We’ve recently heard how Netflix and its streaming video service is now the largest single source of Internet traffic in North America, and such services are only just getting started. That’s why it’s comforting to know the speed at which data can be transferred down a piece of optical fiber can scale to terabits.
Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have managed to set a new record by sending data down an optical fiber at a rate of 26 terabits per second.
That may actually seem quite slow when you consider the National Institute of Information and Communications (NIIC) in Tokyo achieved 109 terabits/s earlier this month. But the Karslruhe technique offers one big advantage over how other, higher transfer rates have been achieved: it’s relatively cheap to implement.
The NIIC method required a new type of cable, previous 100 terabits/s speeds have required hundreds of expensive lasers and vast amounts of energy to achieve making them unworkable for the majority of our communication networks around the world.
Professor Wolfgang Freude, who is one half of the research duo that came up with this new method, managed to achieve terabit speeds using just one laser. That laser shoots out very short pulses of different colored light. 350 different colors are possible in total, each of which can carry a data stream. On the receiving end an optical Fourier transform is performed that can separate out the diferent color pulses and therefore the data, allowing for such huge transfers of data over a single line.
The most important aspects of this new form of data transfer is its ability to work with existing cable infrastructure and comparable low cost when compared to alternative terabit transfer methods. Freude believes the technique can eventually take the form of a processor making it very easy to deploy.
Read more at BBC News