Europe and Japan Aiming to Build 100Gbps Fibre Optic Internet | Hacker News Reader

Europe and Japan Aiming to Build 100Gbps Fibre Optic Internet

ispreview.co.uk

30 pointsllamataboot19 comments

As a Londoner who recently got a 1Gbps up/down connection, I can't wait for this; the limiting factor in saturating my connection is now the rest of the 'net, rather than my own connection — which is actually oddly frustrating. Catch up already!

It makes one think that perhaps delivering content via a protocol such as BitTorrent is not such a bad idea, since often a limiting factor can be the upstream bandwidth of a site (although obviously this might not work too well for all use-cases, a Torrent-based CDN of some type might still have some kind of future).

Without some special agreement from the upper tier service providers or a Ono-like plugin, this is probably not a good idea.

I would be very grateful if you could go into a little bit more depth with regards to what you mean here on both the special agreement and the ono-like plugin (a google for this showed nothing pertinent, but maybe I'm just being especially dumb?). Thanks!

Sure. Ono is a plugin for the Vuze/Azureus Bittorrent client[1]. It attempts to find peers closest to you.

The reason why increased Bittorrent traffic is that the Bittorrent protocol doesn't require any specific selection of peers. This means that you can have excessive traffic from other areas, which plays havoc with Tier 1 ISP peer agreements. If the protocol isn't modified to work in conjunction with peering, I would expect ISPs to simply kill Bittorrent traffic.

[1] http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/118-ono-reducing...

Thanks - I see your point now. You're right, finding closer peers would be very beneficial in this case.

I have 120Mbps down (Virgin Media, also in the UK), and even with that bandwidth I have the same problem.

There aren't many online services that can chuck >100Mbps at a single user.

What sites or services exist where an average person might legitimately need that much throughput? The most common "bandwidth hog" that I know of is video (specifically, Netflix and Youtube) and even those won't use more than around 5-6 Mbps per stream.

Is this business or personal? I'd be interested to know how much that costs.

Personal, with Hyperoptic. It's £60/month, but that includes a phone service.

What is your actual speed? With a server in Germany? US? Japan?

The current problem with 100gb is it's really expensive to implement the backhaul. A 100gb linecard from Juniper is between $250-500k list!

You can get them for MUCH lower than that - the line card & optics costs of 100G are falling pretty quickly. Newer routers with >4x100G (e.g. 10x) will be pretty interesting (CFP2).

The way the article conflates backbone link speed with end user connection speeds really irks me. For backbone link capacity, yes native 100G interfaces are a step forward, but not in the way most people are going to assume. 100G of capacity is not a significant amount, either in 1x100G or 10x10G, when you already have optical transport equipment that can mux over 5T of capacity onto a single fiber pair.

It is exciting the increases 100G coherent DWDM technologies bring in raising the capacity as well as the reach of transport systems.

As we continue to shove more and more bits down a single strand of fiber, 100gb+ interfaces are going to continue to be more important, though. It doesn't scale to send 5T down an optical system if you still have to break it out into tons of 10gb LAGs to use it.

There is definitely a need. In 3 years time we could get Dual 10 Core CPU on a server with PCI-E Based SSD card at insane IOPS speed for a very reasonable price. So very soon, year or so we will be bottlenecked by our Network Port. And I dont see 10Gbit Ethernet price coming down anytime soon.

Good, future-proof goal. We'll need better Wi-fi technologies, too. 802.11ac is nice, but 2x faster speed doesn't seem like a huge improvement after 5 years or so of research (802.11ad doesn't count).

Apparently 100Gps wireless already exists, not that they'll let the general public have access to the technology for the next 30 years...

http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/12/14.aspx

heh.. I bet the NSA can't wait to sink their hands in this link.

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