All the major internet providers have huge IP backbones, interconnected with 10GB/s fiber optics. But that’s not going to last us long, the need for more bandwidth has become higher with streaming video and HD content on the internet. GigaOM’s article goes into the detail of how it works.
Infinera, together with Level3, Internet2, University of California, Santa Cruz brought 100GB/s interconnectivity to reality. What’s this going to mean for most of us? Well, our providers will be able to offer us faster connections, and a lot more people will be able to maintain the new, fast connections.
Azureus and BitTorrent are already in the works of making P2P video content a reality, and if that really does go mainstream, this new bandwidth will be needed.
Although, it’s not going to be standardized for a while. IEEE took nearly 5 years to make 10GB/s standard, and this time around we can’t wait that long!
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December 6th, 2006 at 4:26 AM
Yeah it could take a while for the IEEE to standardise it but there’s a pretty good chance that an RFC will be coming soon if it meant to be a standard. Although, however much this will help there is always the issue of broadband access to the consumer, a problem that cannot easily be solved. If P2P content goes mainstream, an idea would be to put massice peer to peer proxies in local exchanges that can be put as an extra service as it would allow the network to only be active to the consumer when needed, saving bandwidth and power. (Say 20 people want file X over bittorrent and the server just downloads it once of the seed and redistributes it y times, it would save the networks a lot of traffic.)