waggledance, incThe Wire/Fiber Bottleneck
r-serdes™
the "no new copper"™ solution
to data traffic congestion
Waggledance, Inc is developing a next-generation wired communications technology. It has ambitions of making Fast Ethernet and USB seven times faster, and PCI-Express ten times faster. We call it r-serdes™ ("r-sirdeez").
It does not obsolete anything. R-serdes enabled devices will inter-operate with everything the general computer user now owns.
R-serdes™ upgrade will happen beneath the user's concern. When touch-tone telephones came out, nobody had to scrap their dial phones. When touch-tone was offered at your local phone company you could adopt it when you were ready to. Or not at all, ever. People with touch-tone can still call you on your vintage phone, and you can call them.
It will be the same with r-serdes™.
The two places r-serdes™ will speed things up are: inside the computer (optionally), and between computers (optionally): local networks and the internet.
Where does r-serdes™ fit in the network picture? At the bottlenecks. Probably first in your internet service provider's facility, telecom companies, fiber optic backbone operators, and wireless network operators needing to get data onto and off from fiber faster.
R-serdes™ will not require any computer user to change or replace anything. It will not affect homes or small businesses with wireless networks. It will be an optional upgrade to Ethernet cabled networks that are bogging down with traffic.
If you're doing video editing or "extreme" gaming and want tenfold r-serdes™ speedup from graphics card to screen, you'll have to get it either with your next PCI-Express motherboard, or an independently enabled (r-serdes™ enabled) graphics card that bypasses PCI.
Meanwhile, nothing will force the decision except your own needs and preferences. No new format or software product will suddenly fail to work with your present setup. None of your present software will need to be upgraded if you deploy r-serdes™ hardware.
Speed inside the computer is increasingly important to some users: getting data from a graphics card to the display is the most severe bottleneck here.
Telemedicine professionals, MRI diagnosticians, extreme multiplayer gamers and video conference participants--all will see quicker visual action when we apply r-serdes to PCI-Express. Here we expect a tenfold speed increase.
Internet speed is becoming more in demand by many more kinds of users.
In Europe a fiberoptic link was recently demonstrated that is fast enough to transfer a data load equivalent to the books in the Library of Congress in two seconds. (That would take months over DSL or ISDN, years over my dialup connection.)
As fiber links get faster, they will be expected to support more users with higher data traffic for each user. At boths ends of a fiber cable there are bottlenecks, where wire cable takes over the data delivery. Today's splitout switch with, say, eight or twelve Ethernet cables to one fiber link will be inadequate when the link is replaced with faster fiber.
Traffic of many end users travels over each Ethernet cable at the switch, so this is not directly a user problem. Nobody's computer is threatened with data overwhelm. Quite the contrary--it is networks, not computers, that are bogging down with data flow congestion.
Send a half-meg file to yourself through Google and watch your system monitor to see how boggy their internal network is. Then try it with Yahoo. Google has great gobs of storage for you, but grindingly slow data flow (March, 2008).
Sure it's a problem for the user who sees the slowdown, but only the telecom utilities and IT managers can solve it. The temporary solution they are resorting to is to throttle down your uploads severely and hope you don't get so frustrated you change service providers.
If 8 Ethernet cables can't handle the traffic fast enough, what then? Replace the splitout switches at both ends of the fiber cable with 16-port switches? Maybe 64 ports? That's a lot more than just switches, it's many more miles of wire cable. Worse, it's still not enough to keep up with coming fiber speeds.
And copper is getting scarcer and more expensive. Maybe we should use the thousands of miles of working cable already in place more efficiently. We don't have to scrap it for fiber.
R-serdes™ is the "no new copper" solution.
Wired connections are still the common bridge between wireless and fiber connections. And wireless hotspots on different floors or different wings within a building need to be connected via cable to the internet.
These observations point to a busy future for wired technologies as the "copper glue" in high-speed data transfer.
So how does it work? and what is Waggledance doing?
Waggledance, Inc.
a Wisconsin corporation ©2008 Waggledance, Inc updated 2008.8.4