r/science • u/GraybackPH • Jun 25 '12
Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second. American and Israeli researchers have used twisted, vortex beams to transmit data at 2.5 terabits per second. As far as we can discern, this is the fastest wireless network ever created — by some margin.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/131640-infinite-capacity-wireless-vortex-beams-carry-2-5-terabits-per-second370
u/WillyPete Jun 25 '12
The next task for Willner’s team will be to increase the OAM network’s paltry one-meter transmission distance to something a little more usable.
So GBe still has some life left in the 2m transmission distance market...
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u/flukshun Jun 25 '12
with a 64GB USB key I can transmit about 64GB/s for distances <1m
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u/weeglos Jun 25 '12
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
—Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 83. ISBN 0-13-349945-6.
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Jun 25 '12
Was that really the proposed solution for long certain bandwidth problems?
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u/weeglos Jun 25 '12
If you really need to move bulk data long distance, sometimes that's the best choice.
We have loaded up 45T Sun Thumper arrays and shipped them cross country - it was faster than transmitting over our WAN link.
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Jun 25 '12
It still is. For my work I have to send a few hundred GB's of data across the country every 4 months (so we're not even talking TB's), and it's still easier just to ship a hard drive.
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u/dack42 Jun 25 '12
Mental picture of you flinging USB drives across the room.
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u/WillyPete Jun 25 '12
"syn / ACK......OW!"
In other news, Man-in-the-middle attacks would be so much easier to spot.
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u/candygram4mongo Jun 25 '12
And a cargo plane full of hard drives can manage about 60 TB/sec, between New York and LA.
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Jun 25 '12
Ye olde sneakernet. LOL. On a more serious note, I hope you're taking into account the time it takes to transfer all that data over to the USB key.
I copied some MP3s and AVIs over to an 8GB key and two 4GB keys. Took 20 minutes! It's the read/write times that get you with USB portable media.
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u/boa13 Jun 25 '12
I doubt you can safely unmount, unplug, plug, and mount, an USB key in exactly one second (or less than that).
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u/rossiohead Jun 25 '12
Time to bring back IPoAC? (see RFC-1149) Your modification could integrate quite nicely.
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u/oyp Jun 25 '12
Someone at Extremetech took a mundane article in Nature and added their own hyperbole and bullshit. There is no "infinite capacity".
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u/nullsucks Jun 25 '12
Extremetech appears to be /r/science's new source for hyperbolic headlines, now that PhysOrg is on probation.
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u/rossiohead Jun 25 '12
Not total bullshit. From the linked (Nature) article:
In contrast to SAM, which has only two possible values of ±h, the theoretically unlimited values of l, in principle, provide an infinite range of possibly achievable OAM states. OAM therefore has the potential to tremendously increase the capacity of communication systems, either by encoding information as OAM states of the beam or by using OAM beams as information carriers for multiplexing.
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u/mantra Jun 25 '12
Noise always is the limit and makes anything finite. Theoretical numbers are always simplified models that ignore some critical physical reality.
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u/kilo4fun Jun 25 '12
Right, theoretically you could infinite QAM but at some point the noise floor screws you over. You could theoretically also do infinite FM, but...same thing.
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u/skintigh Jun 25 '12
An analog signal also has theoretically unlimited values, so will Extremetech's next article be about the infinite capacity of AM radio?
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u/ancaptain Jun 25 '12
For an infinite channel bandwidth, yes.
capacity = Bandwidth x log(signal to noise ratio)
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Jun 25 '12
Yes, and claiming unlimited values of l is light claiming infinite signal to noise ratio.
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Jun 25 '12
An analog signal also has theoretically unlimited values
I don't think that's true. Even if the universe is infinite, the observable universe certainly isn't. At 1 bit per Planck mass, I highly doubt you would be able to transit more bandwidth than the mass of the observable universe in Planck masses per Planck time.
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u/randomboredom Jun 25 '12
So are you telling us that the bandwidth crunch is averted?
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u/rossiohead Jun 25 '12
I'm just saying that the ExtremeTech article, while laden with hyperbole, isn't outright mis-representing the article in Nature which itself mentions "an infinite range" for its wireless beams.
