Photonics to pave faster Internet speeds
Imagine connection speeds up to 60 times more than what we have today. That’d be a miracle, since we all know that even if the fastest pipelines are laid, there are still the limitations of electronics to deal with. Luckily, Australian scientists have found a way to drop electronics altogether, and make circuits fully photonic. Yes, photonic. The future awaits at the full story.
Integrated photonics, says researchers at the University of Sydney, Australia, will be able to tackle the problem of bottleneck electronics in the age of high-speed, light-based transmissions. And after creating a system similar to the Internet, they proved that they could achieve speeds as fast as 60 times more than present day speeds.
At the Center for Ultra-High bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), nested under the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, researchers also unveiled that the technology will not cost more than what high Internet speeds cost customers today.
How is that possible, you ask? Well, they used a piece of scratched glass not bigger than your thumbnail.
Yeah, “WTF moment” right there. Let Professor Ben Eggleton, director of CUDOS, explain this bit:
The scratched glass weÂ’ve developed is actually a Photonic Integrated Circuit. This circuit uses the ‘scratchÂ’ as a guide or a switching path for information — kind of like when trains are switched from one track to another — except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity.
Wow. Just wow. Like one reader pointed out, if you’re to download a terabit (122,070,312.5 kilobits) using your own DSL or Cable connection, it’ll take you 11 days to download the same amount. Those on dial up better give up while they can – 206 days to download that amount of info is just killer.
To prove the technology’s efficiency, the specialists put up a system powered by electric switching, but still aided by the use of the photonic integrated circuits. Even with electronic switching involved, the system well achieved over 6000% overall speeds than the current high-speed Internet.
“This is a critical building block and a fundamental advance on what is already out there,” said Eggleton, who also added, “We are talking about networks that are potentially up to 100 times faster without costing the consumer any more [than it would cost them today].”
Sweet golly, wow. More updates in the bleeding edge of technology as we get them. Oh and the image above is just a mock up – so don’t think that’s the actual piece of glass they talked about earlier.
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