It has actually been astonishing to watch the climb of fiber optic
capacity over the past four decades. This is one more notching up of
that capacity. Beyond that we are obviously also approaching another
building boom of new cable capacity as the 2000 peak has now been
absorbed.
At the same time the global market for internet demand in terms of
users has also effectively tripled while actual throughput demand has
increased by several orders of magnitude. We are not complete yet
but we now can see the shape of the future and it is certainly the
interactive holodec.
It will be possible to enter a holodec media room, sit down and then
be joined by your friends in virtual form. I will even be able to
correctly model an atom down to the neutral neutrino structure.
Researchers Cram
More Info into Fiber Optics
June 27 2013 02:00
by Marshall Honorof,
Fiber-optic cables
that deliver Internet service are almost filled to the brim with
data, but a novel experiment has demonstrated that they may be able
to carry much more. By changing a property called spin of the light
waves that transmit information, researchers have discovered a way to
not only store more information, but send it over long distances
reliably.
The research comes by
way of a new paper, published in this week's issue of Science. "The
Internet has been growing at an exponential rate," Siddharth
Ramachandran, associate professor of electrical and computer
engineering at Boston University and co-author of the paper, told
TechNewsDaily.
"Fiber-optic
transmission lines and fiber-optic communications have been the
backbone that serves this bandwidth, but unfortunately, it has not
been growing as fast as the demand has been growing," he added.
Internet providers
deliver service through fiber-optic cables: extremely thin glass or
plastic tubes that transmit light. Since light is the fastest
phenomenon in the universe and contains many different
wavelengths, fiber optics can deliver tons of data at
almost instantaneous speeds.
"In fiber optics,
we can send light at different colors and keep them separate at the
end of the line," Ramachandran said. In the past, when engineers
wanted to send more information than can be handled by the current
crop of colors, "we would just add another color [and] call it
multiplexing."
Multiplexing is a
process in which a "fast" connection — like a fiber-optic
cable — transmits a jumble of data to a decoding device. This
device then transmits clear information to computers via "slow"
connections, like Ethernet cables.
There is a limit to
the number of colors that can be sent down a fiber, however, which
meant that providers have already almost saturated the fiber-optic
cables with information. To address this issue, Ramachandran and his
team applied a principle called "orbital angular momentum"
(OAM) to spin fiber-optic photons in a different fashion
and fit more data in transmissions.
Applying OAM to
photons creates a number of new "spatial modes," which
essentially act as channels to contain data. "[Photons]
move corkscrew down the fiber," Ramachandran said. "If we
design the fiber properly, we can make these modes very stable."
The experiment
demonstrated much more than stability. OAM-treated fibers
successfully transmitted data across 1.1 km of cable with a speed of
400 gigabits per second across 4 discrete channels. While the
research is a long way from reaching consumers, Ramachandran foresees
numerous everyday applications. [See also: Top 10 Life-Changing
Inventions]
"Smartphones and
HDTVs require a huge [amount of] bandwidth," he said. "In
order for more apps to develop in that space, one would need
bandwidth to be scaling at an exponential rate." If engineers
can apply OAM to discover additional fiber-optic channels, bandwidth
and speeds can continue to increase, and more people can use
broadband.
Although this research
deals with terrestrial Internet connections, mobile networks are
facing a similar problem: The air is running out of viable data
transmission frequencies. Ramachandran foresees applications for OAM
in this space as well.
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