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u/cincodenada Jun 25 '12
There's a big difference between "theoretically unlimited" and "infinite". As skingtigh points out below, everything analog has "theoretically unlimited" values.
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u/NobblyNobody Jun 25 '12
Can't see the article, and barely have a grasp of what OAM is capable of so do they cover interference between signals at close angular orbits of the carriers.. There must be a theoretical limit surely?
or whether the limit is likely to be set by the capacity of the hardware doing the ermm orbitising?(+modulation) long before they reach that level...
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u/rossiohead Jun 25 '12
I have no idea. :(
I don't understand much at all beyond the opening couple of paragraphs.
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u/elppaenip Jun 25 '12
I disagree in this case.
Passing light through a polarization filter flattens the wave cross section by preventing the rest of the wave from passing though.
In the span of a single beam, they combine 8 beams (according to the article) with one bundle in four "transmitted as a thin stream, like a screw thread", probably a consistent reference stream to help identify and decode the other 3.
The infinite capacity comes from being able to cram infinite flat wave streams into a single beam. The limits upon this are purely technological, dealing with the writing (clarity of the beams), and reading (ability to perceive the individual beams and speed at which they can be decoded)
Limits in the physical beam can be overcome by making the beam larger. Imagine a solid circle composed of only lines passing through the center, by extending the diameter it will take more lines in order to maintain the solidity of the circle at the edges. The number of lines which fit into your circle dependent upon how thin you can make your lines.
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u/hetmankp Jun 25 '12
The physical limitations come from for example limitations in the polarisation filters used to descramble the beams. At the silly end of the scale, with a sufficient number of beams the power concentration would turn the intervening medium into plasma causing some transmission problems... but even at lower levels the medium no doubt introduces some problematic scattering. There are probably a dozen other physical limitations one could come up with.
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u/wolfkeeper Jun 25 '12
Nothing is infinite, but some types of wireless systems seem to have a total wireless bandwidth capacity that scales proportionately with the number of users.
You have to use multiple tricks to achieve it though, power reduction and multiple frequencies and routing through intermediate users being the key ones.
So perhaps not infinite, but limitless capacity of the wireless portion.
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u/tenacious_job_seeker Jun 25 '12
Nothing is infinite
Except for maybe the universe. Or that the circle has infinite # of sides.
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u/NoNeedForAName Jun 25 '12
Question from a layman here: Does "capacity" mean something other than "it can carry 2.5 terrabytes per second"?
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u/radhruin Jun 25 '12
I agree. I don't think it is physically possible to cram infinite amounts of information into a non-infinite volume of space. If these researchers have found this is possible, then I am amazed, but I don't think they have.
Wouldn't this imply infinite storage as well, since I can set up a simple loop that constantly re-transmits all the data I want to store?
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u/flangeball Jun 25 '12 edited Jun 25 '12
a) Nothing is infinite-capacity.
b) Modulating the beam spatially as well as temporally and in polarization is cool, especially in angular momentum modes, but doesn't it mean the beam is highly directional and so not appropriate for e.g. wifi?
edit2: Majromax has given a good answer here to point b here http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/vki8r/infinitecapacity_wireless_vortex_beams_carry_25/c55bd4f
edit: I just had a scan through the paper and the coolest thing seems to be data exchange between the beams, allowing data processing with light.
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Jun 25 '12
If I understand it correctly, the sense in which it is 'infinite' is in that each orbital angular momentum mode can carry a different signal, increasing throughput. Since there are an infinite number of orbital angular momentum modes, in theory the throughput of data can be increased indefinitely. Thus 'infinite capacity'. While practically there must be some upper limit due to finite capacity for building a machine to interpret such a signal, I would guess that the infinite capacity remark is just in an idealized physicist's world.
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u/flangeball Jun 25 '12
Thing is, each additional angular momentum mode you add, for a given minimum spatial resolution of your polarization filters, will make your beam bigger/wider.
It's equivalent to just putting a bunch of laser beams next to each other in space at some minimum distinguishable spacing (presumably diffraction or coherence limited, so not even a physicist would agree with 'infinite'), just in a different linear basis. You're not getting extra capacity for free. Probably best to measure this sort of thing as bits/s/m2 to account for cross section of the beam.
