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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 ledow on Monday October 23 2017, @09:32PM
The day I get fibre, actual fibre, to my property, I don't think I'll have any worries about what's at either end of it enough to care.
"FTTH" is rare.
"FTTC" is a cop-out, ending in... well... copper.
And Ethernet basically shows that with a 100m of copper of so, I could easily have 1Gbit, probably a LOT MORE even without 8 full cores of wire, if it was designed for that purpose. Technically, I should be getting at least 1Gbit to the end of the street, somehow. And I'm nowhere near that and even if I could be, it would need multi-multi-multi-gigabit at the street cabinet to do anything useful for the people online at any one moment.
However a fibre, now, today, provably, can give me multi-gigabit over hundreds of kms, and can be upgraded to ridiculous speeds limited only by what I want to pay for the bits that go on each end.
Give me fibre, and I won't complain. Once I have fibre, 10Gbps is basically piss-all of what should be possible over that connection.