Talk about fast. Researchers have recently reported sending over 100 terabits of information per second through an optical fiber, New Scientist recently reported. That’s a staggering amount of data–it would take three months’ worth of HD video footage to use so much space.
The findings were revealed at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference, held in Los Angeles recently. First, an NEC Laboratories researcher (in Princeton, NJ) named Dayou Qian shared how he managed to push 101.7 terabits of data per second along 103 miles of fiber. The trick involved using pulses from 370 different lasers to multiply the amount of information that could be encoded at once. The light pulses were further varied to encode more information by using different polarities, phases, and amplitudes of light waves, according to reports.
Breakthroughs often occur in pairs (otherwise we wouldn’t have so many patent disputes). Not to be outdone, a researcher at the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Jan Sakaguchi, had an even more impressive figure to share. Sakaguchi managed to squeeze 109 terabits per second through a fiber. His technique was different, and a little more intuitive–he simply used seven light-guiding cores in his fiber, rather than the more traditional single core. “We introduced a new dimension, spatial multiplication, to increasing transmission capacity,” as he put it to New Scientist.
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