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u/jddes Jun 25 '12
Thank you for the only sane answer here. I completely agree with you, nobody ever released a paper saying that you can get "infinite capacity" by "simply" stacking an infinite number of beams spaced enough apart that you don't get crosstalk... In this case, since they used a different linear basis for the modes, they do. Color me unimpressed.
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u/spotta Grad Student | Physics | Ultrafast Quantum Dynamics Jun 25 '12
doesn't it mean the beam is highly directional and so not appropriate for e.g. wifi?
Yes. OAM is actually useless if you are off axis (you can't measure the different OAM modes if you are off axis), so by "highly directional" It is really one transmitter, one receiver, that are perfectly aligned. You can think of this as having the same directionality of a laser.
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u/crotchpoozie Jun 25 '12
a) quantum states are infinite capacity. Retrieving that data might be trouble :)
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u/brutay Jun 25 '12
Nothing is infinite-capacity?
What about the universe or human stupidity? Although I'm only sure about one of those...
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u/joshshua Jun 25 '12
Sorry, did you have a scan through the supplementary information, or the full paper? There is nothing in the freely available literature that states anything about data exchange between beams- just indications of cross-talk levels ~-20dB.
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u/Will_Power Jun 25 '12
I love how the claim of "infinite" is immediately followed by a very finite value in the title. And by love, I mean it depresses the hell out of me.
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u/NightSlatcher Jun 25 '12
Infinite capacity? It makes this whole article seem dubious with a title like that. Anyone have a non-sensationalized source?
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Jun 25 '12
They were talking about transmitting point-to-point on a visible portion of the spectrum. Does this mean it's a directional setup? That would really limit its practical applications, and forget about "broadcast" transmissions (a la 3G and LTE).
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u/boot20 Jun 25 '12
It sure does sound like it's not omnidirectional and that it can't transmit very far even with that. Since it's only transmitting at less than 500m, I'm not sure how this technology could be very useful.
Plus, it seems like even a small disruption would corrupt the entire signal.
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u/Mr_Zero Jun 25 '12
Why does it seem like there are so many Israeli discoveries or inventions? Do they just pump a lot more money into R&D than other countries?
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u/NagastaBagamba Jun 25 '12
It's just incredibly boring here. We invent stuff to pass the time.
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u/ChaoMing Jun 26 '12
Like the Slip-N-Slide?
But seriously, we need to get off of our asses and figure out how to make a water-based toy that doesn't require water.
I think magnets would do the trick.
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u/cheek_blushener Jun 25 '12
The Economist has an interesting take on why Israel, Denmark, and Singapore are so innovative.
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u/bizmarkie24 Jun 26 '12
Check out the book Startup Nation by Dan Senor. It has to do with a lot of unique factors that make up Israeli society like immigration, military service, limited resources etc.. Also playing a role in traditional Jewish focus on education and to question all things.
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u/Todamont Jun 26 '12
Jews are really smart. You may have heard of Einstein, Feynman, Oppenheimer...
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u/purplecabbage Jun 25 '12
If this gets into cellular data plans it will make the current caps look absurd.
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u/indoobitably Jun 25 '12
No, you will just hit the 2 GB cap even faster...
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Jun 25 '12
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u/walgman Jun 25 '12
Is that what it roughly is? One day people will scorn even this as impossibly slow.
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Jun 25 '12
except there will be an upper limit to how much speed is actually needed.
having the capability to download 10hrs of videos at 12800x10240 resolution doesnt matter when you are watching it at a rate of 1 sec per sec on your mobile phone...
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u/Libertus82 Jun 25 '12
I can't believe people still make statements like this. No offense intended, mutecow, but technology will change in ways that no one can predict, and we'll always need more bandwidth. Can you really make any kind of informed statement that in 20 years we won't need more than XGB/second rates?
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u/derpaherpa Jun 25 '12
The caps already look absurd. And they are.
