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from the making-it-quicker-to-reach-your-bandwidth-cap dept.
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) researchers announced a Tech breakthrough to allow 100-times-faster internet:
Broadband fiber-optics carry information on pulses of light, at the speed of light, through optical fibers. But the way the light is encoded at one end and processed at the other affects data speeds. This world-first nanophotonic device, published [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06952-1] [DX] in Nature Communications, encodes more data and processes it much faster than conventional fiber optics by using a special form of 'twisted' light.
Dr Haoran Ren from RMIT's School of Science, who was co-lead author of the paper, said the tiny nanophotonic device they have built for reading twisted light is the missing key required to unlock super-fast, ultra-broadband communications. "Present-day optical communications are heading towards a 'capacity crunch' as they fail to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of Big Data," Ren said. "What we've managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth."
[...] This latest technology, at the cutting edge of optical communications, carries data on light waves that have been twisted into a spiral to increase their capacity further still. This is known as light in a state of orbital angular momentum, or OAM.
In 2016 the same group from RMIT's Laboratory of Artificial-Intelligence Nanophotonics (LAIN) published a disruptive research paper in Science journal describing how they'd managed to decode a small range of this twisted light on a nanophotonic chip. But technology to detect a wide range of OAM light for optical communications was still not viable, until now.
[...] "It fits the scale of existing fiber technology and could be applied to increase the bandwidth, or potentially the processing speed, of that fiber by over 100 times within the next couple of years. This easy scalability and the massive impact it will have on telecommunications is what's so exciting."
Also at The Guardian.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @03:55AM (3 children)
Now the big ISPs can't claim extra infrastructure costs for installing new fiber, and, and, and, net neutrality will be a moot point because everything will be so cheap.
And then I woke up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday October 30 2018, @06:42AM (2 children)
If these things work and get adopted, the reality will be somewhere between "no change" and the utopian scenario. Increasing the TB/s that can be sent over fiber is only one piece of the puzzle. Other equipment will have to be upgraded.
Cheaper bandwidth is a good thing. Video is the top use of bandwidth, and new codecs, particularly AV1, are going to lower bitrate requirements yet again within a few years, while bandwidth cost declines at the same time. We might have to invent excessive stuff like 32K 360° VR in order to increase the average bandwidth use per person.
Net neutrality is already a moot point. It doesn't matter that much for broadband ISPs. It might matter for mobile. What matters is the lack of ISP competition, barriers to competition, lobbying against municipal broadband, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 30 2018, @04:08PM (1 child)
360 VR is already here, it's just not widely adopted, yet. Seriously, I really like playing with my Vive and I could see myself greatly enjoying a Planet Earth like VR title. Even, if they just made it more like watching an IMAX film, that would be quite the experience.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 30 2018, @04:17PM
We need to go deeper. We need to go to 32K resolution 360° VR [soylentnews.org]. You can specify the Hz. How about 240?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]