Japanese research group developing next-next-gen optical Internet

Word that Brett Favre broke the NFL's touchdown pass record shot around the world pretty fast today, but if Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology has anything to do with it, you'll be hearing about such things even faster in 2015, when the group and several private companies intend to launch a next-generation optical network with peak data-transfer speeds of 10 gigabits. Although similar projects are underway in both the US and Europe, the Japanese effort has some heavy-hitters behind it, including NTT, Fujitsu, KDDI, Hitachi, Toshiba, and NEC. The system, which will cost a projected $260M over the next five years, will be able to support 100 billion devices but still maintain those gaudy transfer rates, even for mobile users. No word on when the tech will hit the States, sadly, but here's hoping.

[Bryan @ Oct 1st 2007 2:44PM]

Am I missing something? There are already DWDM (dense wave division multiplexing) systems pushing 10Gb per channel. These systems typically support multiple channels (up to 64 on some), and have been out for some time. If they want to work on next-gen maybe they should set the bar a little higher at 20Gb/s.

[Andrew @ Oct 1st 2007 9:28PM]

I also think there's either no-news here or there's an error in this story. Did they mean 100Gbit/sec?

Core router interfaces in the big service provider and content provider networks are almost uniformly 10Gbit/sec these days; 40Gbit/sec interfaces have been available for a few years, but these interfaces are very expensive (the market is but a few companies, probably less than 100 units deployed worldwide, I'd estimate) and the DWDM systems to drive these are also still in their infancy.

[ip_world @ Oct 11th 2007 2:18AM]

Internet2 is already 100Gbps ready...