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The Internet

Is That An OC-768 In Your Pocket? 128

Posted by CmdrTaco from the or-are-you-just-happy-to-see-me dept.
bdigit writes: "Qwest communications using Nortel Networks OC-768 was able to transfer 40Gbps over 435 miles(700 km) breaking the record for the fastest land speed record. Qwest has plans to begin deploying OC-768's in quarter three of 2001." Note: if they need beta testers, just lemme know! I can write a mean bug report ("My pr0n is only getting 30gps! Please fix!")
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Is That An OC-768 In Your Pocket? More

Is That An OC-768 In Your Pocket?

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  • For most applications you really don't need even cable speed. As long as the times that you have to wait for things are about what the human attention spam has your perfectly fine. I use a 2400 bps link every day and find that it works reasonably for fetching and sending e-mail quite well. Downloading works better than kermit and at least with your own ip and lynx or w3m with SSL support is better than nothing and is often much better than all of the cruft that is en vouge today. I actually have never had access to something that fast so I really can't see unless you make it a personal habit of mirroring all the major ftp sites or run some form of server or you like to mail chain letters with DVD attatchments.

  • Re:Mmmm, bandwidth. (Score:3)

    by TheReverand ( 95620 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @07:08AM (#979024) Homepage
    Hey! Some of us have to put all our email on floppy disks and mail it!

    This message posted by CmdrTaco via U.S. Post Office.

  • 3. When big businesses figure out that if they want anyone except CEOs and Saudi Arabian oil barons to buy them they are going to have to take the first step and wire American cities via themselves or the government to accomodiate access. You can't expect the average joe to finance something so damn expensive do you?
  • I prefer this chart [whatis.com] since it's slightly more detailed. Plus, it's not in a damn frame, ugh.
  • By the time that's a reality, we will be "your grandma," and quite comfortable with the notion of computers. ~L. Kynes
  • I am aware he isn't the right Bruce. And I'm also aware, that you've already got DSL, so it never could be you.
    But...to get back to the point, DSL is a huge investment to the Service Provider, which is why the geographic area is carefully selected.
  • That's complete BS, ISP's do invest longterm into providing DSL to the prices you see currently.
    Take it from one who actually does the calculations.
    Oh...and take a look at my tld...I'm not American
  • Yep that will do the trick...

    Just like open access has so significantly increased the performance and reliability of DSL connections!

    No filtered ports - that means any dork with a Linux box becomes a spam relay...I don't think open access is gonna stop that.

    Static IP's - yep lets add ANOTHER layer of administration to the ISP - to track all of the IP addresses. What happens when network renumbering needs to be done, the ISP will have to call each user and have them switch IP addresses...

    Better service? 99% of trouble in cable networks is in the distribution nodes between the local "hub" and your house - those are still owned by the cable company and guess who still has to fix them? Reference the current DSL situation for a prime example of how responsive the ILEC's are to fixing problems for CLEC's.

    And of course, you'll be able to get AOL via open access - the fact that they are now in favor of open access is scary enough to me...

    ZoneMan

  • what Nortel gear has is OC-768 sonet pipe, but you still need a router operating at the same speed if you want to make it Internet backbone. At this time Juniper has OC-192, Cisco presumably will have it soon. Will Juniper have oc-768 interface in a year? Probably. This box really rocks. In any case, you have to understand one thing: all these rates, OC-192 (about 10Gbps) and OC-768 (about 40Gbps) is for Internet core only.
  • ...Except that the first was OC-1.
  • 20 TB Library of Congress.

    Works out to be about a 2'x2'x2' cube filled with DVD-Roms. Fits into the trunk of a Miata, I would think.

    Boggles the mind.
  • These sort of ultra high speed lines are not intended to ever be used by the public. They are for building backbones with (hence the 700km testing.) However, if you want really fast access to your home or buisiness, they might be coming out with 40 Mbps dedicated cable connections (by dedicated I mean that the bandwidth isn't shared with everyone else on your loop.) Or you could always lease a T3...

  • OC-n = (n = STS-1 = 51mb) * 768 or 48 or 12 or 3 (Score:5)

    by plastik_s ( 204333 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @07:12AM (#979035)
    T1,T3 are transmission rates that descibe electrical interfaces. A T1 link is 1.5mb ( bits )
    T3 = 45mb. OC ( optical carrier ) is a BellCore
    description of transmission in SONET networks. ( Synchronous Optical Network ).

    The speed of OC-n is derived from the number of interleaved STS streams. STS-1 is 51mb per second
    All OC-n rates ( lowest is OC-3 which sts-1x3 ) are derived from a multiple of this.

