Heh, looking at the U.S. RF Allocation chart, it seems like TV broadcasting has a lot of bandwidth under its belt, so it might _seem_ like the right idea to tap into some of it for the 4G push. I think they (FCC) should start off small with their re-allocation effort so that it doesn't strain DTV carriers, for one. I also think they should do this so that it drives up the costs on 4G carriers because I think TV at home shouldn't be hindered just because some teeny bopper with the latest mobile gadget wants to watch youtube clips of Dancing with the Stars at uber fast speeds. I can understand the need _right now_ for the business minded folks out there that need to upload/download business-related files like powerpoints and excel sheets and whatever else. But really, how much speed do they need while on the go? I just hope they don't royally rape the DTV market.

Gov't intervention is always needed to prevent greedy corporations from screwing over EVERYBODY but themselves. That's what it's all about: controlled chaos. Let people/corporations have just enough sway in order to stay afloat and prosper from time to time. If there was no FCC, we'd be in a world of crap and you know it. Yes, let the free markets have some pull, but don't let them take over!

FCC made its intentions quite clear: they want to preserve everyone's right to gain access to this Internet and to make sure there is stateful competition among the telcos/ISPs so that no single entity controls. Let the ISPs solve their issues at their level. This could very well mean bandwidth caps in order to preserve the greater good. Like it or not, eventually it will be a free-market and socialist Internet at the same time....eventually. This is if the infrastructure cannot provide for peoples' insatiable appetite for multimedia. But maybe the telecomm industry _can_ support everything later on. With companies pushing towards 100G networks, maybe. Maybe there can be redundant grids to spread the load.

Net neutrality needs to stay, just as the commissioner of the FCC said.

Fanfoot, uh, wow, it was like, a typo. Happens to the best of us.

Meant to say he usually gets 10Mbps. I had the 1Gbps stuck in my head from the earlier point.

Heh, there will never be a "government ISP". There are government domains(.mil, .gov, etc.). Those domains are fairly restrictive but that's for good reason.

I think in the bigger picture, the three largest telcos owning the backbone of this country is the best move. All the spam mail and advertisements is better absorbed electronically rather than wasting millions of tons more paper by doing it through USPS, not to mention the extra fossil fuel required to ship all this junk mail to the people around the nation. Let USPS hadle package shipping and bulk freight. It's better that way.

My grandfather gets that throughput on Verizon Fios in Florida. Not all telcos will have this speed right out of the box; it depends on what service you pay for. But I feel that eventually this can be the baseline. R&D companies are, right now, trying to standardize 100G devices based on fiber optics. Once they can do away with electro-optic interfaces, that's when the speeds will really start to shine. Right now, you probably have fiber to the curb or fiber to the premises, if that. Just depends on where you are/how developed your local infrastructure is. Once you get FTTH, you get the idea.

Mark, When you say "they", are you referring to the content providers you mentioned here? Or do you mean the ISPs and/or telcos that actually lay down the hard infrastructure (fiber, coax, satellite, etc.)?

As far as content providers imposing BW ceilings, that may have been worked in as a part of a contract you sign with them, or it might just be a logical cap created in accordance with the sheer number of users downloading at any given instant. They might actually have a legitimate need for that capping, due to their servers only being able to support so much traffic. This could very well be backed up by independent research, but the real key is: if you're serious about knowing that you're getting what you paid for, you have to be able to find the information that says you're getting a square deal. Otherwise, you're just pissing in a pond.

And then you have to know a little something about your ISP practices too, as well as what kind of capabilities and limitations does your connection possess?

To the common end user that utilizes the Internet for entertainment and occasional scholastic interests, they are really unaffected by any policy change the FCC creates, unless the change is drastic. But they're not here to provide enforcement on us; they're here to ensure connectivity for all people in America - right down to the hillbilly town with a population of 300. Capping is inevitable in the future, even if everything goes FTTH because multimedia quality will only improve and the world population is expanding at a scary pace. But really, how much speed does one person really need?

Like I said, I'd be plenty happy with 1Gbps down and 500Kbps up.

SleepyWag, you're a douche. Go away, you peon.

Bile, states don't own airwaves, the FCC controls the spectrum.

