You’ll never get this kind of result in the real world though because no matter how good the fibre optic is it’s inevitably going to travel through a router with a chip made by the lowest bidder.
Not sure why you think so, nowadays network switches handle several terabits already, and on the consumer side there’s always premium routers
To add at least one on-topic comment here:
This is impressive! Our usual spans go to maybe 120 km at most if I use our strongest EDFAs. With those we can deal with around 30 dB of span loss, and most fibers we can rent have around 0.25 dB/km loss. Of course this is on classical single core fiber, we don’t use HCF yet.
I remember YOFC was also at last year’s ECOC, where they presented their support tube hollow core fiber concept, reaching 0.05 dB/km at some wavelengths. Here’s some slides I photographed.
I watched those pictures load one row of pixels at a time for 2 minutes.
Imagine howe quickly they would load on this newfangled fiber.
1 minute and 59 seconds I reckon
You sound like you know what you’re talk7ng about. What does the span loss (db/km) actually mean? I am most curious about why its measured in db (I guess it gets done by that to represent the sum of the “intensity” of all waves across different wavelengths that falls of across longer distances). Also how much span loss do they have in this new experiment (if you know something like that)
Okay let’s start with the simple case: You have a sender (laser source), a span of fiber of a certain length, and a receiver (photo diode). The three associated measurements would be transmission power, span loss, and receiving power.
Let’s say your laser is fairly strong in the context of optical networking and outputs 4 mW of power into our fiber span.
As the light travels through the medium (silica glass (SiO2)) it loses some power at every point, due to Brillouin scattering. Over distance the effect accumulates. How much you lose also depends on the qualities of the fiber, and on the quality of the splices where sections of fiber are connected (I’m told that while laying fiber they work with spools of 4 km of cable).
Now you could say something like, we have measured this cable, and after 12 km it loses half the laser power at 1550nm wavelength, that’s a realistic value. We would then have 2 mW of receiving power at the end of a 12 km span, or 0.125 mW after 60 km (halve the 4 mW five times).
But it’s hard to work with, and more so if you care about distances that don’t happen to be multiples of 12 km. So instead of multiplying absolute power levels with loss ratios all over the place, the industry has standardized on using a logarithmic scale. (Actually I’m pretty sure we inherited this from the telephone industry already, who had the same issue.)
Expressed in deciBel the 1/2 loss ratio from above becomes 10 * log10(1/2) ≈ -3 dB. Ten times for the deci, and the unit Bel is defined as the base-10 logarithm of the power ratio.
Now since it’s a log scale you can add up sections of fiber loss instead of multiplying them. If 12 km have a loss of -3 dB, then 24 km have -6 dB or 60 km have -15 dB. And if you want to calculate for arbitrary distances you might want to break it down to the kilometer, so -3 dB / 12 km = -0.25 dB / km. Now we can calculate what loss we would expect for 83 km, 83 km * -0.25 dB / km = -20.75 dB.
Okay great but how do we relate that to the transmission power of 4mW? Well we convert that into dBm. dBm stands for deziBel milliwatt. It expresses absolute power in a logarithmic scale, by essentially treating it as a ratio over a fixed reference value of 1 mW. So our 4mW turn into 10 * log10(4mW/1mW) ≈ 6 dBm.
Now you can add transmission power and span loss to get your receive power, which is super handy, just to prove it works I’ll do the 60 km case form above again: So 6 dBm sent over 60 km of fiber with a loss per kilometer of - 0.25 dB/km, or 60 km * -0.25 dB/km = - 15 dB, together gets us 6 dBm - 15 dB = -9 dBm, and convert back for proof (divide our value by ten for the deci, then take ten to the power of the intermediate to invert the logarithm) 10^(-9/10) ≈ 0.125 mW
So that’s how the scales and units work. I hope I could explain how It’s useful even if you only have one laser source. Of course it’s also useful if you have multiple sources, and other optical components, like filters and EDFAs in the mix, because you can specify them all in dB or dBm and just add and subtract as applicable.
For example you use 5 of those strong lasers of 6 dBm each, but you need a dynamic optical filter called WSS to combine them, which introduces an attenuation of 12 dB, but then you also add an EDFA that has a gain of 15 dB, followed by a fiber section of 30 dB loss, then another EDFA with a gain of 20 dB, then another WSS with 12 dB attenuation, and finally 5 receivers.
