De Canadese regering heeft blijkbaar wel visie, die subsidiëren namelijk de bouw van een super snel landelijk netwerk. Capaciteit: 80 Gigabit per seconde!
Using a $55 million grant from the Canadian government, a consortium of universities and businesses has fashioned a next-generation, Internet-style network, stretching from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. So speedy is CA*Net3, as the network is called, that the entire contents of the U.S. Library of Congress could be transmitted from one end of Canada to the other in just one second.In the United States, the Internet2 project can handle that kind of load — but it still takes a full minute for a bicoastal download. Canada hopes to use this world’s fastest nationwide network to stake its claim to the high-tech future. Unlike Internet2, however, CA*Net3 is finding it difficult to attract researchers who can use the brand-new network.
“Nobody knows what we’re going to use this for,” says Alan Greenberg, director of computing at McGill University in Montreal. “But that’s the reason you build these things — so that people can find new ways to do things.”
[...] CA*Net3 also employs new technology that allows different wavelengths of light to be transmitted along the same fiber-optic cable. By using eight colors of light, the amount of data sent through the cable can be increased by a factor of eight.
That means 80 gigabits of data per second can be transmitted through CA*Net3 every second. That’s 1.4 million times faster than the download speed of a 56K modem, and about 60 times faster than America’s Internet2 project. And it could improve even more, St. Arnaud says.
Theoretically, an infinite number of wavelengths of light could pass through a fiber-optic cable without interfering with each other. Right now, researchers are working on transmitting data on 2,000 wavelengths — somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 gigabits or 20 terabits.
Stel je voor dat men in Den Haag een beetje helder over de toekomst zou kunnen denken? We wonen notabene in één van de dichtsbevolkte landen ter wereld, zonder al te veel moeite zou men de complete Nederlandse bevolking met een dikke netwerk lijn kunnen verbinden. Stel je voor wat dat voor nieuwe toepassingen op zou kunnen leveren? Maar goed, met een premier die niet eens weet hoe-ie een muis moet vasthouden kun je niet veel verwachten...
