Low Cost, High Speed Optical Data Transfer Record

In a society that is more and more dependent on data and information, this type of advancement is important. Scientists have set a new record for data transfer using a single laser in an optical cable. While there have been faster transfers, those involved many lasers and a load of very expensive equipment. This new technology does it in a very low cost manner that will be suitible for commercial production in a few years.

We will have a need for more and faster data transfer as time goes on. Video is currently the biggest eater of bandwidth but that might not be the case forever. As students bring their own technology to school, the real challenge will be to have the school provide the infrastructure to support all those devices. This technology will help a lot!

• Wow, that IS fast! Scientists transfer 700 DVDs of data in a SINGLE SECOND | Mail Online

  high speed optical data transfer

  tags: technology optical future

  • A new speed record has been set for transferring data down a fibre-optic cable using a single laser.

    Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany succeeded in sending 26 terabits of data – the equivalent of 700 DVDs – down an optical fibre in one second.

  • ‘Already a 100 terabits per second experiment has been demonstrated,’ Mr Freude told BBC News. ‘The problem was… they had something like 370 lasers, which is an incredibly expensive thing.

  • But Professor Freude and his colleagues have now worked out how to replicate similar speeds using a single laser with extremely short pulses. A number of discrete colours of light, known as a ‘frequency comb’ exist within these pulses.

  • The Fourier transform extracts the colours from an input beam on the basis of when the different elements of the beam arrive.

    Professor Freude’s team does this optically – rather than mathematically, which would not be possible at such high transfer rates – by splitting the incoming beam into different paths that arrive at different times and recombining them on a detector.

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