Optical Discs roadmap + FTTH projections

[What'sHD]

"The optical disk technology roadmap predicts that a single side of an optical disk will hold 1 Tbyte or more in 2010 or later. At the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage (ISOM/ODS) 2005, held in Hawaii in July 2005, the ISOM Steering Committee organizing the event revealed a roadmap calling for 1-Tbyte capacity and a 1-Gbits/s data transfer rate in about 2010."


Reading this, I got to thinking the post-BD optical format could kick some serious butt. With Quad-HD displays (at least) and lord knows how many channels of uncompressed sound, its going to be heaven.

Seeing as how BD will easily last until 2010 as a movie technology, downloads don't seem that attractive even post-2010 cos projections on FTTH are that, by 2011, about 90M households will have fiber connections and these connections will not support (for all households simultaneously) close to the kind of data rates optical media will.


Thus, downloads circa 2010 will be fine as a replacement for 1080p-via-disc but likely not good enough for Quad HD and so forth. So, ironically, early adopters may be the last group to adopt downloads for their HT fun, assuming we follow the upgrade path to Quad-HD etc. If we stick with high def, then downloads seem to be the way to go post-2010, at the earliest.

[nhaase]

I just don't know about downloads being the way to go. I live in a major city, and downloads even from major company websites are still pretty slow, when you think about how long it would take to download HD content. I would like for something such as downloads to become a more widely used technology, but cable internet prices would need to come down for it to take off. Also, remember how long it takes new technology to catch on. HD was supposed to be the native format as of January 2006, now it's 2009.

[MrBogey]

FTTH projections are wildly overestimated. The amount of backbone upgrades nukes the idea of a lot of people having 100MB connections by 2010. I believe AT&T just popped in a 40Gb backbone. It's going to be several years before it's economically viable to move to a 1Tb or 10Tb backbone.

[Blue]

This is referring to the Holographic disc. See numerous threads here - especially before Blu-ray was released. I think the time frames are a little ambitious, from memory I think the 300GB was supposed to commercially available mid 2006. I'm not disputing the technology, just the time frames. I suspect we will have Blu-ray 200GB long before 300GB Holographic appears.
As far as downloads go most of the world will take a long time to get even 50Mb/s

[john_1958]

Originally Posted by Blue

This is referring to the Holographic disc. See numerous threads here - especially before Blu-ray was released. I think the time frames are a little ambitious, from memory I think the 300GB was supposed to commercially available mid 2006. I'm not disputing the technology, just the time frames. I suspect we will have Blu-ray 200GB long before 300GB Holographic appears.
As far as downloads go most of the world will take a long time to get even 50Mb/s

Would also like to see video camcorders using holographic memory cards or discs
maybe movie companies will start using HD camcorders intead of crappy film

I agree down loading is dumb and should be illegal

[MrBogey]

"Crappy" film has a higher attainable resolution than a lot of HD equipment.

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by MrBogey

FTTH projections are wildly overestimated. The amount of backbone upgrades nukes the idea of a lot of people having 100MB connections by 2010. I believe AT&T just popped in a 40Gb backbone. It's going to be several years before it's economically viable to move to a 1Tb or 10Tb backbone.

True it is wildly over projected. Not only for your reasons, but for the simple fact that supplying that much bandwidth at a server site is unfeasible for the forseeable future.

Just for sake of argument let's say you really can have an OC-3 (155 Mbps) to your home by 2010. Now let's say 1,000 people in the world want to download a move from a certain company's server system. That company would need to have at least 155 Gbps of bandwidth just to keep that 1,000 users' pipes full. THAT is not going to show up by 2010! The 9.9 Gbps OC-192s of today are very, very few and far between and extremely expensive. Assuming a company (Disney, Paramount, Microsoft, Apple, or who ever) is going to get something more than 15 times that bandwidth by 2010 to serve movies to customers is, if you'll pardon the expression, a pipe dream!

Originally Posted by Blue

This is referring to the Holographic disc. See numerous threads here - especially before Blu-ray was released. I think the time frames are a little ambitious, from memory I think the 300GB was supposed to commercially available mid 2006. I'm not disputing the technology, just the time frames. I suspect we will have Blu-ray 200GB long before 300GB Holographic appears.
As far as downloads go most of the world will take a long time to get even 50Mb/s

In Phase started shipping 300GB drives and disks in December. They were in very limited quantities. They just pulled it together enough to start shipping limited quantities in December so they could put out marketing statements that they met their goal of shipping systems in 2006. They expect to ramp up to "production quantities" (whatever that means) by July, 2007.

Holographic disks will make it. There will be multi-terabyte holographic disks -- eventually. They just won't happen as fast as the proponents claim.

[MrBogey]

A certain major phone company is phasing out their ATM to DSLAM DS-3 network. Gigabit ethernet is the new standard. It's going to be used for IPTV though.

Cache and forward picks up a lot of the problems with video distribution. Still not beefy enough for live 1080p distribution though.