First demonstration of one petabit per second

Using MEMS switching and spatial-division multiplexing fibres, the Network System Research Institute at NICT have cracked another record, achieving switching a variety of input speeds from 10Gbps to 1 Petabit per second.

1 Petabyte per second sounds like a stupendous amount of bandwidth. Let alone over one channel. But video, the omniprescent bandwidth consumer of our generation bring that number back to reality with a thump. Example: an 8K video subscription service going out to 10 million people is 1 petabyte of bandwidth.

And if you don't believe that video in the next generation will hit 8K, I have a bridge I want to sell you. The challenge that video brings to network design is not only the order of magnitude in bandwidth increases required, but the more sinister impact is in the shift of consumer demand, readily and lustily cheered on by the video industry, for time shifted video.

Time shifted video is where a program is pre-recorded and uploaded to a content site, readily available to be viewed at any time by any consumer. This technique, whilst beneficial to the consumer, has an unwanted side effect, this negates the multicasting benefits enjoyed by the traditional content providers, where consumers all got to watch the same video stream at the same time. This shift to TCP connection-based services dramatically increased the amount of streams omnipresent on the network, further increasing load on the network infrastructure.

Certain network technologies are already showing strain at how they manage this transitional evolution of the content. Bigger fatter pipes are needed absolutely, but careful planning in how we engineer the network infrastructure can provide this capacity incrementally. I am pretty sure I don't need to be buying a 1 Petabyte Ethernet Analyser in the near future.

I hope.