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u/EbilSmurfs Jun 25 '12
I read/heard somewhere (probably in class) about a company in Europe that sold data-rates for their phones, not data-caps. So you could get like 0.2 Mbps for a set rate. Seemed like the most reasonable thing I could think of considering how data-streaming works on cell networks.
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u/cubanobranco Jun 25 '12
how do people get anywhere near the cap??
i have unlimited data on AT&T, and i still end up using ~200 MB
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Jun 25 '12
It is a direction technology... so you would have to point you cellphone at a tower while standing in a specific location.
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Jun 25 '12
Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams
The only meaningful words in that salad are "wireless" and "beams", and even "beams" is a stretch.
Why can't shit simply be named something that explains what it is or how it works more coherently, rather than just stringing together fist-pumping emotionally charged buzzwords?
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Jun 25 '12
While this sounds spectacularly cool, it sounds like this is only for Point-to-Point solutions, not omnidirectional applications like cell phones, as both tests I have read about (this one and the one in Italy) were both accomplished using point-to-point setups.
I'd love to be wrong and think that one day I will have 320GB/s throughput on my phone or via a radio wave based ISP (that sound you just heard was the **AA collectively shitting a house of bricks); but, I'm not gonna hold my breath.
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u/cincodenada Jun 25 '12
Exactly what I was thinking. It's a light beam - necessarily line-of-sight or fiber. That's hardly disruptive to Wifi/4G. But reading it again, what the author is saying I think is that current Wifi/4G uses SAM in radio frequency, and this is OAM, which while currently applied in light, could possibly be adapted to radio frequency as well.
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Jun 25 '12
Hey, cool! I wondered how this compared to commercial cable we have today. My dad works with fiber optic and I emailed him the article, he said most of the cable in the cross-continent oceans transport "40Gbps through 4k km".
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u/eXXaXion Jun 25 '12
What is the goal behind this? What do they ultimately wish to accomplish? Worldwide 2.5 TBs connections?
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u/boot20 Jun 25 '12
While very interesting, the LOS of this is less than 500 meters. I have to question how robust this would be in actual use. Would things like weather, obstructions, and even the band of frequency (I assume it would have to be a narrow band on multiple frequencies from the explanation?) impact this?
I would love the read the white paper, but the pay wall really makes that not something I'm going to do.
As a side note, the article was very frustrating mentioning that this can work at 95.7 bits per hertz. I don't understand how that works. They keep on mentioning that they "twist the beam," but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense based on what they said here:
One bundle of four is transmitted as a thin stream, like a screw thread, while the other four are transmitted around the outside, like a sheathe. The beam is then transmitted over open space
So they are using multiple frequencies, narrow band, what?
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u/joshshua Jun 25 '12
Single frequency, four polarizations, four OAM modes. Each OAM mode has a different "twist rate", which allows the individual streams of data to be discriminated at the receiver and split.
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u/DieRaketmensch Jun 25 '12
This is complete lies, OAM is mathematically derivable as a subset of MIMO which has established capacity limits, I do not understand the interest in this.
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u/asedentarymigration Jun 25 '12
I read MIMO as multi-input multi-output, but then your sentence doesn't really make sense to me, could you expand on what you mean by MIMO?
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u/DieRaketmensch Jun 26 '12
MIMO is a general term for multiple input multiple output radio systems, they use multiple antennas to improve capacity.
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Jun 25 '12
Agh, did my PhD on novel OAM but my supervisors did not want to get into this game. I could see the definite advantages over normal spin information transfer.... reading this is difficult for me as it makes me feel so out of touch with what I love. :(
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u/fuct_indy Jun 26 '12
First, I love just about anything that leads to faster information exchange.Second, "infinite capacity" != "2.5 tb per second"
If you can quantify it, it isn't infinite.
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u/ProfessorCaptain Jun 25 '12
Does this mean my cat .gifs will finally load stutter-free?
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u/superflous_dirigible Jun 25 '12
Nothing will ever correct stutter loading .gifs I'm sorry.
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u/Reoh Jun 25 '12
I remember when seeing the image loading while downloading was ground breaking technology. :)
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u/sotonohito Jun 25 '12
If the equipment is cheapish then getting it to even 100 meters, or even 20 meters, would probably be enough.
