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According to RFC1925, the second fundamental truth of networking is: No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can’t increase the speed of light.
However early in the world of network engineering this problem was first observed (see, for instance, Tanenbaum’s “station wagon example” in Computer Networks), human impatience is forever trying to overcome the limitations of the physical world, and push more data down the pipe than mother nature intended (or Shannon’s theory allows).
One attempt at solving this problem is the description of an infinitely fat pipe (helpfully called an “infan(t)”) described in RFC5984. While packets would still need to be clocked onto such a network, incurring serialization delay, the ability to clock an infinite number of packets onto the network at the same moment in time would represent a massive gain in a network’s ability, potentially reaching speeds faster than the speed of light. The authors of RFC5984 describe several attempts to build such a network, including black fiber, on which the lack of light implies data transmission. This is problematic, however, because a lack of information can be interpreted differently depending on the context. A pregnant pause has far different meaning Continue reading
