Not to worry.

By the time transfer speeds this high are available to you and I, the files we'll me moving around will be so large it will *still* take the same amount of time it does today.

Hell, 1200 baud modems were once blazin' fast.

Even if we had 1tbps speeds, you would only get about 2mbps because 90% of the country would still be running on slow broadband. Most people don't even know you can get up to 16mbps connections now.

*bangs head on desk* terabits. Even the dude in the Sonic commercial knows the difference between a bit and a byte.

Someday, many moons from now, one of my future grandkids will complain about how it took two seconds to download the super hi-res version of season 1 of whatever the hell show kids will be watching in the future, and I'll start in: "Back in my day, we sat and waited half an hour for a 4 meg mp3 to download, and we liked it."

Now I feel old.

I'm faster.

Holy shit that's fast. What sucks is that we have copper as the go-between medium. That throttles it back down to the sucky speeds we have in the present day. Now if I can have all fiber media (switches, routers, and the like) then I'll be a happy camper.

carrier pigeon ftw!

@ Cobolman2
Absolutely true!
heck, each bit of data at that point will probably have 1mB of encryption on it.

Oh boy!
LAN party at Alcatel/Lucent!!!

Yeah, but I bet it loses 3tbps per inch of cord.

you mean dial up isn't cool anymore?

ME WANT ME WANT!

And to think I was happy with my cable modem. slow piece of crap.

when i think of the possibilities this presents for me porn collection, my head explodes.

Bit and byte. TWO different things. Honkey please... This is not as fast as you think.

shouldnt the title be
"World Record Transfer Speed Set: 25.6Tb per Second"

b= bits
B=Bytes

right? in either case... wow

now to invent a hdd that can cope with such speeds :p

Sheesh..........at that speed we will never be able to leave the pc to make a cup of tea.

And ppl are saying new HD formats are safe because they are too large in size, ALU simply says:

IN YOUR F*#**NG FACE!!!

SLAP THAT: TB=TERA BYTES !!!!!
Anywho, speed is very impressive, but don't forget that your bottle neck will always be your hard drive!!!! Which still cannot write faster than 20-50MB/sec
HEHEHEHEHEHEHEH

That's a lot of porn really fast.

So, what happens if a phone pole with a bundle of these fibers fals down and snaps the line?

Do laser beams from hell cut through innocent bystanders?

And I was all excited about getting Shaw's Nitro connection today... Oh, well. The real travesty is that I should have known that this would happen.

25.6 terabits
3.2 terabytes
26214.4 gigabits
3276.8 gigabytes
26843545.6 megabits
3355443.2 megabytes

per second.

It's still pretty fast.

This will kill RIAA.

Think about it... in about 10 minutes of P2P networks the entire collection of world music will be shared and downloaded planewide.

On second thought... If I was Alcatel/Lucent I start assigning bodyguards to all key employees... RIAA mob bosses might start wacking people and ask questions later...

Run Forrest, Run !

I'm sure this technology is for backhaul and undersea cables, not home users.

Besides companies make the most money when they can sell equipment with modest improvements every two years or so. There's no real incentive for such a massive speed increase when they can milk it for several upgrade cycles.

There's an inverse relationship between local storage requirements and bandwidth: the more bandwidth you have, the less local storage you need and vice versa. When effectively unlimited bandwidth is available you eliminate the need for almost all local storage - and thereby minimize one of the main factors contributing to both size and expense of electronic devices.

Just to put things in perspective...

25.6 TB = 49,230 hours(5.61 years) of uninteruppted video or 1,523,790 hours(174 years) of uninteruppted audio.

My only question would be... is that enough for MUHD TV. (Mega-ultra-high-defininition)

25.6 TB/s huh? Does that come with a 10,000,000 rpm hdd?

As leep1 said b=bit and B=byte however for all of you saying that 25.6 Tb isn't as fast as you think it is, put it this way, 25.6 Tb = 3.2 TB.

So you tell me when was the last time you transfered 3.2 TB, let alone in one second.

itll be usefull for when they come out with 3D/hd movies or something, but damnn. but music would probobly be all like 1Mb/s... crazy

Actually protozoider, I'm on a T3 connection right now. It's 45 Mbps solid. They connections go even higher then T3 also. So basiclly yes, we have more then 16 Mbps. What you are refferring to is average top end home user's speed.

Betcha a trunkful of 500 Gb disks is still faster and more cost effective.

At what point will we be able to transform our bodies into a string of data and teleport to distant rooms, like, say, the bathroom. Because I'm too lazy to get up a walk.

so, since the giz is allowing flunky tech journalism, has anyone answered the question of what this story states yet? In re: Is the new transfer record 25.6 TB or Tb?

(and ps: jesus christ. can you not allow posts like this? Where you fuck it all up?)

Hey guys, I was actually at the conference (OFC) where they announced this today! I'm sorry if I dissappoint some of you know, but its bits - not bytes we're talking about.

Reading from the post-deadline paper they submitted I can also tell that the transmission distance was 240 km and that the number of wavelength channels was 160. Each channel contained two polarization-muxed 85.4 Gb/s RZ-DQPSK signals. So, basically, they used a bunch of magic tricks (pol mux and DQPSK) to squeeze out a spectral efficiency of 3.2 bits/s/Hz together with a really wide (160 ch x 50 GHz) optical spectral bandwidth to beat the old record.

The funniest thing, however, is this: NTT also tried to beat the record, but they only got to 20.4 Tb/s!! In their face!

If you're going to be lame, erikislame, couldn't you just follow the link to the source for this story?

The one on PR Newswire where it says "Alcatel-Lucent Achieves a World Record 25.6 Terabit/s Optical Transmission"?

Thanks.

I too shall be picky and say that should be a lower case "b" in the heading.

The one thing you also have to remember is that although your connection may be insanley fast it's very unlikley your harware can write that fast.

A typical website (amazon, google, etc) doesn't really noticably load any faster if you're on a 1Mbit or 8Mbit connection. You only really notice it on file downloads and very heavy sites. And downloading 10gigs of porn will only be as fast as the data can be pushed throught your hardware.

Eh, Comcast will still throttle it back to 6 Mbit/s anyway.

Let us not all holding our breath for anything even remotely like this to enter our homes and offices. Lucent demonstrated 64Gb/s over a single fiber back in '99, a major mux/demux accomplishment at the time. Everyone believed that bandwith would soon be so plentiful as to be nearly free. Really helped the stock bubble get bigger faster. But is there a single fiber in your house today? Except for some Verizon markets, not really significant penetration yet. Alas, bringing fiber over the last mile is major expensive and unless and until there is an arguably clear revenue capture stream that will amortize the cost over no more than 20 years, installation will be slow. So many, many billions of dollars of market valuation and investor cash just disapeared in the long-haul fiber boom that the utilities are still scared. What do we have to show for it today? 3 cent a minute phone calls to Europe. Whoop-di-fuckin-doo...

to digidandy:

you're right, i should have clicked the read link rather than complain.

still, it's neddlesome that the meat of the story is obscured by tech illiteracy. by a paid tech writer, no less.

...

and really: don't we read gizmodo because it's a fun filtering of bland RSS feeds?

BitTorgasm!!!