Just read about Telstrra transmitting 100Gbps data on a continuous 2038KM fibre link between Sydnney and Adelaide, claiming a world-first in attemppting transmission over that distance wihtout the need to refresh or regenerate the data at any point!

Aparently its using dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) technology from Nortel, anyone know anything about DWDM????

DWDM is one of the two types of WDM, the other being CWDM (coarse).

Imagine you've gone to all the trouble of laying a fibre network. Hooray! Then you start torrenting and you run out of bandwidth. Do you run more fibre? No, you multiplex different light frequencies down the same fibre you've already run.

In normal TDM systems, each fibre transports optical signals by using a single laser. WDM involves simultaneous transmission of multiple signals at different wavelengths over a single fibre. Modern implementations are usually a combination of TDM/WDM.

Typically SDH will run over WDM (usually in the same equipment - see Alcatel, Nortel, Ericsson(PDF) and Siemens) into which everything else runs over, but many vendors are releasing equipment that allows IPoDWDM (see Cisco) for lots of converged goodness

Jimmeh respect +100 for that explanation

Incredible... optic technology really broke through all limits of connectivity...