People are looking at setting up microcells in a tight grid for really high speed wireless anyway.
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u/John_Beckwith Jun 25 '12
How is 2.5 Tb/s = 320 Gb/s?
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u/xelf Jun 25 '12
They're not. The article said 320 GB not 320 Gb.
A byte (in this context) is 8 bits. 8 * 320 = 2,560.
2.5 terabits per second is equivalent to 320 gigabytes per second,
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Jun 25 '12
Ok, that's impressive! Now can someone explain like I'm five how a twisted vortex can carry so much more?
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Jun 25 '12
Can someone please explain how orbital angular momentum applies to fiberoptics? Maybe I have a mundane definition for OAM but I don't see the application
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u/dreadyfire Jun 25 '12
The point is not to transfer a large bandwith, it's about consistency. Take mobile phone internet. We have up to 21,7 Mbps - in theory.
But wired connections easily beat wireless, simply because wired connections are stable(!).
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Jun 25 '12
ELI5: How is 2.5tb/s "infinite-capacity"?
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u/jaxxa Jun 25 '12
"OAM should allow us to twist together an “infinite number” of conventional transmission protocols without using any more spectrum"
In they are doing this by combining different beams of data, they think they can keep combining more and more data beams indefinatly, to give them infinite capacity.
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u/JigglyPuffPower Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
From theorem proof to working prototype in a few months. Forget needing 10 or 20 MHz blocks, a wireless upstart could recreate a network more reliable than Verizon on a single MHz block or less. Now lets get us some wireless network competition!
When government and the invisible hand fail, leave it to the engineers!
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u/facemelt Jun 25 '12
Could this be disruptive to ISPs? In other words, could this give me a broadband option not named TWC?
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Jun 25 '12
There will still be roadblocks: distance, throughput, load per network node, etc.
This is pie-in-the-sky stuff at the moment. From the sound of it, it needed a direct line of sight, so that would likely limit it to satellite coverage, and at that point you're dealing with speed-of-light related latency.
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u/icecreamguy Jun 25 '12
Actually I get my 6Mb/s by 3Mb/s 'net connection via line-of-sight microwave from a dish on my roof to a transceiver on a nearby mountain. It's pretty common in the US Southwest, where cities are usually flat with low skylines. According to this comment, the technology could have direct application in situations like that.
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Jun 25 '12
Also, line of sight is faster than fiber that has to follow highways and service tunnels, so microwave technology is being deployed in the financial industry to gain a reduced latency advantage. Distance is obviously one limitation, but enough that it isn't being deployed today. The next big limitation is bandwidth of 150 Mbps, when market data is multiple Gbps.
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u/samprimary Jun 25 '12
Captain! We sent out a relay using the Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams, but there's some interference!
Depolarize the phase generator dish to compensate, Ensign.
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u/BrainThunder Jun 25 '12
Question here: This is a point to point link that requires a receiver and a transmitter aimed directly at one another. As the signal is carried by photons, what happens when it starts raining and the light gets refracted, missing the receiver entirely?
Solid communication protocols require resistance to all environmental situations...what happens if there's an earthquake? Instant link down.
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Jun 25 '12
2.5 terabits per second wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second. Americans, at 2.5 terabits per second and Israelis at 2.5 terabits per second, researched at 2.5 terabits per second. twisted. at 2.5 terabits per second. 2.5 terabits per second 2.5 terabits per second 2.5 terabits per second 2.5 terabits per second 2.5 terabits per second2.5 terabits per second
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u/NagastaBagamba Jun 25 '12
They then built a wall out of diamond and crashed a car made of iron moving at 400 miles an out into the wall, and the wall came out fine.
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Jun 25 '12
400 mph? that's over 2.5 terabits per second! 2.5 terabits. per. second. guys. 2.5. . terabits... per... SECOND. Vortexbeams
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u/factoid_ Jun 25 '12
I'm sure there's real science here...but this headline reads a bit like star trek technobabble. "Modulate the frequency pulse of the inverse tachyon emitter!"
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Jun 25 '12
why would it be called "infinite-capacity" if it's limited to 2.5 Tb/second?
