Report: It's Easy to Make Fibre Broadband Twice as Fast

By Chris Mills on at

Getting bummed 'cos you're only getting 80Mbps on your fibre-optic broadband line? Well, there's no need to do a Hyundai yet, because researchers reckon that we're only using around half of fibre's capacity at the moment, leaving a whole 'nother chunk of bandwidth ready for the advent of 4K 'movies'.

One of the current methods used to transmit lots of data over one optical fibre is wavelength divisional multiplexing -- essentially, lots of different signals, each encoded in a different colour laser (and therefore different wavelength laser) are sent over the same optical fibre. Over long distances, however, that generates a lot of noise, which decreases channel capacity and kills baby seals*.

However, a team from the University of Tel Aviv reckon they've got a solution, which involves using the noise itself, which displays "strong temporal properties", to create a filter to remove it, thus doubling the bandwidth and bringing those baby seals back to life**.

Of course, this is all just a theory at this point, but it certainly looks promising -- maybe the future of internet isn't 5G after all. [Arxiv via The Register]

*not strictly true
**not strictly true either 

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