaged APCN-2 intra-Asian cable, which forms a ring linking China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan. However, the web traffic in the region has not been disrupted. Beckert emailed me the following:

It’s not clear how much damage there has been to undersea cables, but thus far, there haven’t been any reports of major disruptions. There’s one report of 2 or 3 cables being damaged, but the report is riddled with errors (calls them undersea power cables, and says it will disrupt phone calls to China), so I’m discounting it, for now.

The most concrete report I have is from Chunghwa Communications of Taiwan, which reports that the earthquake damaged the APCN-2 intra-Asian cable, but that communications have not been disrupted. It’s not clear from their statement if the APCN-2 cable is still carrying traffic, or if APCN-2 is down and Chunghwa is rerouting traffic over alternate cables. I suspect it’s the latter.

This is no small mercy, given how important communications are in the aftermath of a disaster of this nature. Texts, tweets, web services, such as the recent Google’s People Finder registry, all rely on Internet connectivity provided through those cables. Below is a map of the undersea cables that land in Japan provided by TeleGeography, and we’ll update the story if we get more details.

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For the Web Delivered at Light Speed: Go With the Flow

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:39:09 +0000

MIT’s brains have figured out how to deliver a faster Internet using optical connections throughout the entire transmission, which could result in a web that’s up to 1,000 times quicker, is cheaper and more power-efficient than what we have now. But any such innovation would require a replacement of the current style of routers used inside the network — an expensive proposition for network operators, many of which are upgrading their infrastructure with bigger and faster routers designed to carry more traffic.

The breakthroughs, called flow switching, which researchers have been working on for 20 years, essentially keep the optical signals that travel over the long-haul networks as light the entire way through. Normally, the optical signals are translated to digital signals at the router where they can be stored inside the short-term memory in case of a massive inflow of traffic that must be routed across different routes.

With flow switching the light gets sent over dedicated paths, but unlike today’s dedicated bandwidth, traffic can flow over those paths dynamically. Today’s dedicated bandwidth is like a private road, once that dedicated path is built, the traffic can travel across it, but the path risks being empty when no signal is sent or overwhelmed by too much traffic if there’s too much data. The flow switching approach is more dynamic, using algorithms to dynamically allocate light wavelengths based on demand.

These types of technological breakthroughs are key as we want to keep cramming more information through our pipes, while also lowering the overall cost of sending that information. It’s not enough to figure out how to stream millions of HD videos to consumers; it has to cost less to do so. Breakthroughs like flow switching and other optical technologies can deliver cost savings as well as more capacity and faster speed. However, with higher upfront costs associated with essential network equipment replacement, the backbone companies and internet service providers may not be eager to invest, nor may they need to do so for a while.

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Miami Firm Plans First U.S.-Cuba Fiber Optic Cable

Colin Gibbs — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:42:53 +0000

In a move that could have a major impact on the lives of Cubans, a small Miami-based firm is hoping to give the isolated island nation its first-ever fiber optic connection to the rest of the world. TeleCuba Communications Inc. said the U.S. government has approved its effort to link Key West with the Havana suburb Cojimar via a 110-mile cable by 2011, which could drastically lower international calling rates and make the Internet more accessible for Cubans.

Cuba — which is the only nation in the Western Hemisphere without a fiber optic link to the outside world — has yet to give final approval to land the cable, and the Cuban government would set calling rates and could restrict web access. But it’s tough to overstate how important fiber optic access could be. While Cuba currently uses slow, expensive satellite links, TeleCuba’s cable would support 8-10 terabits per second, enough for more than 160 million simultaneous phone calls. So while Cubans may still be stuck with antiquated American cars, they may soon have access to modern American broadband — and that could be very good news for the Cuban economy.

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