New method doubles the capabilities of optical networks
Researchers in the US have announced that they have found a way to break through current technical barriers in optical telecommunications networks, almost doubling their capabilities while reducing their costs. If it is proven that the new technology can indeed be successfully applied to the existing fiber optic networks that have "girded" the Earth, then - among other things - the way is opened for a much faster Internet than today.
The researchers, led by Nikola Alic and Stojan Radic of the Photonics Laboratory of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California-San Diego, who published the relevant publication in the journal “Science”, succeeded in sending coded information via fiber-optic cables and then decoding it with precision, at a record distance of 12,000 kilometers between transmitter and receiver. At the same time, they managed to increase the power of the optical signals 20 times.
The new method can significantly reduce the cost of telecommunications infrastructure, because it makes it unnecessary to periodically amplify (with appropriate electronic equipment) optical signals along optical fibers.
Optical networks emerged in the 1980s as a faster alternative to traditional copper telecommunications networks. Gradually, the technology has improved further, as more and more data is “packaged” into different channels, which coexist at different frequencies (“colors”) in the same beam of light.
The optical signals that carry data, traveling through fiber optic cables in laser beams, must be amplified periodically. In addition, the process of converting optical signals to electrical signals and vice versa every few tens of kilometers is done by computers, which increases the cost of these networks, while also limiting how much data can be transmitted.
The new technique overcomes these barriers. The researchers were able to send optical signals over a distance of 12,000 km, without having to amplify them at all along the way from transmitter to receiver.
Google and Japan's Sumitomo Electric Industries, a producer of fiber optic cables, contributed to the research, but other scientists were more skeptical about whether the new method could be applied with the same success in the real world, beyond the laboratory
Source: APE
