[Cerowrt-devel] LCA 2018 talk available

[Joel Wirāmu Pauling]

If  POF (Plastic Optical Fibre) like install methods can be scaled up
to Polymer/Glass runs (Sharpie knife slicing/jam into receptor). I
don't see this being the problem. Depending on the Sheathing fibre is
just as good as UTP cabling. Magnitudes cheaper too.

When I learnt of POF I was excited, until I learned how it's severely
limited in the bandwidth/frequency transmission department.

I guess if we could get some sort of Clamp-on USB-C style adaptor for
fibre would probably be the ideal. I don't really see why this
couldn't work with MPO style fibre.


On 15 February 2018 at 02:21, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Feb 2018, Joel Wirāmu Pauling wrote:
>
>> Again it's not the speed, it's the throughput. TB3 delivers near to what
>> my local x86 can do in terms of throughput. Also network should never be
>> slower than disc. Since NVME has been around this is no-longer true. It's an
>> unnatural order of things.
>
>
> Having done networking since mid 80-ties, having the network be slower than
> disk has been the reality, forever, for me. The only time this might not
> have been true would be in the beginning of 1GBASE time, where single HDDs
> were slower than network. With in 10BASE-2 days, HDDs were doing a magnitude
> higher transfer speeds compared to network. Running NFS was slow compared to
> local drive.
>
>> Cabling is the issue in my mind right now. Every laptop with tb3 ports
>> has 10G+ capability, if passive optical long run was cheap and easily
>> available for tb3 then half the problem would already be solved.
>
>
> Cabling fiber is unfortunately always quite a lot harder and more
> complicated than copper, that's why RJ45 won. Having factory-made fiber
> cable with USB-C connectors at each end might work, if the active
> electronics can be made small enough. Think pulling these through holes in
> walls, through cable management etc. Unfortunately I doubt these will reach
> enough volume in near time to really become widely used due to their initial
> high cost.
>
>> Maybe 10G over cat6a will be ok as the evolution. But you have to go to
>> cat8 to get anything beyond 10G... so the cabling situation and incentive to
>> upgrade to future-proof isn't there.
>
>
> If we need higher than 10G speeds, then yes, fiber is the next natural
> evolution. I don't know how we're going to make single-mode fiber something
> that the average user can handle without problems. There are advantages
> though.
>
> I am getting FTTH now. The cable they're putting is looks like this:
>
> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154951833141595&set=p.10154951833141595&type=3&theater
>
> It has 3 strands and it's single mode.
>
> So if we can light up these at a good cost/power/size compromise, the cables
> can be made extremely thin. Still wondering how the connectors etc are going
> to look like to make this end user friendly.
>
>
> --
> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se