The new technology uses light waves instead of electricity to transfer information. That would allow computers to transfer about 160 gigabits of information per second.
For perspective, an informal survey of adult industry webmasters revealed a wide range of bandwidth usages for different companies, different programs and different sites, but 20-30 megabits per second of transfer fell roughly in the middle for a successful adult paysite. IBM's new technology would let companies transfer 160,000 megabits of information per second.
Online guru Brandon Shalton told XBIZ that even though most Internet companies don't need to transfer information that fast yet, another problem stands in the way of this technology: fiber optic wiring, or a lack of it.
"IBM has produced the technology, but they'd need everyone to be wired with fiber optics to be able to use it," said Shalton, who founded the traffic analysis service T3Report.com. Shalton added that Verizon is wiring select American cities with fiber optics, but that the full infrastructure needed to exploit this new technology is a long way off.
Adult industry professional Media, who is the vice president of online sales at Girls Gone Wild, expressed excitement at the possibility of downloads that move at the speed of light. Media told XBIZ he was looking forward to being able to put this new technology to work.
"It sounds pretty cool if it's going to become standard," Media said. "One gigabit transfer over a network is awesome. I can't even imagine 160 gigabit transfers. I'm not sure how hard drives would even keep up with that."
Mr. Skin Vice President of Business Development Derek Meklir agreed. He told XBIZ he was anticipating the new technology, even though it sounded like the general public had a long wait in store for such a huge advance.
"We've been waiting for flying cars for awhile now," he said. "Why not this?"