combining digital and fiberoptics?

[drewjustforyou]

thought just occurred while studying for genetics (something I am all to glad to take a break from), what if computers used 2 forms of data transfer rather than 1?

I was kicking the idea about in my head of using the fiber-optic line to send packets of data, and the digital line (which is somewhat slower) to act as a checksum for it. Anyone know if anything like this has been done, or is being worked on? does it sound feasible? would the system bottleneck at comparing the data? and if it did would the gained bits in each packet be worth the bottleneck?

Thanks for the studybreak!

-Drew

 

[Alvin.C]

Hi,

I'm a little confused to be honest! . What do you mean by 'digital line'? – are you referring to a copper cable carrying an analogue signal? Also, in what context is this communication network in?

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Fiber Optical communications ARE digital. They use On/Off, Digital is 1/0, nothing in the middle, analogue varies, it has peaks/valleys, and everything in between.

 

[kmote]

I would suggest it would be much slower as you would loose any hardware level checking.

EDIT: even without this it may well still be slower. Take an example of checking 1MB of data against 10KB of checksum, if your fibre channel is significantly bigger than your copper line it is not really going to matter if you send 1024K or 1034K.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

If it is REALLY important, on fiber communications, where data accuracy is critical, I would think they would have a form of checking all data, but, the chances of data becoming corrupt on a fiber network, is almost non-existent unless the hardware is faulty.