A communications network that could transmit terabits (trillions of bits) of information could open the full resources of a reserach library to every home, school, office and laboratory. For these scenarios to materialize, physicists and engineers must devise methods to use more of an optical fiber’s capacity. A single fiber could, in theory, transport 25 terabits each second, an amount sufficient to carry simultaneously all the telephone calls in the U.S. on Mother’s Day.
Predictor: Chan, Vincent
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article published in Scientific American, Vincent Chan discusses the coming fiberoptic network enhancements. He writes: ”The revolution in high-speed fiber communications may have only just begun. The advent of a market for digital video could overwhelm the fastest commercial optical networks. Digital video will require up to 500 times the communications capacity, or bandwidth, needed for the routine telephone calls transmitted over fiber-optic networks. Such a network would also accomodate the flow of enormous quantities of digital data. Proposals abound to create online libraries large enough to hold all the text, images and audio archives from the entire Library of Congress. A communications network that could transmit terabits (trillions of bits) of information could open the full resources of a reserach library to every home, school, office and laboratory. For these scenarios to materialize, physicists and engineers must devise methods to use more of an optical fiber’s capacity. A single fiber could, in theory, transport 25 terabits each second, an amount sufficient to carry simultaneously all the telephone calls in the U.S. on Mother’s Day. But the practical information-carrying rate of a fiber is much more limited: it is checked by the tendency of a pulse representing a digital 0 or 1 to lose its shape over long distances, as well as the absence of optical components that can process information at these blazing speeds. Recent research advances hold promise for tapping much more of a network’s unused bandwidth.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Pipeline/Switching/Hardware
Name of publication: Scientific American
Title, headline, chapter name: All-Optical Networks
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web11.epnet.com/citation.asp?tb=1&_ug=dbs+0%2C1%2C2%2C3+ln+en%2Dus+sid+4350E799%2D2B2C%2D4188%2D8440%2DC41383A837A8%40Sessionmgr6+51F4&_us=bs+chan%2C++vincent+ds+chan%2C++vincent+dstb+KS+hd+0+hs+0+or+Date+ri+KAAACBTB00226030+sm+KS+so+b+ss+SO+B6B8&fn=1&rn=5
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Kafoure, David