Tag Archives: optical networks

Market Leaders Drive Investment in Switching

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Terabit switch chips and switch chipsets that scale up to 400 Tbit/s are making merchant switch chips very attractive for high-performance network systems against in-house ASIC and FPGA-based designs. The latest switch devices not only deliver on performance, but integrate additional system functions such as Ethernet MACs and programmable classification engines to support software-defined networking (SDN).

via Light Reading – Market Leaders Drive Investment in Switching – Telecom.

High-performance switch devices have become both more complicated and simpler. The devices integrate additional functionality with significant on-chip memory and packet processing functions. On the other hand, the interfaces for most protocols are moving to 10 Gbit/s for the current generation and 25 Gbit/s for the next generation.

Scientists Establish First Working Quantum Network

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The team has managed to rig up a laser to fire and hit the first networked atom in a way that the atom preserves its quantum state, but also produces a photon with that information plastered onto it. The photon then shoots off down the fiber optic cable delivering it to the second atom. Network achieved. On top of that, the researchers managed to get the two networked atoms to entangle, which means the network should be completely scalable to something along the lines of an Internet.

via Scientists Establish First Working Quantum Network | Geekosystem.

NOVA series on quantum mechanics.

And another link from Cornell: Does quantum entanglement imply faster than light communication?

Say you agree to send out two beams of light to your two friends who live on opposite sides of the galaxy (you live in the middle). Ahead of time you tell them that if one of the beams of light is red the other will be blue. So you send the blue beam to your friend on one side and immediately she knows that your other friend is recieving a red beam at the same time. Aha! You say, my friends have now communicated at a speed faster than the speed of light and violated relativity, but no real information has been passed between them. You have told both of them at a normal sub-luminal speed about what you just did and that’s all. (A way of proving there’s no faster than light communication is that you could lie and send them both the same coloured beam of light and they would never know!).

Watching quantum mechanics in action: Researchers create world record laser pulse

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UCF Professor Zenghu Chang from the Department of Physics and the College of Optics and Photonics, led the effort that generated a 67-attosecond pulse of extreme ultraviolet light. The results of his research are published online under Early Posting in the journal Optics Letters.

via Watching quantum mechanics in action: Researchers create world record laser pulse.

Flat lens offers a perfect image

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Operating at telecom wavelengths (i.e., the range commonly used in fiber-optic communications), the new device is completely scalable, from near-infrared to terahertz wavelengths, and simple to manufacture. The results have been published online in the journal Nano Letters.

via Flat lens offers a perfect image — Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“In the future we can potentially replace all the bulk components in the majority of optical systems with just flat surfaces,” says lead author Francesco Aieta, a visiting graduate student from the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy. “It certainly captures the imagination.”

 

TIME dotCom, Facebook And Others Invest In Massive Undersea Internet Cable Project

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TIME is leading up the process, but Facebook as well as a few others are joining in by combining $450 million to the cause. APG is geographically well spread to bridge international capacity hubs such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea as well as connecting emerging markets such as Vietnam and China where demand for capacity is multiplying yearly.

via TIME dotCom, Facebook And Others Invest In Massive Undersea Internet Cable Project – HotHardware.

1Gbps wireless network made with red and green laser pointers

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Now, I think for the first time ever, researchers at the National Taipei University of Technology in Taiwan have transmitted data using lasers — not high-powered, laboratory-dwelling lasers; handheld, AAA-battery laser pointers. The setup is rather simple: The engineers took a red and green laser pointer, wired in a 500Mbps data stream into each, and simply pointed them at photodiode receptors. On the receiving end, the signals are amplified and then multiplexed to create a 1Gbps data stream. The complete setup, according to New Scientist, cost just $600.

via 1Gbps wireless network made with red and green laser pointers | ExtremeTech.

Will laser-based VLC actually find its way to market, then? There’s no getting around the fact that laser links are highly directional (even more so than the shoddy IrDA networks of yore), and atmospheric conditions will play a big part in the BER, and thus the actual data rate. With WiGig making its way to market, laser pointer VLC will probably never be seen by consumers. Still, for quick bursts of data between mobile devices, or wireless communications in hospitals, or simply as a fun hobby for amateur radio (?) operators, cheap, laser pointer VLC could be very useful indeed.

Big Content eyes Google Fiber deployment in Kansas City warily

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Meanwhile, 180 miles to the north, in Iowa, Google is also getting busy. This week, the company announced plans to build a new $300 million data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, just outside of Omaha. This facility is expected to continue to do what another Council Bluffs site did when it came online in 2009: host Gmail, Google Maps, Google+, and of course, search.

Given Google’s FCC filing from earlier this year, that Iowa station may also serve as a future IP video facility to be used in conjunction with Kansas City’s fiber service.

via Big Content eyes Google Fiber deployment in Kansas City warily.

Iraq Emerges From Isolation as Telecommunications Hub

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The new cable will speed Internet and telephone traffic to India in the East and Sicily in the West. From there, traffic moves onto other networks to connect to the rest of the world.

Much of the world takes lightning-fast broadband service for granted, but any kind of Internet access remains a rarity in Iraq, where fewer than 3 percent of households are online. The new capacity could help bring Internet connections to 50 percent within two years, said Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, the Iraqi communications minister.

via Iraq Emerges From Isolation as Telecommunications Hub – NYTimes.com.

All-Optical Networks: The Last Piece of the Puzzle

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The functionality of an optical diode is simple to understand, as explained by MIT’s Caroline Ross, whose lab recently published a paper on the diode: “It lets light go one-way, but blocks it from going the other way.” In that sense, it’s no different from electrical diodes that have existed for decades. (While the electronics term is “diode,” the preferred term in photonics is “optical isolator.”)

But controlling photons presents challenges far more complex than controlling electrons. “You need to have a material where light propagating in one direction behaves differently from light propagating in the opposite direction,” says Ross. In order to achieve that, you need a transparent material that when magnetized creates an asymmetrical medium, which allows you to control the light’s direction.

via All-Optical Networks: The Last Piece of the Puzzle – Input Output.

Standard optical fiber transmits 1.7Tbps over core network

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Standard optical fiber transmits 1.7Tbps over core network.

Chinese telecommunications provider ZTE held a field demonstration of an optical network capable of transmitting 1.7Tbps, the company announced today. The network used Wavelength Division Multiplexing to achieve the thousand-gigabit speeds, which separates data into different wavelengths and transmits those wavelengths over the same optical fiber. In ZTE’s demonstration, the company used 8 different channels, each transmitting 216.4Gbps. The transmission was conducted in China over 1,087 miles, on a standard fiber-optic cable.

From the linked article:

ZTE isn’t the only vendor that has conducted demonstrations to show its prowess when it comes to next-generation WDM systems. Last week, ZTE’s Chinese competitor Huawei showed a prototype system that can handle 400Gbps per channel and offer a total capacity of 20Tbps.

I wonder where Tellabs or Lucent equipment is in all of this.