Squeezing more light in could lead to fiber optic cables that carry 10 times more data
When you’re trying to bring the world data at faster and faster rates, every little bit of efficiency matters. That’s why scientists have spent years attempting to coax as much capacity and speed out of fiber optic cables as possible.
Data signals travel through fiber optic cables in the form of pulses of light, and by packing those signals closer together, you can send more data. At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, researchers have figured out for the first time how to do so, allowing 10 times more data to pass through the cables. They published a paper today (subscription required) in Nature Communications.
“Since it appeared in the 1970s, the data capacity of fiber optics has increased by a factor of 10 every four years, driven by a constant stream of new technologies,” paper co-author Camille Brès said in a release. “But for the last few years we’ve reached a bottleneck, and scientists all over the world are trying to break through.”
Researchers have known for some time that packing signals closer together would be an important breakthrough, but no one was able to do so without causing interference between the pulses. The Lausanne team found that the secret lay in creating pulses that had uniform frequencies, which prevents them from affecting others nearby. They were able to create ideal pulses with 99 percent accuracy.
“These pulses have a shape that’s more pointed, making it possible to fit them together, a little bit like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle lock together,” Brès said in the release. “There is of course some interference, but not at the locations where we actually read the data.”
The researchers say the technology is mature enough for adoption and relatively inexpensive, so they expect to receive interest from the industry.