We transmit almost a thousand petabytes of data over the ‘nets every month — an amount that’s growing exponentially, thanks to your narcissistic obsession with Snapchat. In fact, we’re quickly closing in on the limits of how much data optical fibre can transmit. Luckily, scientists at Boston University recently unveiled what could be the next generation of bandwidth tech.
The findings of their DARPA-funded study, which were published in Science today, describe a novel new way to send data down an optical fibre by using doughnut-shaped laser beams called optical vortices. To understand what’s really remarkable about this, it helps to know how bandwidth works right now. Currently, the 0s and 1s that make up your emails, photos and YouTube videos travel down the optical fibre as specific colours, which are unpacked at the other end according to hue. Traditionally, bandwidth is increased by adding more colours to the process — but that’s a limited approach.
The scientists at BU, though, have harnessed the power of a laser that travel along spatial modes within the fibre, each “mode” carrying several different colours. The system is capable of transmitting 1.6 terabits per second, which as lead author Siddharth Ramachandran explains, is exponentially faster than our current internet connections:
A typical cable Internet connection to a home delivers 1-10 megabits per second of data, which means that the transmission capacity we demonstrated with OAM modes in our fibre represents a capacity equivalent to one million simultaneous cable-internet connections today.
According BU, physicists and biologists have know about optical vortices for decades — in fact, they’re a central tenet of quantum computing, which imagines the application of ideas about quantum mechanics to technology. But up until now, the phenomenon was thought to be too hard to control.
So just how fast is 1.6 terabytes a second? It’s the rough equivalent of the data of 100,000 phonebooks hurtling towards your house, through tornado-shaped laser beams, every second. [Science via Futurity]