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Re: Welcome to the WIRELESS 21st century This idea that wireless will replace fiber requires some snooping around for some ridiculous bandwidth numbers, so I went hunting on google and wikipedia for some statistics and specifications.
Google turned up that according to an article from Cisco, the global mobile data traffic at the end of 2012 was 885 petabytes per month (or 927,989,760 gigabytes per month). So we divide that by 30 days in a month, then 24 hours in a day, then 60 minutes in an hour, then 60 seconds in a minute and we arrive at an impressive 358 gigabytes per second.
According to wikipedia, in 2011 NEC achieved a data rate of 101 terabits per second on a single optical fiber 165 kilometers long. 101 terabits divided by 8 bits in a byte is 12.625 terabytes, multiplied by 1024 gigabytes in a terabyte is 12,928 gigabytes per second.
In other words on average you could fit the mobile traffic of the entire planet through a single optical fiber and still have over 35 times more bandwidth to spare. And from the looks of it, they aren't even beginning to approach the physical limits of data rates through fiber. I would say that fiber is in no danger of becoming outdated any time soon, it remains orders of magnitude faster than any other mode of long distance communication available. |
