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Society has an insatiable desire for data. In fact, it is rather astonishing to think that average Internet traffic is several hundred terabits per second and consumes about eight percent of our electricity production. All of that for instant cat videos—and our desire for new cat videos is apparently insatiable, driving the need for more capacity and even more energy.
[...] The fiber that transported the signal consists of 30 light-guiding cores, surrounded by a single cladding. That means that each core is capable of transporting data at a rate of 25Tbps, bringing us to a grand total of 768Tbps. That, however, is the raw data rate. Data is always transmitted with some redundancy to allow for errors to be corrected, called forward error correction. Once redundancy is accounted for, the net data transfer rate is 661Tbps.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/661tbits-through-a-single-optical-fiber-the-mind-boggles/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:46PM (5 children)
Headline:
Story:
Okay. The word "fiber" means a single thread or something that resembles one*. You could also say a "fiber" to mean something made of fibers, but the headline stresses that no, we are talking about a single fiber.
The problem is, we very much aren't talking about a single fiber carrying 661Tbps. We are talking about 30 fibers bundled together into a cable, each carrying a net of 1/30th of that.
Isn't that impressive enough? Why do we have to say "yeah, sure, it's really 30, but we are going to wrap them into a covering and say it's just a single one doing it all! Ha ha! Boy, won't everybody be fooled!"
This would be like covering thirty cars with a tarp, and having them all work towards pulling an impossibly heavy load, then trumpeting that "a single car" did the pulling. I.e., nonsense.
Bandwidth aggregation has been a thing for a long time and I am glad they are using it for multiple-fiber runs to carry fast data. I just don't get why you would deny the "bandwidth aggregation" and "multiple fiber" parts of it, because they seem to represent the entirety of then achievement here?
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* https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fiber [merriam-webster.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:12PM (1 child)
Until you learn to adjust your expectations to drop to those of the intended audience, I can recommend that you view any headline with terms such as "the mind boggles" with something not on-par with the quality one may find in an actual technical/engineering/science based website.
Consumer oriented websites such as arstechnica may have the occasional gem, but conde nast doesn't force them to embed videos because their audience likes to read.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:44PM
Your advice is good, and well-taken. I had also missed the blurb at the top of the article [arstechnica.com]:
The notice of which might have adjusted my expectations appropriately downward. Thank you.
(Score: 2) by Slartibartfast on Saturday August 04 2018, @07:14PM (1 child)
Through a single *cable*, yes. Fiber? No. My company was doing 72-half-duplex fibers through a single connector at 2.5 Gb/s back in 2000, so this is definitely progress... but nothing terribly exciting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:48AM
This is 307,000 times faster. What, to your mind, would be exciting progress?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @04:53AM
Well, even a single fiber consists of a few concentric layers. If there's a true story about Tbps going through a single fiber, are you going to hassle them for not mentioning the very important CLADDING?