Terabyte Fiber Networking

Hi everyone, today’s topic will be about the future of fiber optics, a future that promises a lot of improvements and breathtaking performance speeds. Today the regular consumers often have between 2 and 10 mbit/s on their personal networks, this being much more speed than what we could achieve just 4 years ago. Companies often have speeds of 100-150 mbit/s and even if both companies and consumers have respectable speeds there is a growing demand for higher performance.

After all, we’re in a world that co-exists with the Internet. The whole multimedia branch has gone digital, the telephone, the TV, the news, the home entertainment etc. Everything that we use for fun or information has been released onto the Internet. Nowadays with applications like Netflix or iTunes people even can download or stream rental movies and music instead of going to blockbusters or the music store. The whole industry is emigrating onto the global world of Internet, so the need of higher performance when comes to fiber networks are inevitable.

Now the Internet2 has announced the so called future of Internet speeds, a terabyte is promised within a reasonable future. Internet2 has actually achieved network speeds of 100 gbp/s, and they aren’t stopping there, they believe that they could scale up to terabyte per second speeds. To put this into perspective, it would be equate of transferring all the material of the Library of Congress in 10 seconds, all of it.

The technology that makes this possible is the use of 10 different wavelengths of light, all over a single fiber optic cable, they want to expand those 10 into a 100 wavelengths, and each wavelength would carry 10 gbp/s. These speeds won’t be necessary for consumers, but for companies transferring big amounts of data will be able to cut large amounts of time maintaining network performances.

Isn’t the future beautiful? More on Internet2 in the future.