    OC-768 = 768xSTS1 rate = 39168mb per second
    OC-48 = 48xSTS-1 rate = 2448mb per second
    OC-3 = 3xSTS-1 rate = 153mb per second

    OC-n rates can be described as concatenated ( a fat pipe ). or Channelized whereby an OC pipe contains multiple channels ( STS payloads )each
    of which can contain different payloads ( packets or atm cells ).
    Oc-3c is a concat. fat pipe.
    Oc-3 is a channelized pipe.

  • Re:Mmmm, bandwidth. (Score:3)

    by jhittner ( 66567 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @07:16AM (#979036)
    When I was your age we had to walk ten miles uphill both directions to get our email, and we loved it.

  • lol - i'm wearing my 'chicks dig unix' T-shirt with some cargo pants. and a Gameworks hat from seattle...

    there are only two things that get me hard bro - naked women that i'm about to have sex with and the 2.4.0 kernel - this article wasn't about either.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Now IANALP (I Am Not A Laser Physicist) but the best analogy for an optical repeater I can think of off the top of my head is this: imagine a lake on a mountain. The lake has several rivers which flow down the mountain and each of these rivers splits off into smaller creeks and rivers. By the time you get down the mountain, you might not have much other than a small trickle of water. Now imagine you had a portable Niagara Falls that you could place at the base of the mountain to feed into the small stream. All of the sudden you've got a huge waterflow again and still in the same direction as the original stream. This is what optical repeaters do.

    These repeaters use something called an optical pump. It's basically a high-powered silicon laser that's injected into doped silica fibre. The process of pumping injects energy into the fibre and because of some fancy physics it happens to do so in phase with the original signal.

    The trouble with repeaters is that they're dumb. They'll amplify signal and noise equally.

    --

  • OC-768 exists for short haul ATM and SONET connections inside a data centre. That is not a big deal in the communications world.

    Getting OC-768 DWDM with all of its little tricks to run for such a long distance between end points makes the promise of bigger and better backbones a reality. There are a ton of technical problems keeping the leading and trailing edges of the pulses of every different wavelength of light from degrading and interfering, and somehow managing to recover all the signals at the far end. 700Kms covers most any reasonable distance in Europe.

    It would be nice if /. posted links to a real news story, rather than print a company press release with no further informations for us to look at. This story surface a few months ago when a european partner of Qwest and Nortel were showing the technology at a trade show in Germany. They had a couple of spools of fibre totalling about 20kms, and were pumping some incredible level of data across it. They had also done a real world test between two German cities with a fibre running along side some train tracks.

    the AC
  • Ok, I knew that, and I still spelled it wrong. Oops. :-)

    (and I just had to get a completely off-topic post in here somewhere, just because I wanna grow up to be an AC someday)
  • Forget library of congress as a metric - think FedEx truck full of tapes!

    From the useless stats dept.

    40 Gbits/sec = 216 Terabytes in 12 hours.

    If you put 1800 120GB DDS4 tapes in FedEx baggies you will move the same about of data (latency is not so good but that's not the point :-)

    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of tapes.

  • It's always nice to know that I can fill my hard drive in less than a second.
  • "My pr0n is only getting 30gps! please fix!"

    Waddayaneed more than 30gps for? a realtime tomographic video of her insides?
  • Just gimme a call. Im sure it beats my cable all to hell and back. :P
  • ahahaha I caught that too...
  • There's another reason for the cost of equipment being so high - a limited market. I worked for a company that found out it was cheaper to build our own equipment than to purchase from the 3 vendors (at the time - now there's only 1 and the first 3 are gone). It was estimated at the time that there were only about 12000 locations in the world that would be able to use said equipment (automated video playback devices). In order for them to make a profit, they had to charge through the nose. We then would have had to pass those charges on to the end customer to get the payback.

    So, don't look for prices on CO equipment to come down anytime soon. If anything, they will go up, due to the fact that consolidation in the telecom world is happening much faster than ever before.

  • That's some nice bandwidth. If only having access to high bandwidth lines didn't cost retarded amounts of money, the Internet would be a far better place than it is now. Just imagine, if the last-mile bit was solved with high(er)-bandwidth lines everywhere, one wouldn't need cable or telephones..

    Utopia? Nah. Better? Yes.
  • I mean, honestly, it would take either a huge disk array or a lot of RAM to be able to demonstrate speeds of 40Gbps anywhere.

    I'm just curious as to how they do this, does anyone know?

