Okay, I understand this is WAAAAAY far off, and this is all theoretical. But with the speed of light being what it is, assuming computers could decode and encode fast enough, what is the fastest data transfer we could achieve over fiber optic cable? Do we even have a way of knowing?
The speed of light has nothing to do with the rate of data transfer, just the time taken for the signal to be passed (aka the latency).
The main issue is creating rapidly firing lasers (or LEDs) to initiate transfer. For example, how fast can you turn on and off a light switch... yea its pretty hard to go fast! Also, how many signals are you sending at once? If multiplexing is involved, well it depends how many different light spectrum points you can send without them merging.
Obviously there are some limitations currently with how the TCP/IP protocols currently work with how they are processed (there are several standards in the works for data oriented packet design).
If you are compressing traffic as well, you could force data rates up (with an obvious draw back to latency with the need to reverse the compression upon receipt)
It all depends on how technology changes to how fast fibre will eventually go, but currently the fastest operational link I know of (and has lots of information readily available about it) is TAT 14. One of the trans-Atlantic fibres that has the capability to transmit at 3.2Tb/s (currently running at 1.8Tb/s)
Okay, so how fast do you think copper can get? Will normal homes ever really start to use fiber in place of CAT6?
Fiber has hit 1 petabit recently. And yes normal homes with probably use fiber over copper. Initially I think it will be due to cost efficiency. I am sure someone said you think homes will ever use ISDN. Its the nature of the beast. Everything gets faster and eventually copper will not be able to keep up atleast in cost vs performance. Cat6a has been out its 10gbps as well as Cat7. I have seen 40gbps and heard of 100gbps copper. Right now distances usually decides which you would choose MM fiber or cat6a/7 to the desk. These speeds are only to effect internal file transfering within the home unless you have a SM cable terminated directly to your house and full fiber network.
We were actually discussing this very topic in my uni lecture today.
The following is a really good read and you'll be surprised by the findings. I know I was.
http://www.o3bnetworks.com/media/40980/white%20paper_latency%20matters.pdf
Fiber optic cables typically measure around
70% of the speed of light whereas copper cable varies from 40% to 80%
depending on the construct.
If you are interesting in see how 'fast data can travel' look to the latency wars that are going on with the day trading firms, like this mob. >> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303947904579340711424615716
And yeah as zanginator mentioned about the protocols. A lot has yet to be done to standardize protocols that will make better use of fibre. Better tcp windowing, jumbo frames.
To be honest Id much prefer if more attention was focused on everything switching over to ipv6. What good are crazy speeds gonna do if there is no more address space left.
To be honest I'm a little scared about the ipv6 switch. My ISP hasn't even STARTED implementing it yet, and neither have any of my friends. If they don't get their crap together we're all gonna be out of luck. Plus I'll probably get a lot of confused calls from my grandma 8 hours away wondering why the heck stuff isn't working on her Linux laptop. Please, if anyone at Mediacom is reading this, HURRY UP.
In terms of copper, its a mixed bag. At the same distance fibre can cover...... well the baud is just really low due to signal loss.
If you are also talking a single wire, again very low. As CAT achieves its speed via multiple twisted pairs. I run CAT7(S/FTP) in my house with all my core machines switching at 10Gb/s (the rest still at 1Gb/s). Mainly because I am moving away from my Infiniband setup.
With readily available Infiniband kit you can go at 40Gb/s, but the equipment required has some finicky setup on certain OS's *cough* Windows *cough*. Although I was actually using 20Gb/s.
Around the house, copper is still king. Due to its cost people don't have to worry about breaking it, unlike fibre which is quite delicate and breaks easily or if you try and run it tightly (for example along a skirting board).
We may see a push in the near future to 10Gb NICs on equipment, but...... due to everyone liking the horrific thing called wireless, I recon we shall see more development their first as connection speeds to the home increase.
IPv6 isn't a scary thing. Its actually a very sensible standard (providing people abbreviate it properly). I have both an IPv4 and v6 connection to my house, but I did have to request the IPv6 address.
The main reason we haven't switched is A: due to the number of devices needed to be reconfigured B: some core routing equipment being so old it can't utilise IPv6 (not in the firmware) and finally (and the one I dislike the most) C: The end to end traceability (as NAT is no longer needed).
Although the mishmash can be routed around using devices that communicate with both protocols (and transfer between the two) its not that efficient.
Where I work, we are currently in process of refreshing the Core Routers of the network, which will now be connected at 100Gbps.
Does your place of employment perhaps do internships? :P
I'm currently making my hamfisted approach into InfiniBand (cheap parts off eBay). I've read mixed things about IB with Windows but nothing so terrible as to deter me from it. With the IB fiber cables being as cheap as they are now why are you moving away from it?
I know NAT is no longer needed because of the insane amount of address space, but is it POSSIBLE? From a security standpoint (especially for companies and schools and such) having a gateway/firewall/NAT box seems like a much better option than just DHCPing out public IPv6 addresses to everyone who connects to the network...
Just because you're not sharing a single IP address does not mean you won't still have a firewall on the internet connection. The only difference is that you don't need to use port forwarding. You still need to open the ports in the firewall but now anyone on the network can use port 80 (for example) at the same time.
You can still use NAT with ipv6 anyway.
It was my understanding is that they really dont know yet? glad to see the site is up. Missed, you guys. ahh
Could you run your devices on an ipv4 LAN network but have your routers external IP be IPv6? Seems like that wouldn't be terribly hard and would be pretty convenient.
Maths time.
The smallest measurable unit of distance is a Planck length - 1.61619926×10^-35 m
Light travels at 299792458 ms^-1
It takes light 5.39106×10^-44 seconds to travel a planck length
Which equates to 1.85492×10^43Hz
Assuming that the switch could keep up (which it couldn't because it would be operating at near the speed of light) you can transfer ~1.855×10^19 ybps
For that to work, you'd need the same number of photons as bits. This source http://harveyjohnson.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/the-number-of-photons-ejected-from-the-sun-in-a-second/ estimates the output of the sun at 10^45 photons per second. So you'd need about 1.85% the output of the sun to power this thing (assuming it was 100% efficient and it used the same wavelength of light as the sun's average wavelength). So just about 7.1 yotta watts.
But in all seriousness, we're limited by the speed that the transmitters and receivers work at.
P.S. I've probably made a mistake. Feel free to correct me.
well just recently I read this
so currently it's at 255 tbit/sec.
I'm thinking the limit is actually much lower when you consider how many people a cable/strand will service...
I believe the question was the amount/speed of data a single cable could handle. Even if tons of people were using it at once, the maximum would remain the same. As a total, not a per-user basis.