Petabits/sec, and the like

[Eric Kuhnke]

Re: Australian terabit project

The budget for routers alone will be astronomical...  Loading up a Juniper 
T640 with OC-192 PICs isn't cheap!  To the best of my knowledge there are 
submarine cables commercially available from Alcatel, Fujitsu/Siemens and 
KDDI with capacities in the 640Gb range.  This requires not only multiple 
OC-192 capable routers, but vastly expensive DWDM terminal equipment at 
each end to insert multiple lambdas in fiber pairs.

20 singlemode fibre Rx/Tx pairs * 20 DWDM wavelengths per fiber pair * 
real-world 9.2Gb/s per DWDM wavelength = one immense problem 
processing/receiving at the destination of your data stream.

Currently, with the telecom capacity glut, the highest capacity 
single-purpose cables laid in 2001 such as 360Atlantic (Boston USA to UK) 
and Tyco Transatlantic are operating at 80Gb or less.

As a price reference, the FLAG group (recently purchased by Reliance 
Telecom) spent something like $1.6 to $2.0 billion to build a worldwide 
network four years ago with 80Gb capacity.


>That should be very exciting.  Very, very expensive, but very exciting.
>Just mux/demuxing the data should be "interesting", as should finding
>someplace to put it as it comes through.  Sort of like catching the
>aforementioned metaphorical river as it flows and splitting it into lots
>of small pipes that go into bottles that


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