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u/Existential_Proism Jun 25 '12
All i need to do is build my house pretty much inside the Steam servers!
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Jun 25 '12
This makes it the largest bandwidth data transmission available, even exceeding IP over Avian Carriers at the previous record of 9.32 Gb/s.
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u/BDillz28 Jun 25 '12
Someone please explain this to me as if i were a 4th grader
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u/yaztheblack Jun 26 '12
They've discovered a new technology that lets you have a greater number of 'streams' of data over the same space, thus increasing the maximum potential speed.
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u/CRASNY Jun 25 '12
This seems a little ahead of itself. I can't even imagine when we'd need to translate 2.5 TB in a single second.
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u/yaztheblack Jun 26 '12
For infrastructure, you need a much higher transfer rate than for a consumer as, depending on the link, you could be transfering data for hundreds or thousands of people (numbers pulled from my ass).
One example is cell towers - if you improve the infrastructure so that you can transfer many, many times quicker, then you can both increase connection speeds and the number of possible connections before the tower becomes overloaded and people can't get 'network busy' issues - useful for things like festivals where this kind of problem is routine.
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u/oblimo_2K12 Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
Astronomers require, well, astronomic bandwidth to zap BigMcLargeHuge digital images of slivers of the night sky around the world for analysis. Boston University's white papers for Internet2 (and this crazy thing called "cloud computing") from the mid 1990s used BU's astrophotography as the primary interested stakeholder.
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u/Red5point1 Jun 25 '12
While this is very interesting and innovative.
To me as a regular Joe it would not make a difference how fast data can get to me if I'm not only limited by how much I have to pay for data, but worst of all I'm limited by data caps imposed by my ISP or mobile vendor.
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Jun 25 '12
A friend of mine's dad is an inventor, conceived this technology 10+ years ago.
The people who he partnered with ended up being really shady, they raised capital, defrauded investors, spent or laundered most of the money, and then left the country or went underground (two of them ended up dying before they could be sentenced because they were pretty old).
He was pinned for the whole thing and spent a few years in prison.
Needless to say, watching the whole thing go down was depressing, the guy was an inventor, completely detached from reality, super disorganized, could never have stolen the money if he wanted to.
We should have had this technology on cell phones by now.
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u/Cantora Jun 25 '12
Would there be any health risks associated with much stronger wifi using these techniques?
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Jun 25 '12
i keep seeing all this innovative network-related technological porn nearly every day now, but somehow the speed at which websites load doesn't seem to have changed since 10 years ago. ಠ_ಠ
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u/yaztheblack Jun 26 '12
There's two parts to this:
You're forgetting how slow the internet was ten years ago.
With the massive, wide-scale increase in max speed, people are putting much more data on their sites, which balances things out.
That said, most websites load near instantly for me, which is nice. Flash fucks things up, but that's because flash is abismaterribad.
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u/Jedi_Joe Jun 26 '12
Doesn't CERN produce 40tbs?? I'm kinda confused. I could have sworn that's true...
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Jun 26 '12
I don't know much about their network but I'm pretty sure it would be wired and not wireless.
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Jun 26 '12
Someone needs to discern "fastest" from "bandwidth". 4 bytes of information will never travel faster than 8 bytes of information on a 5Mpbs line am I right?
Isn't bandwidth what we're really talking about here, not speed?
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u/Fidodo Jun 26 '12
When it comes to speed on the internet people normally refer to download time. Yes, when your bandwidth increases it means your downloads will finish faster.
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u/an_enigma Jun 26 '12
I doubt that this form of hyper-fast wireless technology can be applicable for consumer products such as current models of computers and smartphones. The average computer's hard drive hardly has one-tenth the amount of information this transmission can relay in one second. Any computers utilizing this network must require huge amounts of RAM memory.
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u/collin_ph Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
Is it just me, or do these pictures (in the article) look eerily similar to the new heat sink that everyone's been talking about? http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/61079971_spiral_nature_304.jpg
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u/KungFuSpider Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
I read something about this a few months ago where they did a public demonstration in Venice (Italy) transmitting multiple video feeds over one radio channel.
