https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/julyaug-2022/speeding-...
Trans-continental is different, because you'll need amplifiers. Many, many amplifiers in a row. And those generally work well only in a fairly limited band. But unless you're doing submarine, bandwidth is almost never the problem.
To make things worse, a lot of existing medium-haul fiber links are actually twice as long as you'd expect, due to the desire to cancel out dispersion; you first run the fiber e.g. 10km from place to place, and then run it through a large 10km spool (of a slightly different type of fiber) in the datacenter to cancel out the dispersion. This is slowly going away, but only slowly.
Only slowly? I haven't worked with very long haul wdm systems or sonet/sdh but I've never seen this. Maybe you mean much longer distances than 10km as we've had 10G-LR for ages that don't need this.
Getting data to literally the other side of the globe currently takes about 100 milliseconds. How many truly novel applications open up by that latency dropping to 66ms?
For short-distance stuff the latency is already low enough to be practically realtime. For long-distance stuff we're already fast enough for human-level applications (like video chat), but it's not dropping enough for computer-level applications (like synchronous database replication).
I'm sure some HFT traders are going to make an absolute fortune, but I doubt it'll have a huge impact for most other people.
If you had to move 100 tons of packages, which is going to be faster - a Lamborghini going 200 mph, or a tractor/trailer going 50mph?
If you’re trying to set a speed record and don’t care about bringing anything along, which is faster?
Neither meaning is necessarily wrong.
I think it’s more like in the future they might not be. It’s anyone’s guess how mass production and deployment of this might look.
"There has not been a significant improvement in the minimum attenuation—a measure of the loss of optical power per kilometer traveled—of optical fibers in around 40 years...
"The new design maintains low losses of around 0.2 dB/km over a 66 THz bandwidth and boasts 45% faster transmission speeds...
"The new fiber is a kind of nested antiresonant nodeless hollow core fiber (DNANF) with a core of air surrounded by a meticulously engineered glass microstructure.
"The team believes that further research can reduce losses even more, possibly down to 0.01 dB/km, and also help to tune the fiber for low-loss operation at different wavelengths. Even the losses achieved, however, open up the potential for longer unamplified spans in undersea and terrestrial cables and high-power laser delivery and sensing applications, among others."
0.2 dB/km is already a pretty common loss ratio, though. It's true that you won't get that over the entire 1310–1550nm range (the ~35 THz range commonly in use), but you generally can't use all of that for long-haul links anyway due to the way repeaters work.
More interestingly, they promise 0.06 dB/km or so in the most relevant bands. If they can keep that up, it would mean less need for amplifiers, which is a Good Thing(TM).
Besides, I think most homes are not even close to using the full capability of what fibre can offer nor do a lot of people need that extra bit of speed to browse Instagram/Facebook/YouTube/Whatever else.
On medium and long distance runs, it will provide a lot of benefits. Reducing latency on a cross country link is palpable; reducing latency on a shorter link like LA to SF is valuable too, because some routes have many of those. Reducing the number of amplifiers needed will be apprechiated by cable operators as well, fewer points of failure, likely a lower power budget, etc.
It may obsolete existing long haul fiber. But installed fiber will still be useful even if there's better fiber that could be installed... And existing fiber will be useful for redundancy and additional capacity even if there's better fiber on the same route.
This won’t change anything for 99% of new fiber deployments, and practically doesn’t make any difference for existing fiber deployments either. The actual media is still 100x more capable than anyone’s end termination equipment outside of a lab.
When such technology becomes practical for the large telco's it will be implemented soon as this saves on attenuation equipment.
