New Data Transmission Speed Record

An anonymous reader writes "Gizmag is reporting that a team of German and Japanese scientists have collaborated to shatter the world record for data transmission speed. From the article: "By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower."

Re:Digg Loses

[imunfair]

Precisely why I read slashdot and fark, but not digg.

Slashdot has the non-time sensitive, most interesting news - with insightful or interesting comments.

Fark has the time sensitive or humorous news, with clever or funny comments.

Digg is somewhere in the middle, with the immature comments or spam I can find in an AIM chat room if I need it.

Nothing ever makes it out of the lab

[b00m3rang]

into the real world, right? Why are they developing nuclear pebble bed reactors in laboratories, when I can't buy one at the 7-11 yet?

Re:Why is bandwidth measured in Kb

[blazer1024]

One reason is because it's serial data generally, and you don't know exactly how many of those bits are going to be data.. (you could have start or stop bits, etc)... but I don't know the details of that, so I'll just mention my other possible reason.

It's that throughput is generally what actually matters when sending data. In other words, that how much actual payload is being send, minus any overhead. If you've got a decent amount of overhead, your actual throughput might be a bit less. So it makes more sense to talk about bandwidth in bits per second, so as not to confuse it with actual throughput.

Not filling 1gb pipe

[swpod]

I've done some checking of aggregate SAN bandwidth in the last few months, and for the most part companies are not even saturating their 2 gbit Fibre Channel links (for that matter, most could easily run with legacy 1 gbit gear). Even the inter-switch links are often crusing well below 2 gbit. Funny to note that the big push is to release 4 gbit gear, for what conceivable purpose I have no idea.

It just seems to me that the real issue is access time, not bandwidth, though kudos to this team for an essentially meaningless achievement.

Re:faster than ram

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

The target use for something like this is Internet backbone traffic, so the question is whether Cisco will be able to deliver a router that will keep the line busy. Cisco's web site says "the innovative 12000 Terabit System scales to 5 Terabits (Tbps) per second ".

Re:who cares?

[multi io]

This technology enables many more people to be simultaneously stuck at 4Mbps down/256Kbps up.

Re:in libraries of congress please

[DRUNK_BEAR]

Research scientists are always ahead of the "real world". This has always been, always will be. You can view their work as creating ideas, innovations and technologies. Once these ideas have been published, it is the industry's work to pick them up and transform them into something commercially usable. Yes, there is a lot of research projects that can be viewed as useless, but, you should see it as a brainstorming of new technologies. Not all will end up in something revolutionary, but it may incite new ideas and/or bring new products or ways of doing things in the "real world".

Re:And so it begins

[swillden]

So technically, it was the Japanese who liberated Europe?

If you want to look at it that way, it was the Soviets who liberated Europe. Hitler's decision to attack Russia was the beginning of the end for Germany. The Eastern Front diverted and tied down much of Germany's military power, in a conflict that they were almost certain to lose. No one will know for sure, of course, but it's probable that the allies eventually would have liberated Europe even without the direct involvement of the US. The end would not have come as quickly, and the victory would probably not have been so complete, but it's unlikely that Germany would have retained much of the territory it had conquered. More likely, Germany itself, and perhaps much of the rest of Europe, would have fallen under Soviet control.

So maybe the Japanese liberated the French from the Russians :-)

Re:revisionist bull. Without US supplies, Russia w

[swillden]

You notice that you call my post "revisionist bullshit" and then proceed not to disagree with me.

Your post primarily says that once the US entered the fray the end was clear, which I completely agree with. What I said was that even if the US had not entered the war, Germany still would have lost (though without US involvement, Japan would probably rule much of Asia). It's interesting that you mention supplies: The US was supplying the allied forces before it actually entered the war, but the US supplies, both before and after 1942 went primarily to the western front. AFAIK, the US never provided significant supplies to the Russians; there really was no way for us to do so.

I will concede that the US entry into the war and the Normandy invasion did help take the pressure off of the Soviets, but I think it's far from clear that Hitler every could have conquered the Russians. The USSR was too big, too populous and too powerful, even if it didn't have the level of industrialization the US had.

It's all speculation, but I think even without the US involvement, the Soviets would have fought Hitler to a standstill, consuming more of Germany's troops and resources and the British were already planning the invasion of occupied France even without US troop support (they had US logistical support even without the US entry into the war). The US ended the war much sooner than it would have otherwise, and probably dramatically changed the level of Communist influence in the outcome, but Germany was doomed either way.