"HOW TO: Copy the Entire iTunes Catalogue in 25 Seconds"

[Spang]

Answer: easy, if you’re a brilliant scientist and have access to the kind of technology available to the folks at Bell Labs. They’ve broken the optical data transmission record, crossing the 100 petabit per second.kilometer barrier. More precisely, they’ve transfered 15.5 terabits of data per second over the distance of 7,000 kilometers.

To do this, the researchers from the Bell Labs facility in Villarceaux, France have used 155 lasers, each operating at a different frequency and carrying 100 gigabits of data per second. Multiply the number of lasers with the transmission rate, and you get a crazy number of 15.5 terabits per second, over the distance of 7000 kilometers. Multiply those two numbers, and you get over 100 petabits per second.kilometers (a standard measure for high speed optical transmission).

To make all these silly numbers more understandable, I’ve applied a little math to it. The iTunes Store holds some 10 million songs. The average size of a song on iTunes is roughly 5 megabytes. So, the entire iTunes catalogue is about 50 million megabytes, or 47.6 terabytes heavy.

Now, turning that number of 15.5 terabits per second into terabytes, we get roughly 1.9 terabytes per second, meaning that it would take around 25 seconds (47.6 / 1.9 = 25) to transfer the entire iTunes catalogue over the distance of 7000 km. The calculations are rough: give or take a second or two, if you must, but it’s still mind-boggingly fast, especially for us mere mortals, used to WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet at best.

Of course, it’ll take quite a bit of time before we see such transfer speeds in real-life use, but it’s impressive nonetheless. Here’s a scary thought: one day, we’ll be able to copy more music than it’s possible to listen to in a lifetime in a matter of seconds. To find out the technical nitty-gritty about this achievement, check out the official press release.

The Source

[Aabidano]

That's pretty cool, it's amazing the amount of data that gets pushed around today.

[Siji]

Here’s a scary thought: one day, we’ll be able to copy more music than it’s possible to listen to in a lifetime in a matter of seconds.

Winnow just got a hardon as he typed up an email to his ISP and usenet provider asking when they're getting laser speed bandwidth..