Siemens Breaks Network Speed Record
By Ed Oswald | Published December 20, 2006, 2:38 PM
German electronics company Siemens said Wednesday that it had set a new network speed record, achieving a speed of 107 gigabits -- the equivalent of roughly two DVDs worth of data -- per second, two and a half times faster than the previous record.
The test transmission was conducted on a 100-mile stretch of fiber-optic cable in the U.S. It also marks the first time such a test was performed outside of the laboratory. Siemens says the continuing surge in multimedia applications necessitates such high bandwidth needs.
At the core of the faster speeds is an entirely new transmission and reception system. This development allows the processing of data without the need to split the traffic into different channels to prevent bottlenecks.
Siemens' developments are especially promising for those working on increasing the current network ceiling of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits, although most residential-based deployments have transmission limits of one gigabyte or less.
"Ethernet has long been the data communication standard on corporate and home networks," Siemens said.
Regarding the new technology, the company said that one of its advantages "is that the data is no longer transmitted over switched connections to the end customer, but in packets that can be routed over alternate lines to bypass overloaded or very busy network sections."
The first products taking advantage of the technology will begin appearing in the next few years.
This is weird. I knew the data transfer record was way higher: 2.5 Terabits/sec. It was set by the Fraunhofer institute this year, over a glass fibre link stretching 160 kilometers (roughly 100 miles):
http://www.digitalmediaa...ult.asp?ArticleID=14405
http://www.fraunhofer.de...6-Topic2.jsp?print=true
A difference between network speed and data transfer speed probably...
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|Too bad there isn't a hard drive that can write that fast.
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|Yeah, but it is still nice for distributed computing tasks and other memory resident data transfers...assuming the latency is not horrible.
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|I don't think 2 DVDs hold over 100Gb of data!! I would have to assume they meant 2 BluRay DVDs, which hold 50Gb each.
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|107 gigabits - Its BITS not BYTES!!
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|"...speed of 107 gigabits... per second..."
It was referring to speed of throughput, not volume of data. Read it again.
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|BIT not byte
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|At the pace most infrastructure improvements rollout in the U.S. I think *maybe* my grandchildren might see this happen.
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|my thoughts exactly.
We will never see this speed because of all the red tape regulations and "snails pace" infrastructure improvement.
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|I believe he mistakenly typed "gigabyte" instead of "gigabit".
I'm excited about this as it will ultimatly push faster residential speeds up as well.
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|"Siemens' developments are especially promising for those working on increasing the current network ceiling of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits, although most residential-based deployments have transmission limits of one gigabyte or less."
Why switch to gigabyes for the home-user example?
Are you sure you have got the right unit for all these examples?
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|"Why switch to gigabytes for the home-user example?
Are you sure you have got the right unit for all these examples?"
I think the author screwed up.I don't think too many residential users have networks capable of one gigaBYTE. The author had to have meant one gigaBIT.
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