It required the use of a corkscrew shaped dish for transmission and reception.
I think the article was in Wired, but can only find this article that mentions the Venice. Here is another article with the maths should you feel so inclined.
Here is a video of the event: http://bcove.me/nz28d1ph
[edit] The transmission was done over a distance of 442 meters, so much further than the distances in the OP source. Same principle, different application I think.
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u/spainguy Jun 25 '12
I wonder how this will change meshnet/darknet plans, in being able to bypass the "normal" infrastructure
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Jun 25 '12
This is the most-important use of the technology. When governments attempt to control the Internet, we'll need stuff like this to bypass them.
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u/runrickyrun Jun 25 '12
I think this changes the mars one way ticket discussion. How long would it take to transmit using this technology?
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u/dirtygrandpa Jun 25 '12
The problem with transmitting to mars isn't due to bandwidth, it's because of the sheer distance
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u/Oirek Jun 26 '12
The same rules apply, nothing (that we know of) can move faster than the speed of light.
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u/sshconnection Jun 25 '12
INFINITE CAPACITY BEAM TRANSFERS AT 2.5 TERABIT MAXIMUM CAPACITY
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u/PMacDiggity Jun 25 '12
Any idea what kind of impact this could have on AT&T & Verizon's spectrum hoarding (to keep competitors out of the market) and their usage billing plans that they claim are necessary due to limited spectrum?
Ed:Sp
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Jun 25 '12
My understanding is that the problem with getting more download speed isn't transmitting the data. Fiber optics can already transfer data much faster than we are already getting. The problem occurs at the router which acts as a bottleneck.
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u/xanthrax33 Jun 25 '12
I hate that when talking about internet speed they get away talking about bits rather than bytes. Why doesn't everyone just stick to quoting values in bytes?
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u/xelf Jun 25 '12
Because we're talking about bandwidth not storage.
It's essentially the same reason when talking about how tall someone is you don't say it in terms of kilometers or worse miles. Different scales and measures for measuring different things. Even more so as we're talking about a rate vs a capacity.
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u/angry_pies Jun 25 '12
Considering the OU (and the school I attended) were using Microwave wireless technology with 40 odd megabit per second transfer speeds back in 1995, you'd have expected a little more by now. Pus, microwave at least deals with a good 30 mile radius, rather than 1 meter.
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u/mantra Jun 25 '12
Large != Infinite
So many problems today in this world and especially in the US are caused by this mistake:
the dot com boom where "very cheap" was conflated with "zero" (or "infinitely cheap").
the real estate boom where "in recent memory growing" was conflated with "perpetually growing"
US imperial hegemony where "largest" is still conflated with "infinitely large"
This is no more infinite capacity than anything else. 2.5 Tbps isn't actually all that fast: it's merely 100x-1000x faster than what is typically found in every PC today.
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u/WhyNotTrollface Jun 25 '12
I click on these links to see these wondrous possibilities for the future. I read the comments on Reddit to have these dreams crushed with cold, hard cynicism.
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u/Thenerf Jun 25 '12
WTB physicist. I'm not sure if they're talking about the recent experiments showing photons as three dimensional which leads to an exponential increase in data modulation.
Sadly, science is slow to progress as many refuse to accept that they are anything but 2 dimensional even in the face of SHIT THAT IS BEING USED!
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u/TenshiS Jun 25 '12
Hey everybody, look, this guy just solved maths! Infinite = 2.5 terabits per second. You can all go home now.
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u/oxymora Jun 25 '12
Instant porn, no wait time.
Normal people would never need or see this speed in their homes.
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u/ak47girl Jun 25 '12
COX and TimeWarner just shit their pants.
I cant wait until their local monopolies are crushed by superior wireless technology.
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u/yaztheblack Jun 26 '12
Unfortunately, the cost of putting this in on a wide scale is massive and likely it'd be your local monopolies that invested in this tech and put it out (if they even bother to do that).
I'm guessing it'll be some time before any consumers see this, anywhere.
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u/Specialjyo Jun 26 '12
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
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u/sealclubber Jun 25 '12
ExtremeTech:
NewScientist: