The technological innovation established by the excellent University College of London that will speed up the potential of even the fastest Internet in operation today is further elaborated on today by their chief experts.
Dr. Domonaic Lever told The eye of media that the demonstration of a 1.125Tbit/s receiver is ”a milestone in optical fiber communications”. ”Cutting edge, commercially available, transceivers can operate at up to 400Gbit/s (0.4Tbit/s), so the receiver we have demonstrated is almost three times ‘faster’ than the best that can currently be purchased.”
Network operators tend to connect several transmitters and receivers to a single optical fiber by operating each at different frequencies (different colors of light) in a technique called wavelength division multiplexing. By using a 1Tbit/s receiver instead of a 400Gbit/s receiver, you would reduce the number of components required to achieve the same aggregate data rate, or increase the total data rate over a single optical fiber.
What exactly does this mean for the Internet? He explains ”You can think of the Internet as a series of smaller networks. Broadly, there is the access network, which connects homes and businesses to the internet, and there is the core, which moves all the data around between access networks. The development of this fast receiver will be potentially trans-formative in the core network, allowing a much more rapid transportation of data around the world.
In a nutshell, this enables fundamentally new applications of the Internet. One popular example is the Internet of Things (IoT), which is a pervasive network based on machine-to-machine communications, such as sensor networks. This is exciting because, for the first time, this will make the Internet work for humans without any requirement for human interaction. ”The hope is that our lives will be enriched as services such as real-time health monitoring, self-driving vehicles, and smart homes become a reality”.
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Each individual sensor or device in the Iot will therefore transmit and receive a small amount of information, but vast networks of these devices will generate tremendous quantities data, requiring a faster core network to cope.
What about fibre-to-the-home (FTTH)?There is no doubt the 1.125Tbit/s is extremely fast but, to make use of this capacity in the core network, the end user’s broadband connection must also be fast. Our team at UCL recently looked at paring down one of the enabling features from this record data rate demonstration for use in the last-mile FTTH networks, where equipment cost is a key factor. This key feature – coherent detection – was implemented using only 25% of the components required for our previous record demonstration, showing the potential for a broadband connection at 10Gbit/s (10,000 Mbit/s). This is over 400 times faster than the average broadband connection speed in the UK today!
When asked when the industry will pick up on this work, he replied ”It’s clear that there will be a demand for 1Tbit/s line cards in optical communications within the next product cycle, so we anticipate that the techniques we have used to demonstrate this record result will be transferred to next generation product development, which is happening now. With regards to our proposed FTTH solution at 10Gbit/s, this data rate will be required before 2024, so the next few years should see some exciting developments in the broadband market (see below URL).
Next step on his research is to try and transmit the data over several hundred kilometers of optical fiber! The 1.125 Tbit/s demonstration used less than 100 meters of fiber, but there are significant challenges in extending this to transoceanic distances, as the optical signal will be distorted in long distance transmission.
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