So you send into the fiber a total of 5 * 6 dBm - 12 dB + 15 dB = 33 dBm
Then at the end of the fiber you have 33 dBm - 30 dB = 3 dBm
After the EDFA and WSS you get a resulting power at each of your five receivers of (3 dBm + 20 dB - 12 dB) / 5 = 21 dBm / 5 = 4.2 dBm
As for this experiment, I haven’t heard more detail than what is found in this link. Maybe they will present it at ECOC 2026 :-)
But for now I know that the hollow core fiber section was 206.5 km long, and that they told us last year they had a real world deployment with 0.085 dB/km over 34 km. And that last year they had a record fiber (not weaved into a cable yet, which usually adds attenuation) of 0.050 dB/km, but it was relatively short, I think they only managed to make a spool of like 20 km or so. So maybe we can assume this new real world experiment achieved 0.080 dB/km over 206.5 km (longer is harder, of course), which would give us 16.52 dB span loss. But that’s just a pretty random estimate.
But the impressive bit is really the distance of 206.5 km without having to add any amplifiers anywhere in between. That is only achievable by sending light down the hollow core where it experiences less Brillouin scattering compared to in a classic silica glass core. And it needs to be well fabricated for all 206.5 km, with the fine silica glass details that make up the confinement structure in a hollow core fiber. It looks like very good engineering I would say. I’m just a user of fiber though. Even the fabrication of classical fiber sounds fiendishly difficult to me.
Just for contrast, if I had such a 206.5 km span to bridge in our network I would need to look for housing for an amplifier site, ideally somewhere between kilometer 90 and 116.5. Luckily Switzerland is dense in the populated areas, so this is usually not a big issue. I think our worst in-line amplifier site used to be in Rodi Fiesso, on the way up to the old Gotthard rail tunnel, but that one is history now.
This isn’t for you or me. It’s for their AIs to link globally.
Oh boy, this is going to really take me to the next level in Balatro
Why would internet speed affect your play of Balatro?
I think you found the joke
For the same reason switching to fiber helped me shatter my Minesweeper top score
woosh
I’ve stopped caring what the capacity is. Youtube doesn’t require a fraction of what we have already in place.
However, they’ve put so many ads that an adblock is required.
But, if you have adblock you need to click the video you need to watch, let it not load, refresh the screen, wait way longer than should be needed, and then watch the video while getting a nagging popup that says “Experiencing interuptions?”
Followed by watching the video rendering NOT rendering at various points, and you need to pause and let it buffer.
All because google thinks they are entitled to push malicious ads onto my device, and punishing me for blocking them.
The speed we have is more than enough for the internet we have. The bottleneck is the companies enshittifying their own service.
Faster speeds mean nothing when you artificially throttle them.
Crazy how they think we’d rather watch Ads than a silent spinner
I can see you don’t regularly have to upload terabytes of data every day. A faster connection would literally change my work life.
Can’t detect if serious.
Last time I needed a > 1TB dataset they sent it in the snail mail.
Not sure what is the snail mail, but yes; serious. It’s mostly simulations data. I can easily produce 100 TB/GPU*day. I have access to some 500 GPUs. Data can not stay where it is produced in order to free up space for more to be produced and must be shuffled around to be processed, thus the importance of a fast internet connection. Sometimes I need to get part of this data on my local computer, process it and upload it somewhere else, it can be terribly slow on a normal 1 GB/s connection.
Snail mail is traditional mail, in this case presumably sending a physical data storage device for those terabytes of data, which could maybe be faster and more reliable than networking it.
Oh, yes I do need to do that from time to time. That’s why a faster internet connection would make life simpler.
Strange, YouTube works fine for me with adblocker.
You could, you know, just not use YouTube. Like, no one is forcing you to.
Kinda forced when 99% of the world that uses internet is on that platform yk
I mean, it’s not though.
Look, I’m no fan of ads, but… It’s a free service that costs an ungodly amount of money to run. They’ve gotta make money somehow.
Of course the whole running it at a loss for a decade thing means they had to go the enshittification route. Could’ve had more ads and a subscription option long ago but they wanted to lull us into a false sense of security first :/
I honestly don’t know what people here on Lemmy want them to do. If you don’t want ads then you can pay the subscription.
You can’t expect the largest video platform to be free and without ads, they have to pay to host all of the videos somehow.
