Now, this is Broadband!
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010 by Roberto Saracco
Nikon, SanDisk and Sony have submitted to the CFA (Compact Flash Association) the proposal for a new standard to implement on Compact Flash memory cards to transfer bits at a speed of 500 MBps, that is 4Gbps. Now, this is really what I would call broadband!
It is an amazing speed but please notice that today’s best compact flash memory cards are supporting a transfer speed of 167 MBps, that is over 1.2 Gbps, which is beyond the capacity of a local loop even in the best service being offered today (fibre connectivity to the home going up to 1 Gbps).
Why such a need for speed? Well, new digital camera can take up to 15 photos per second and each photo can require as much as 30 MB. That is 450 MB per second. If you want to keep the pace you need a transfer speed of sligthly less than 4 Gbps.
Now, this is a strong message about the fact that consumer electronics (we are not talking here of special professional cameras where image size can skyrocket over 200 MB and the number of pictures per second can reach 1,000) is really on the edge of evolution.
Local area networks will be stimulated by consumer electronics to provide ever greater performance and in turns this will stimulate new network architectures where the edges creates meshed networks.
Indeed, we have just begun to taste the future!
Tags: compact flash, LAN, storage