The good optics of silicon photonics: Light sailing serenely down a fibre Why on earth would Cisco want to push fibre to your desk? It's a good question. Even modern video editing houses are content with 10Gbe to workstations, and most of us aren't modern video editing houses. Even Wi-Fi can reliably deliver speeds at or near the gigabit. No, you don't need fibre to your desk. But don't tell me you …
Singlemode telecommunications fibre is a pure SiO2 cladding around a Ge doped SiO2 core. If memory serves the Ge doping raises the refractive index by about 0.0043 so use 1.46 as the refractive index of the fibre, so speed of light in a fibre is about 0.68 speed of light in a vacuum.
But the bandwidth of the fibre is limited by the quality of the devices shoved on each end. In your face microwave.
Isn't this expected to be a major paying application of LEO satellites with optical links between them, such as Starlink? Upload from a ground station in London to LEO, beam across the pond in a vacuum, down to a ground station in New York, beating light pulses travelling through undersea cables.
<PissedOff>That's just a small factor that usually just limps off but fibre is great! I can deliver SPAM so much faster with fibre. Once everyone has a fibre connection they will be able to receive SPAM emails every millisecond ... this will benefit the Tech world in so many different ways ... everyone will have to upgrade their processors and storage to be able to process the SPAM reliably. I love fibre - it's such a great upgrade to the crap life!</PissedOff>
I don't think you need 100gbps to stream 8k video. The benefits of 8k over 4k are not as great as the benefits of 4k over 1080p, and beyond that the returns diminish even further. Look at printers for example. The resolutions there haven't really improved in the last 15 years.
With the pitiful data caps that many ISP's (especially US ones) have, you will be able to use up your whole months data allowance in under an hour then be reduced to dial-up modem speeds.
Before high speed fiber (>1Gbps) to the home becomes a reality, the ISPs will need to make major investments in their network hardware. As many events have shown - where there is no real competition they will not do this.
I'm currently on 300Mbps FTTP with BT. Do I want/need to blow an extra £10/month to get 900? Decisions, decisions... (This is in rural northern Ceredigion)
What pisses me off with fibre is the fact that general web access is virtually the same speed as pre-fibre. It's making the 50-100 connections to Facebook, Twitter and god knows what else that slows it. (Just loaded a Daily Heil story as a test - 283 connections!) It's great for moving large files, but people expecting lightening-fast page loads will be sadly disappointed.
Surely, 5 quanta per linguine should be plenty of connection speed for anybody. Faster speeds could damage your neurons -- and while you may accept that while striving towards total personal gratification, it surely is unacceptable for the kids. Think about the kids! Cisco and Intel would like to pretend it is rainbows all the way down, but we know better. right?.
An old neighbour of my Dads complained he was only getting 760M on his B4RN connection but then he was a world leading geologist who had some pretty hefty data sets to shit and he was a wind up merchant! I've now got 4G BB which is supposedly up to 70MB but during the day seems to do over 100 with the right far end. All I can say is we can watch whatever we want and I can still download a full desktop install many many times faster than I can find the bloody USB I need to burn it to.
Is the point about PCs being successful because geeks got into them first and the world followed correct?
To my mind PCs form part of the office automation process: pre WWII there were electromechanical adder-upper beasts, then main frames came along, then smaller office computers, and finally we got to the PC which put a computer on a desk.
I can see that there is some case to be made based on the development of the microprocessor based home computers which were uber-geeky in the mid seventies, and may have helped drive expectations, but I contend it is the office automation process that is the important factor. Geeks or no geeks we would have had a variation on the PC.
Discuss...
I'd argue, that the geek community getting into personal computing way back then, made what we have today possible. Without their tireless enthusiasm, the PC would more resemble a Play Station or X-box - a machine locked in to what big business want to sell you.
Commodore, Dragon, Sharp, Sinclair....the list of personal computers that locked the user into a closed world, with little interoperability would have just continued unabated.
The IBM x86 was the disrupter of that business model, but somehow, I don't believe it was ever their intention. If IBM could go back and rethink things, they would never had made the x86 so easily customisable.
'The IBM x86 was the disrupter of that business model'
I would argue that it was reverse engineering and IBM's mistake in not tying up Microsoft in distribution constraints relating to the DOS they supplied that was the real disrupter at the time.
IBM completely underestimated the impact the PC would have and didn't treat it like its other products because they never believed their control of the computing environment at the time would be undermined or lost.
Yep @Tom7, I worked for GPT/Marconi & built some of the first 'Photonix' (or Flowtonix) boards with fibres moving data around PCB's in the Mid-1990's... But then BT decided to go with proprietary Internet Protocol based technology & it became the death knell of Marconi... But thats another story!
I could make 2.4Gb work over 10km using the technology we had then. We did submarine fibre and I could see a use for that but for domestic use? We were looking at fibre TV but even in those days we could not have even worried the bandwidth. The hardware did price out at something around the annual phone line maintenance costs. At the time I though we could have sold millions of basic connections and retrofitted protocols later. Boy did I underestimate the potential!
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