New Fiber Optic Cable Could Make the Internet 100 Times Faster

[rangerrebew]

New Fiber Optic Cable Could Make the Internet 100 Times Faster

It's all about finding the right twist.

By David Grossman   
Oct 24, 2018


New Australian research offers a tantalizing promise–fiber optics that could make Internet speeds 100 times faster. The research relies on fiber optics that imitate the basic structure of life: DNA.

Fiber optics are long, thin and made out of pure glass. They're put in bunches called optical cables where the fiber optics transmit light pulses through them. The new research, from the Australian RMIT University, says that by twisting that light into a spiral the transmission speed could be increased by orders of magnitude. Currently, light pulses bounce down the glass like light would bounce off a mirror. The twist allowed researchers to create a third dimension for those pulses, one they call "the level of orbital angular momentum." In physics, that's called spin.

"It’s like DNA, if you look at the double helix spiral,” says Min Gu, the professor from RMIT University who designed the team that created the breakthrough, quoted in The Guardian. “The more you can use angular momentum the more information you can carry.”

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a24170311/new-fiber-optic-cable-could-make-the-internet-100-times-faster/

[Elderberry]

This assumes that the Internet Bottleneck is the Fiber Optic Cable and the rest of the network is capable of operating 100 times faster.

Fat Chance.

[240B]

The internet is already primarily fiber optic based. In terms of speed, the breakthrough came when a signal could be sent over the spectrum of light. That is, each frequency of light is a 'channel'. This leads to at least 7 to ∞ number of channels all broadcasting at the same time and being sampled and coordinated at the distant end. But the biggest return is, we do not yet know the distance limit of this technology. That means, that we could all be watching Chinese TV real time as it is broadcasting, from nowhere America. It would be as if you were there in real time.

[truth_seeker]

Is a line the bottleneck, or is WiFi/radio signal the bottleneck?

[Frank Cannon]

The internet is plenty fast enough. It the outdated hardware people have in their homes that is the problem with speed.

[roamer_1]

Is a line the bottleneck, or is WiFi/radio signal the bottleneck?

Wire is always faster than wiffy... by a ton. With normal use I don't know if you can tell the difference... But if you can pick a big enough chunk of files to measure it - Say a gig+ movie or more - Copy it from your laptop to your desktop via wifi, then hook it to the wire and copy it back... Even with ac wifi, the difference is substantial.

I push a lot around... Recover someone's movies off of a drive, and the recovery can very easily be between 500gb and 1T... And my tertiary station (which is temporary for when both of my test bench stations are tied up) is wireless... It takes forever to get a recovery from it down into the server. Literally better to walk a spare drive over there and drop it in the toaster, load it up, pull it, walk it over to the server, and drop it into the toaster there, and I will likely be done faster than if it were copied over the wireless.

[roamer_1]

Back in the day, when my local LAN was 10/100, and DSL was the standard, it was commonly said that the net operated at 10bT speeds... I wonder what it's comparative speed is today... Now that my local LAN is Gigabit, It is way faster copying across the LAN than it is DL'ding from the web... but I bet the web is quicker than 10/100 anymore....

[Fishrrman]

Frank Cannon wrote:
"The internet is plenty fast enough. It the outdated hardware people have in their homes that is the problem with speed."

I hear ya, Frank.

Going on 13 years ago or so, I signed up to get DSL as soon as it became available here in Connecticut. Speeds were around 5mbps or so -- I was happy because before that, I'd been using a 2nd phone line and an old-fashioned modem (remember them)?

Well, time went by and the local phone company changed from SBC Global to ATT which converted me to ATT Uverse. Internet speeds jumped up to 8.4mbps. Big deal when cable modems were running much faster.

ATT sold their CT business to Frontier, which kept raising my bill but they never did anything to increase the 'net speeds.

Finally when it jumped $15 in a single month, I decided to pull the pin and switched to Comcast Xfinity.

It's only been in a week, but the install went well and the speeds, well, they're impressive.
Using my 2015 MacBook Pro and the "Speedtest" app, earlier today I ran it and got 452mbps "down". That sure beats 8.4 !

And my bill dropped a heck of a lot, too!

[dfwgator]

WOO HOO! Faster Porn!