I don't know what everyone is making a stink about. This is just a notice telling people that the FCC is reviewing trends and formulating policy to ensure the Internet remains bias-free of any one entity, whether it's commercial or governmental. Did any of you even read the commissioner's address? Everyone is so quick to point to a conspiracy theory these days; it proves nothing more than you don't know WTH you're talking about.

Excerpt from the commissioner's address: "This principle will not prevent broadband providers from reasonably managing their networks. During periods of network congestion, for example, it may be appropriate for providers to ensure that very heavy users do not crowd out everyone else."

That's the only sign of bandwidth caps I saw. And say what you want about capping users' throughput. It becomes a necessary evil. Compare it to roadway traffic laws. They are necessary to avoid collisions as well as congestion, allowing everyone from every origin to participate. Really, how much speed do you need? If you can download 5 minutes worth of HD video on youtube in less than 10 minutes, I'd say you're sitting pretty.

I was living in an apartment complex and I routinely got 800Kb/sec off of a crappy cable (copper) service. Imagine when FTTH rolls out all over U.S. cities (it has largely begun already). You'll be getting at least 1Gb/sec downloads and probably 500Kb/sec uploads - who's gonna argue with these figures even if they're capped at that? Certainly not me and I use the Internet a lot.

28nm is still a joke compared to the capabilities to photonic computing. And besides, if size is all you're concerned about, the article mentioned that 1 nm is attainable.

Erik,

Maybe so, but do you possess or have the ability to find and produce one shred of evidence to prove your claim about the drug companies? It seems like a nice theory, but I don't know what to believe in that matter. Problem with diseases and viruses: they can evolve. Sucks.

And let me dispell some myths here:

The optical processor WILL NOT "process information faster than the speed of light". Optical processors do not "speed anything up". They simply allow more amounts of data to be computed within a given amount of time. It will simply take advantage of light produced from LASERs (Light Amplification Stimulated from the Emission of Radiation) so that more data can be computed per second, because a wave of light has a very high frequency (trillions of cycles per second). There is no "going back in time" or "creating a univeres". If you're interested in that stuff, google "particle physics". Photonic computing is not that!

There will be no wires in a photonic processor, at least none that process data. Currently, in today's chips, wires or "tracers" embedded within the circuit board (usually copper) conduct the flow of data as electricity. With the new technology, light will be the messenger, not electricity.

/End myth-busting/

And with the insane, astronomical speed that these processors will possess, who needs other components in a system such as hard drives? Optical storage mediums will surge again. RAM can be a platter of CD-ROMs. Even high-volume storage too.

Instead of having a separate printer that takes up space, how about using LASERs of the computer itself to create images on paper? We do it now anyways. How about a LASER monitor? Yes, the do exist. Simply dedicate a portion of the photonic chip to video display, run a singlemode fiber optic cable carrying a DWDM signal to a monitor, and bam. You've got a video image without the need for a video card. The photonic processor can do trillions of calculations per second, why not?

Well, first off, you'd have to know a little something of how current-day transistor chips work, or silicon semiconductor or whatever you want to call them. CPU is fine.

Today's CPUs are nothing more than millions or billions of very small transistors packed in close formation on top of a silicon wafer. When electric current input gets to the CPU, usually user-supplied through peripherals (mouse, keyboard, etc), the transistors inside a CPU make decisions as to what to do based on software programming. Input>>>output. This happens now a days at 1 to 4 billion times per second, for the average PC. Keep in mind that the CPU is also tracking many other different processes simultaneously, so the CPU's full potential is seldom seen devoted to just you. It can keep track of the upkeep of hard drives, core voltages of the CPU itself, and many other things all to ensure normal operating parameters of the overall system. You'll see these extreme cooling setups involving actual mini air conditioners for PCs and even liquid Nitrogen and liquid Helium, bringing down the CPUs temperature to below zero, where as if normal fans were used, the CPU would literally melt itself from being "clocked" too high.

Well, now they're trying to push the bandwidth (processing speed) even further. BTW, industry terms such as bandwidth, data rate, etc can mean different things depending on what type of industry you apply them to. For instance, in telecommunications, bandwidth means the size of a channel. For instance, if I told you that the fiber optic line going to your ISP has an aggregate bandwidth of 1 GHz (Gigahertz - 1 billion cycles per second) that means the frequencies it is operating on could be something like 2GHz - 3GHz. That's equal to 1 GHz of totally channel availability. If I were to apply it to the PC or electronics industry, I would say something like, your processor is able to operate at 1 GHz total bandwidth.