If anyone has a serious alternative to ads or subscription while still being able to pay for the hosting then maybe start your own service and use that as the USP?
FreeTube for your PC and PipePipe if you have an Android phone will solve all your problems
Hey thank you, pipe-pipe is excellent!
Or Invidious when you can’t/don’t want to install an additional app
🏴☠️
I could download SO MANY LINUX ISOS!!
Or one Call of Duty
Steam is the only service that actually maxes out my gigabit connection
I haven’t played call of duty in forever, are they still massive file sizes then.
Why, so Zuck can stream back 8k footage of my bootyhole every time I take a shit?!
Right now I’m happy if I’m getting my advertised gig up and down. Any extra bandwidth would just be used by advertisers/spies to exfiltrate more data about me
Dude, the shareholders need to see if you ate corn recently so they known if the corn ads worked. Don’t make this weird.
oh yes, more slop per second
In b4.
Now that does it! I’ve simply had enough of China stealing our technology.
They’ve been doing it for decades, but now they are stealing our technologies before we have them ourselves!! 😡
The worst thing is I now have to hear about how this was never invented in China anyway, and without the west 1.4 billion Chinese people could never have invented anything, because they are too stupid.
/sEDIT PS: For some reason OP edited the headline to be WRONG.
The correct headline is:China: Researchers transmit a whooping 51.3Tb/s through an optical fiber channel
1.2 Tb/s is per wavelength, which is normal to have multiple of. And has been tested up to 51.3Tb/s over a distance of roughly 128 miles.
Edit PS:
Yes I know China has “stolen” technology, so has all developed countries in the world.
Especially USA was built on technologies “stolen” from Europe. So give it a rest already.now they are stealing our technologies before we have them ourselves!!
I remember when “Chinese students can’t come up with anything new because they’re too indoctrinated by Communist authoritarianism” was a thing normal people genuinely believed.
Which is funny considering that China is very capitalist
Well, sure, except for the enormous bits where it isn’t.
But that’s mixed economies for you. They’re simultaneously too capitalist and not capitalist enough, depending on who is angry at them.
Yes I’ve seen something in that line of thinking as well. But even if China has schools that are not top notch, they have sent students to other countries to learn for about 50 years. And their own top schools are among the best in the world now.
https://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings
#11 in Hong Kong and #13 in Peking.
IDK if the list is entirely fair, I imagine having a good and long track record could have an influence.
China has been investing heavily in research and education, several times more than what we do in Europe and USA.
So it’s no wonder they are catching up, and even passing us now.Funny to see how we both got a downvote? 😋🤣
Maybe someone still believing in the superiority of the west, which clearly we don’t have a monopoly on anymore, China has caught up, exactly as Japan and Korea have done before China.you were probably downvoted because it’s completely unnecessary and off topic. no one was going to bring this up but you.
OK admittedly it’s not really relevant, it was merely a joke.
But you can’t honestly claim to not have seen those moronic posts about how China never invents anything and only steal their technologies from the west.
They are so common it’s insanely tiresome. In this thread there are none, maybe because in this case China obviously developed and invented it themselves.
Maybe someone still believing in the superiority of the west, which clearly we don’t have a monopoly on anymore, China has caught up, exactly as Japan and Korea have done before China.
I genuinely is curious to see the exact same propaganda rolled out against China that Americans deployed against the other Eastern Rim industrial states. India is, similarly, getting a ton of this treatment.
The big difference between China and India/Japan/Korea is the failure of the Chinese government to placidly ingest western neoliberal economic policy and stagnate their economies for a decade as a result.
Absolutely, China being communist makes them the enemy.
But to be fair, capitalism is also a declared enemy to communist countries.
Both are equally wrong.capitalism is also a declared enemy to communist countries
Colonialism tends to be the explicit professed enemy. Communism, as a practical economic policy, revolves around securing domestic resources for the benefit of the local public. China’s managed this phenomenally.
What Chinese policymakers object to is extraction of Chinese surplus at a loss. And foreign capitalists hate this, because it cuts into their profits.
Used to make cable filler for a living. A lot of what I made ened up in lines for google and under the ocean. It’s a dirty business. We’re gonna kill the planet for all this.
Big truck.That’s apparently how BSD handles network outages.
Damn, and I thought a station wagon full of tapes had a lot of bandwidth.
less than a box truck with a whole rack speeding down the interstate at 90mph in 1999.
Geerling?