  • Considering that voice analysis isn't absolutely the best for things like code writing and typing there will always be the need for keyboards.
  • Optical tends to go up by factors of four as well. 10 Gbps is the fastest version currently being widely deployed, 40 is coming, and 160 is in the R&D stage.

  • More info inside Qwest (Score:3)

    by chris88 ( 62904 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @07:25AM (#979051)
    2 clicks in and there's a whole page of information about this "record breaking" event.
    http://www.qwest.com/about/media/story.asp?id=28 8
  • They must have used some computers with terabyte hard drives. raid...

  • Single mode is thinner than multi mode, therefore the light doesn't "bounce" quite as much.

    Mikael Jacobson
  • Who said it was TDM? That system uses DWDM as well.

    TDM doesn't do squat to increase bandwidth -- if your hard drive is 4.5G, how you partition it isn't going to give you any more than 4.5G. Light travels at a certain speed through glass fiber. One can turn that light on and off only so fast. In order to increase bandwidth, one would have to either turn the light on/off faster (very difficult) or start using more than one light in the same cable.

    DWDM has practical limits in the photoreceivers. If the receiver cannot differentiate 730nm from 740nm... as selectivity increases, bandwidth increases proportionally.

  • Re:Not for public consumption (Score:3)

    by electricmonk ( 169355 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @07:31AM (#979055) Homepage
    they might be coming out with 40 Mbps dedicated cable connections (by dedicated I mean that the bandwidth isn't shared with everyone else on your loop.)

    Yeah, it wouldn't be horribly expensive or anything for the cable company to rewire its entire system so that there is a dedicated line running from the cable company to each and every house it serves, now would it? And, surely, if it was, they wouldn't happen to pass that expense on to the customer, because they are decent people who don't care if they lose money, as long as the customer is happy, right?

  • Since the library of congress is increasing it's collections each and every day you can't measure a quantity that really should be measured in absolute terms.
  • har-de-har-har.

    Is there a way we can moderate headlines?
    --
  • I was just reading the press release on QWest and they have hit up to 160 Giga Bps!! Using something they called Dense-Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM).

    Of course that just sounds like some kind of compression system.

  • Not So (Score:1)

    by def ( 87618 )
    Just how long do you expect it to take to write out 1800 120GB tapes? And to read them back in?

    You have to count that in the measurement as well.
  • Why count the tape write time - perhaps the date is on tape to start with and the coms line would need to count tape read time ...

    BTW it would take 1000+ tape drives running at once to move that much data

  • Erbium =)

    --

  • DWDM is the process of dumping multiple wavelengths of light into a single fiber. DWDM has been in use for quite some time. The problem was how to get that many colors into a single fiber and then be able to detect it when it comes out the other side.
  • Every one of those links I followed was dead. 'Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!)' The addresses got bunched in with the TARGET tag. Brandon
  • Hey, some people might want lots of simultaneous direct feeds... Some might even want a virtual clusterfuck or two, with feedback. I'm sure we can figure out a way of using up those 30gps :)
  • I'll complain when I have bouts of disconnections 5-7 times each day, each for about 5 minutes.

    (read, ISP in growing pains)
  • Just so you know, the fastest record overall is 1.1 terabits per second over fiber. However, it was done in a labratory with the fiber coiled around pole. As for Qwest, I think these guys are just great. They have tons of fiber and are provide bandwidth to 70% of major cities. If they upgrade there network significantly with these lines, the internet in general should be much less congested.
  • Think about if labour is an issue perhaps the application of convict populations to do the work and then all you have to worry about is the parts.

  • Now I'm not going to step out on a limb and say that my experence is the rule with Qwest, but doesn't everybody that's had anything to do with them have a horror story. I went to a smell tech school (10 points if you can figure out which ;-) ), and that school was a circuit customer of Qwest.

    It was horrible. The router at the other end of the T-1's died, several times a week. They didn't recognize the school's circuit ID number. we had routing issues, links to other backbones died randomly, but wait!
    As long as you were inside Qwest's network, it was very very fast.... so I guess it will fix all of Qwest's problems to make that network faster yet.

  • One thing that Ive never had adequately explained to me is grades of fiber..

    It has something to do with bran muffins and being regular... Try this one [google.com]

  • Re:How do they measure this??? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They don't have to COPY data. They just have to generate it. A program running on multiple computers can easily generate enough data to fill up a pipe like that.

  • OK. First stop thinking in terms of computers and start thinking in terms of optical equipment.

    To get 40G signals they would have to mux four 10G (OC-192) signals onto a fiber which could then be fed into the OC-768 system. And of course, to get the OC-192 signal, they would need OC-48 or OC-12 subtending equipment being fed by DS-3 sources.

    Te get multiple 40G signals, they can do this miltiple times, or more likely they will just feed the same signal through the system on multiple wavelengths. It doesn't really matter as each wavelength is it's own "channel".

  • Actually, according to <a
    href="http://www.bandwidth.com">www.bandwidth.co m</a> anyway, there is such
    a thing as an OC-255. It looks out of place on their table, though :).
  • I mean if you dump a bunch of water into your beer you don't get more beer just more diluted beer.
  • While this speed boost from Qwest is a wonderful breakthrough, one I'm sure the other providers will follow up on as well, this doesn't help Internet conjestion much.
    Consider for a second that the vast majority of Internet Consumers use providers other than Qwest (whether it be UUnet, IBI/Digex, whomever) and still need to cross through peering points to go from network to network. These peering points, in general, are limited to OC-3 bandwidth... (Sometimes you can get FastEther, but that rarer). What good is an OC-768 when the weakest links in your connection are OC-3s. It's like having a T-1 bridge two OC-48 networks... So while you're stuck at MAE East, the Qwest customer hitting www.qwest.com will see it come down in blazing speed. Oh, I'm sorry, the customer only has a T-1 anyway.
    When they, and other providers, update those peering points to allow more bandwidth between providers, we can cut down on serious Internet bottlenecks. Until then, this OC-768 mess is worthless.

  • So what your saying is you would dilute your beer with more beer. what type of beer are we talking about here?

  • I dunno... It's always nice that the end users have fat pipes, but you can't don't forget guys like me, who shell out a lot of cash to put up servers. Currently, I'm co-located at a local ISP, tycho.net. I've got a full 42U rack, 8 Amps of UPS/Generator protected power, and a 10mbps switched Ethernet segment. Of the 10Mbps, I can use 640K 24/7, and burst to full speed for about 65 minutes a day (Yes, the 950 Kilobyte per second downloads rule :-). Unfortunately, all that comes at a price: $750 a month (And I don't bring in $100K a year.) Now chew on this this: for $50 a month, a DSL user who is close to their telco switch could easily suck my 640 dry, and I cant combat it in kind- I need the low latencies unavailable with sDSL, and the upstream bandwidth unavailable to aDSL. Even worse, someone using a work computer could pull the entire 10 megs, searching for movies, or dealing with files. Because of this, I'm forced to setup 30 Kilobyte per second bandwidth limits on each user. It will only get worse when everyone installs DSL (Note that I'm not worried about the cable modem users - self limiting ;-). Now, the flip side to this coin is that when fibre finally reaches the common household, greater connectivity will be reduced in price, though it still won't be as simple as the 56K days. This doesn't mean of course, that I will not appreciate DSL when it's finally installed at my house, but it does make things more interesting. Oh, I still have 30U of space left, if someone else wants to put up a box :-]
  • Sorry, I really hammered that post into the dirt...

    Here we go again:

    I dunno... It's always nice that the end users have fat pipes, but you can't don't forget guys like me, who shell out a lot of cash to put up servers. Currently, I'm co-located at a local ISP, tycho.net. I've got a full 42U rack, 8 Amps of UPS/Generator protected power, and a 10mbps switched Ethernet segment. Of the 10Mbps, I can use 640K 24/7, and burst to full speed for about 65 minutes a day (Yes, the 950 Kilobyte per second downloads rule :-).

    Unfortunately, all that comes at a price: $750 a month (And I don't bring in $100K a year.)

    Now chew on this this: for $50 a month, a DSL user who is close to their telco switch could easily suck my 640 dry, and I cant combat it in kind- I need the low latencies unavailable with sDSL, and the upstream bandwidth unavailable to aDSL. Even worse, someone using a work computer could pull the entire 10 megs, searching for movies, or dealing with files.

    Because of this, I'm forced to setup 30 Kilobyte per second bandwidth limits on each user. It will only get worse when everyone installs DSL (Note that I'm not worried about the cable modem users - self limiting ;-).

    Now, the flip side to this coin is that when fibre finally reaches the common household, greater connectivity will be reduced in price, though it still won't be as simple as the 56K days. This doesn't mean of course, that I will not appreciate DSL when it's finally installed at my house, but it does make things more interesting.

    Oh, I still have 30U of space left, if someone wants to put up a box :-]

    Remind me to look before I leap.
  • Line noise, baby!
  • Alexander Keith's... =)

    No, just kidding, you wouldn't need more beer. See, a beer-optical pump would use regular water and the interaction of the pump water and the signal-bearing beer would be such that the output of the pump would be pure beer - not diluted, just more beer. A beer amplifier.

    --

  • Actually I meant to make a pun to the name of the router company, but I guess that is the way the character's name is spelled. As far as spelling captain incorrectly, I plead guilty :)
  • Just because you ferry more data around dosn't mean you need supposedly "better" software (that IBM just happens to be selling). Standard unixy stuff works well and scales as long as you have hardware tol support the data processing.
  • Our 56K will still outperform any 40Gbps lines in the future because by MS .net server will be in a perpetual crashed state.
  • Installing repeaters would only slow the network down dramatically, as it would mean that the fiber optic signal would have to travel through electronics at some time, and thus, it would be slowed enough to make using fiber optics at all pointless.

    Agilent Technologies is working on a solutio n [agilent.com] for switching these signals without them passing through an electronic switch, but I think repeaters are fundamentally electronic, if I'm not mistaken.

  • Currently, code is optomized for being produced on keyboards. Its not unresonably to predict that as voice recognition becomes better, we will have languages built around voice input.

    Perl is already a little like this (it was written by a linguist after all..) with the expression modifiers (ie some_expression if control_expression.

    Coding in COBOL would be nowhere near as bad if you could speek it :)

    But good typers can type faster than they can speek.. However unless your transcribing something, the input part is idle more often then the tinking part (be it code, or a letter to mom)... The thinking is the time consuming part.

  • My guess is that they bundled OC48 traffic and split it at the far end ( edge switch -->oc768---> edge switch ). They could have used real voice/video data ( unlikely ) or probably had an ATM test cell sequence ( standard random bit content called PRBS sequences)in 16 OC-48 sreams ...which can be multiplexed into 4 x OC-192 streams...which is multiplexed into 1xOC-768 and demultiplexed in the same manor at the far end.

    SONET switches do not manipulate data streams in the same way as PC decodes IP packets. Special framing chips generate/decode the electrical stream which is the conversion of light to electrical. The chips decode the payload and send it to forwarding hardware which in turn sends to a backplane fabric and out to some other piece of similar hardware. Multiple custom ASICS provide a physical route for the data. At OC768 though the data stream is probably not touched at all just pure light to electrical job.

    The transmission is diskless and ramless in this context, especially since the generator equipment is creating payloads in hardware.

  • Re:Impressive :) (Score:3)

    by TBC ( 11250 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @09:34AM (#979086) Homepage
    Actually at this point, you are mistaken. I was just reading an article on optical amplifiers. Basically you dope a length of fiber with rare-earth elements, use a laser to pump the elements in an excited state. Then when the signal comes in on one end, it causes a percentage of the excited atoms to lase, resulting in an increase of signal. It's not a whole lot different from how a HeNe laser tube works. Since it's all optical, you don't have a speed bottleneck. The big issue now is how to pump more power into that fiber. (More power = longer distances) They are approaching the ability to push 1 watt of power into the fiber. That may not sound like much, but when you push it through single-mode fiber, the resulting energy density is ~10 times that of the surface of the sun. If the glass isn't "perfect" it can start to melt. If you don't have the fiber attenuated by the time it gets to the far end, you can actually damage your detector in these new systems.

    Ain't quantum mechanics fun?

  • How T1, T3, and OC3 rates work. (Score:3)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @09:34AM (#979087) Journal
    Can anyone explain to everyone here how the T1 & T3 and OC3 rates work?

    Sure. I've been architecting an ASIC for an "edge router" for the last year, and I've had to live and breathe this stuff.

    ENORMOUSLY simplified:

    DSn (n= 1, 1C, 2, 3, 4NA) refer to data format standards. Tn (n= 1, 1C, 2, 3, 4NA) refer to standards for carrying those formats on wires. Similarly, STS-n and OC-n refer to the SONET standards for data formats and carrying them on an optical fiber, respectively.

    These are standards for US/Canada. Japan is virtually identical (Jn; n=1, ...). Europe did something similar but incompatable, of course. B-)

    For data only a few are in common use. These are:

    Unchannelized T1/DS1
    Unchannelized T3/DS3
    STS-n/OC-n n=1, 3, 12, 24, 48, ...

    The basic quantum of data is 8,000 8-bit bytes ("octets") per second (nicknamed a "DS0"). This is 64,000 bits per second, enough for one phone call. (Some phone equipment steals one bit out of the byte every 6 frames for signaling {ring, dialing, off-hook}, making one of the bits untrustworthy, which is part of why modems maxed out at about 56,000 BPS rather than 64,000.) And yes, that IS a decimal 8,000, not 8K.

    DS1/T1 packs one bit of overhead and 24 bytes of payload into a 193-bit "frame". A T1 feed will typically be "unchannelized" - you get to use the 24 bytes. So the data rate is 1.544 Mhz, and you get to use 1.536 Mbps. For PPP the data will typically be HDLC packets, but some applications will use ATM cells (stuffed with packets fragmented according to the AAL5 standard). The data packaging and protocols will consume some of that remaining bandwidth.

    (ISDN come in two flavors. One ("primary rate"?) uses a T1 but steals one of the 24 DS0s for signaling. The other ("base rate"?) is a format similar in style to a T1, but with the payload stripped down to 2 DS0 channels plus a narrow signaling channel. ISDN makes "digital phone calls" of DS0 bandwidth. Typical equipment can make multiple calls and use MultiLink PPP to combine them into a bigger pipe.)

    Higher rates were originally designed to pack up and carry lower rates. A "channelized" DS2 carries 4 DS1s, a DS3 carries 7 DS2s (i.e. 28 DS1s). But if you buy a point-to-point DS3 you can also use it "unchannelized":

    An unchannelized DS3/T3 runs at 44.736 MHz. One bit in 85 is used for overhead, and the rest are payload, so you get about 44.21 Mhz raw bandwidth. Again your typical PPP feed will use HDLC, but an ISP talking to a DSLAM will use ATM cells. If he expects to do voice-over-packet he might use the "PLCP mapping" of the ATM cells into the DS3 to trade away about 4% of the bandwidth to pass timing information to the DSLAM. (T1 clock rates are tightly synchronized, to keep the DS0s - which are the voice sampling rate - synchronized, preventing "clicks" in your phone. T3 rates are very accurate, but NOT tightly synchronized. A click every three days is acceptable. A click every few minutes is not.)

    An OC-1/STS-1 has, per second:
    - 8000 frames, each composed of
    - 9 rows, each composed of
    - 90 octets.
    For a total bit rate of 51.84 Mhz. The first three octets in each row are used for overhead related to alligning and tranporting the data. The rest is payload. Depending on what the payload IS, perhaps one byte per row might be used for overhead there, as well.

    The payload is allowed to "float" within the 87*9 non-overhead bytes of the framing structure, so that when it hops from one framing to another the box where it hops doesn't need a big buffer to get it alligned, and so things don't break if the boxes' clocks drift. Part of the 3-bytes-per-row overhead is a pointer showing where the start of the payload's frame is currently located within the STS frame.

    You'll notice that the STS-1 rate is similar to the T3 rate, and that's NOT an accident. The SONET standard was designed to interface with the existing phone network, and the T3 was the layer where they started. One of the many possible payloads of an OC-1/STS-1 is a DS3. So for raw usable data rates think OC-1 = T3. You'll be dead on if it's carrying a T3, and real close if it's carrying something else.

    An STS-n/OC-n is N times the STS-1/OC-1 rate, and carries N times the payload. Unlike the DSn hierarchy, which has separate standards for each layer, SONET defines a general mechanism for higher rates. So the particular rates that are of interest are the ones for which equipment manufacturers chose to build the equipment.

    The format of an STS-n is just N STS-1s, with their framing alligned, interleaved by byte, i.e. the first byte from STS-1 number one, then the first from from STS-1 number 2, and so on for N bytes. Then the second byte from STS-1 nubmer 1, and so on forever.

    There are two flavors of combining them. An STS-n/OC-n is N separate STS-1/OC-1 channels. An STS-nC/OC-nC is a single channel: There are still N STS-1 framing strucures, but a single payload is smeared out across all of them.
  • Is there a way we can moderate headlines?

    No.
    ---

  • Re:We will ^not always need keyboards (links) (Score:3)

    by techfreak ( 144299 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @09:38AM (#979090)

    DrEldarion wrote "They've already done experiements where they put electrodes on a guy and he was able to move a cursor around the screen just by thinking about it... (sorry, I forgot where I read that... no link :/ ) "

    Here's some links to articles about that:

    " Anyways, I'm sure that eventually you'll just have a DataJack in your head (just like in ShadowRun!) where you'll just plug in a cable and you're all set. "

    Sounds like fun to me! ;-)

    Impossible means no one's done it yet.

  • But by that time we'll have super-intellegent robot slaves to do menial jobs like programming.

  • I assume you're referring to a digital reproduction of the contents of the Library of Congress.

    I sure hope you aren't transferring the books, or (heaven forbid) the actual Library! That would take at least a couple months.

    Donny
  • AS long as it comes with decent anti virus.
  • The press release says it was TDM.
    ---
  • I think if you include the SONET headers yes 155 megabits per second...If you mean the payload...its 153.
  • More important, how would you explain staying up all night mumbling to your computer to your (soon-to-be-ex)friends?

    Besides, I'd rather not talk for houres on end.

    O, and and I know another one: try shouting move left, jump and shoot at the same time to your computer when playing UT. That'll teach you... something.
  • Voice recognition should be just fine for codeing. Once compilers are written for voice codeing we will be able to tell the compiler what whe want the program to do and it will translate it into code for us.
  • I, for one, am getting damn tired of my 1.5 meg dsl. In my new house, i had fiber optic cable installed to the alley, where it is waiting for the missing last-mile fiber provider. It would be great to have a neighborhood LAN, and to be able to play various games with the entire town at 1-2ms pings :) Not to mention that 30gps porn problem, just need a huge hard disk array and a sniffer/packet grabber to snarf all of the porn that the entire neighborhood looks at. Then i'll be able to make one of those little matrix-folder-with-a-string on all of my neighbors. -Jeff
  • I have a cable modem.

    I use its speed for streaming video and browsing the web with graphics (yes, I do like the graphics, and yes, I have tried using a text browse, did so for 3 months straight until I got off my ass and got a mouse so I could use X effectively). And I know you can browse the web with a 2400 baud modem, I did that for a long time too, but it's hell, especially with some of the bloat on many websites today.

    I also use the speed so that I can do downloads within a reasonable length of time. I definitely transfer more in a day, disregarding web and my ftp server (for friends), than I could do with a 2400 baud modem.

    And then I also prefer cable to modems since it costs about 20 bucks more for an always on connnection at many times the speed. 150/80 is pretty damn good for 50 bucks a month; I could probably do better with DSL, but I haven't had time to do the research on it in my area.
    ---
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • My cousin works at Nortel on this stuff. He was telling me that the OC-768 system that HE was working on employed 400 wavelengths of light on a single line.
  • If we have super-intelligent robots to do our programming for us, they won't be our slaves; they'll be our masters. Not that that will necessarily be a bad thing.
  • O, and and I know another one: try shouting move left, jump and shoot at the same time to your computer when playing UT. That'll teach you... something.

    You forget that a keyboard is also a suboptimal control system for computer games. Joystics and similar specifically designed controls provide a much easier to use interface than the kludge job of setting up a keyboard to control your gameplay.
  • What about holographic display? Virtual reality? Fractal video? After all, we are talking about the future...
  • It's about 1.5 gigabit/sec, which is about the same rate as uncompressed HDTV, which can be compressed down to 19 megabit/sec.
  • In the midst of your Star Trek spelling lesson you misspelled captain.

  • I'm a parent soon. I can hear myself saying... (Score:5)

    by hardaker ( 32597 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @06:30AM (#979107) Homepage
    "In my day, sonny, we only had a 64kbps connection to my house. Thats right. And that's when I was already an adult. Now every house comes with a standard 40Gbps line. Aren't you special. You don't know what its like to have to wait for your keystrokes to be echoed back to your terminal screen. Oh, sorry, you don't even know what a keyboard is do ya. Get outta here."

  • Missing something... (Score:4)

    by tbo ( 35008 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @06:34AM (#979108) Journal
    Where's the obligatory conversion of 40Gbps into X Libraries of Congress/second?
  • Nortel Networks' scalable 40 to 80Gbps platform was introduced at Telecom '99 in Geneva last October, where it was the first 80Gbps platform to be demonstrated in a non-laboratory environment. The Nortel Networks global platform, planned for commercial availability in 2001, is expected to have the ability to scale as high as 6.4 terabits per second.

    6.4 terabits per second? 800,000,000 meg a second? That'd be rather impressive.

    Anyways, I wonder how attenuation will be for these cables. Is 428 some miles the maximum? That's impressive compared the the meters measured for fiber optic. Can repeaters be installed to incresase the distance even if necessary? I could see this implemented around the world.

    Who knows, maybe in a few years we'll be seeing oc-1024k's :-)

    Yay, go future

  • OC-768? Cool. I wonder if they'll do what Excite @Home is doing and start charging different rates for "preferred" service?

    Can anyone explain to everyone here how the T1 & T3 and OC3 rates work? I know that OC3 vs. T3 is a difference in Digital only for OC...

    We work at a small software company and just got a fraction T1 line in. So we did the math, knowing what a T1 can push. But we realized that a T3 wasn't only 3 times faster than a T1? It was much more. What is the difference? And while we're at it, maybe someone can explain what an OC3 gets vs. Napster's OC-48, and now with the OC-768?

    I'd really appreciate it, and would love to know once and for all the correct answer so that we quit guessing around here. Thanks!

    Rader

  • Re:Mmmm, bandwidth. (Score:4)

    by CyberOptic ( 452 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @06:40AM (#979111) Homepage
    I really think you should stop complaining about cable. You are fortunate to have 512KB+ cable access. Me and ALOT others only have access to a regular 33.6 or 64 Kbps line and don't even stand a chance of getting cable or similar. Any way..Cable IS considered a high-speed access, and well...it actually is pretty fast, so please stop complaining, when you don't have anything to complain about.
  • I remember when my trusty 2400 baud serial modem was my hotrod. Now I get my knickers in a bunch when my dsl pipe is running a bit too slow. Looking to the future these types of break neck speeds are going to be a necessity, with ASPs popping up all over the place and more and more companies and individuals wanting to do more on the web than ever before. It would be really nice to save an encrypted backup of my hard drive to some remote server in an instant.
  • There's a bandwidth chart at the bottom of Bandwidth.com [bandwidth.com].

  • Fastest single signal (Score:4)

    by Rhys Dyfrgi ( 64793 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @06:43AM (#979114)
    This is only the fastest single signal, it isn't the fastest single fiber system. Of course, if they increase the number of signals above the 4 they mention on their press release [qwest.com] to the maximum 80 allowable by DWDM [whatis.com], then they can get up to 3.2tbps (terrabits per second) over a single fiber.

    Of course, as this part [webproforum.com] of a tutorial [webproforum.com] indicates that higher bitrates allow for fewer channels, getting 80 might not be possible, so we may just have to settle for `only' 160gbps.
    ---

  • is slashdot going to post a story every time someone at Qwest [qwest.com] takes a dump or what?

    This [slashdot.org] article was posted a little over a month ago about how the guys at Qwest did a hundred mile round trip at 40Gbs. Is this really that much more signifigant? It just seems to me that this is the /. equivalent of a front page headline about how Bell called his other assistant a little over a month after he phoned the first one. The overwhelming response from the telephone using public "Whooptie shit!"


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • If this is what we are capable of, then why can I only connect at 26400 bps?
  • A small company named Enkido [enkido.com] was the first to ever offer OC-768 transit, in Manhatten, back in May.

    What's even better, if you're talking last mile, you should move to Manhatten, where Enkido has that OC-768 service within 200 feet of *anywhere* on the island (they have 3500 miles of fibre on the island). As with Qwest, they're carrying 40Gbps on a single lamba (wavelength), so they currently peak out at 6.4Tbps, although hopes of ever *routing* that are pretty low at this point.
  • What's the data rate thru your monitor cable for 1024x768 32bit color @ 60fps? With this kinda bandwidth, I wonder if one day it'd be possible for people who don't want the 'hassle' of having a computer (read: your grandma) to just plug a monitor, kb, and mouse into the wall...

  • Re:Missing something... (Score:3)

    by Rhys Dyfrgi ( 64793 ) on Saturday June 24, 2000 @06:46AM (#979132)
    It would take 16 minutes and 40 seconds to transfer the entire 20 TB Library of Congress.
    ---
  • If he were really Bruce Perens, he'd have a bit more understanding of transmission-line theory, RF, optoelectronics, what belongs in a point-of-presence and how the signal gets there, etc.

    Bruce

  • Re:When (Score:2)

    by scoof ( 2459 )
    You obviously don't have any idea of what equipment transporting these amounts of data costs. And how expensive it is to set up a local DSL-POP.
    bottm-line: broadband-services costs more money than consumers are willing to pay, and since this is a market-driven world, that will only change when either of two happens:
    1. People are willing to pay more to get more
    2. Prices on equipment drop
  • Who knows, maybe in a few years we'll be seeing oc-1024k's :-)

    Actually, you'll never see OC-1024s. The n in OC-n is an integer, roughly equivalent to the number of DS-3s of bandwidth of the connection. For technical and historical reasons, n will always be 3*(2^x), where x is an integer.

    Therefore, the next step up from OC-768 (n=3*2^8) is OC-1536 (n=3*2^9).

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