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...
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