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Researchers at University College London have developed a new receiver technology that promises data rates in excess of 10 Gbps to home users.
Slow internet speeds and the Internet 'rush hour' – the peak time when data speeds drop by up to 30% – could be history with new hardware designed and demonstrated by UCL researchers that provides consistently high-speed broadband connectivity.
[...] "To maximise the capacity of optical fibre links, data is transmitted using different wavelengths, or colours, of light. Ideally, we'd dedicate a wavelength to each subscriber to avoid the bandwidth sharing between the users. Although this is already possible using highly sensitive hardware known as coherent receivers, they are costly and only financially viable in core networks that link countries and cities.
"Their cost and complexity has so far prevented their introduction into the access networks and limits the support of multi‑Gb/s (1 Gb/s=1000 Mb/s) broadband rates available to subscribers," said co-author and Head of the Optical Networks Group, Professor Polina Bayvel (UCL Electronic & Electrical Engineering).
The new, simplified receiver retains many of the advantages of coherent receivers, but is simpler, cheaper, and smaller, requiring just a quarter of the detectors used in conventional receivers.
Simplification was achieved by adopting a coding technique to fibre access networks that was originally designed to prevent signal fading in wireless communications. This approach has the additional cost-saving benefit of using the same optical fibre for both upstream and downstream data.
"This simple receiver offers users a dedicated wavelength, so user speeds stay constant no matter how many users are online at once. It can co-exist with the current network infrastructure, potentially quadrupling the number of users that can be supported and doubling the network's transmission distance/coverage," added Dr Erkılınç.
The full report is available:
M. S. Erkılınç, D. Lavery, K. Shi, B. C. Thomsen, R. I. Killey, S. J. Savory, P. Bayvel. Bidirectional wavelength-division multiplexing transmission over installed fibre using a simplified optical coherent access transceiver. Nature Communications, 2017; 8 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00875-z
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday October 23 2017, @05:48PM (1 child)
How could this possibly scale well? How many wavelength divisions can they possibly create in a fiber optic cable from a head end controller to the subscriber? 4? 40? 400? 4000?
And when you do chop up the pie into dedicated slices, how much of each slice goes to waste because the bandwidth division capability is based on light wavelength which has to be reconfigured instantaneously as demand changes?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jelizondo on Monday October 23 2017, @06:55PM
Perusing TFA, it says they achieved 8 times more subscribers using Alamouti-coded OFDM QPSK and 4 times more subscribers using 16-QAM using a passive optical network (PON). It is not my field, but I understand that each single fiber on a PON can service 32 users, so multiplying by 4 or 8 using the same infrastructure sounds very good to me.