So, about pushing the power even further...

As it is, the potential of the transistor is reaching its limits. They've done the whole "dual core" and "quad core" and "multi core" extravaganza, but it will never replace what potential the photonic processor could achieve if realized (it'll happen soon enough). The thing most people don't realize is that most connections going to and from your peripheral interfaces (mouse, keyboard, etc) and even to other devices like HDDs, CD-ROMs, are serial connections. It's a single data stream, whereas the parallel would be multiple data streams. The CPU always has a bottleneck, maybe always will. Even with multicore systems, they can't comprehend everything at once. You can only go so far with how much information you can stuff onto electrical signals. I'm talking ones and zeros, on and off states, yes and no, up and down cycles of a sine wave. It's all the same thing. More theory...

CPUs, computers, telecommunications, EVERYTHING is based off of time. Time, time, time, everything needs _time_ to operate on. It's the basis of electronics as well as our everyday lives. The faster and more acurate a device can measure time, the more information you can stuff into that space of time. Time is inversely proportional to frequency. Therefore, 1/time = frequency.

5GHz = 5 billion cycles per second. (5,000,000,000/s). Every second = 5 x 10^-9 cycles. It's a relationship.

Different materials naturally give off rhythmic pulses, such as quartz. Quartz is used in many watches to record the passing of time. We know that in a given span, it will emit so many pulses. And, coincidentally, the smaller the piece of quartz, the faster it will pulse. Many different timing standards exist today. We have Cesium beam standards, Rubidium standards, even Hydrogen MASER standards which don't last very long but are incredibly accurate. Sorry if this goes off into many tangents.

Computing is all about modulating ones and zeros onto an analog signal. How many times per second can you get that signal to cycle such that a receiving device can track it either rising and falling below a given value of voltage--that's the key. First, a computer chip needs timing to function. The many transistors in a CPU calculate decisions many times a second. The faster they can do it, the more data that gets computed, the more output you can achieve. To have a clock that can comprehend the passing of a nano or femto second is truly mind-boggling, but that's what we have today. The problem is with silicon-based transistors, is that they tend to heat up past the 5 GHz range because they are based on electricity flowing through them. And the transistors are needed to be packed very close together in order to not suffer from signal attenuation over distance (even though that distance is mere microns!). This is because they run on very low current, and that is because the more current, the more heat. There is a heat-spacing dilemna now. We are running out of processing power for such devices because they literally 'can't take the heat'. The industry ran into this very same situation back when computing was based on the Vacuum Tube. Just google it if you're interested.

Enter light.

To modulate time and data onto light is the next logical step. This is nothing new. Modulation of intelligence frequencies onto a light carrier wave was first discovered VERY long ago. I won't go into it, but just go here if you're interested: http://www.sff.net/people/Jeff.Hecht/history.html

(intelligence frequencies refers to the data modulated onto a carrier wave).

The frequency range of light used for long distance communications is VERY high (in the terahertz range). Go here for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum

That's your carrier wave, and it can also be used as a timing signal. Any given wave in the "light" range bobs up and down VERY fast. Thereforem, more data can be modulated onto each rise and fall of the signal in a given length of time.

Picture this. Rule #1: you get one second to process as much information as you can.
Rule #2: you have to "superimpose" this information onto each crest and trough of a wave (each top and bottom).
If a wave oscillates up and down faster than another wave in the same amount of time, you can fit more information on that wave.

Basically, what will happen: data will be recorded onto a light wave through modulation. Higher frequency equals more rises and falls per second in the sine wave. This equates to more opportunities for processing speed, provided every componenet in the system can "comprehend" or "measure" the frequency of the signal.

So, what this all boils down to is that very small LASERs will replace transistors, which only operate with electrical signals. Using light, heat is gone from the signal itself because there are no more wires to be concerned with. The circuit, in a sense, is now air. The only heat source to be concerned with is from the many LASER devices themselves. I imagine the user interface will still have to be optoelectrical, meaning any input we supply to the CPU will have to be converted from electrical impulse to a light beam in order for the photonic chip to understand.

But that's basically it in a nutshell. It's a lot to take in, but let me know if any part of that didn't make any sense to you.