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In what one commissioner called a “beta test” phase, the Federal Communications Commission has approved a program of trials that will study the shift to a new telephone network. This … Continue reading

It recently came to light that the NSA snooped on the communications of Google and Yahoo users without ever breaking into a data center. Now, the New York Times is reporting, it appears that could be because it penetrated fiber optic cables.

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Google has been rolling out incredibly fast fiber optic Internet access in some parts of the country offering bandwidth in the area of 1 Gbps. AT&T announced today that it plans to roll out the first all fiber 1 Gb broadband network in Austin, Texas. Austin has become a city with a huge number of […]

Many researchers over the years have worked towards increasing data speeds, something that has had breakthroughs in various ways over the years. The latest one involves a method the creators say is a simple concept, but one that – for whatever reason – was never done. By creating mirrored beams of light that cancel out noise, the researchers sent a 400GB/s signal down nearly 8,000 miles of fiber optic cables.

According to the researchers, fast data transfers over long distances is best achieved using two beams of light rather than a single one ran down a fiber optic cable. These twin beams, as they’re called, are mirrored images of each other, something that has the added benefit of cancelling out the noise resulting from traveling down the cable. As such, data can be send across long distances.

The merging of the signals is done at the end of the cable, with the noise-cancelling effect being the result of something call phase conjugation. When light beams are sent down the fiber optic, they produce a pattern full of essentially “ups” and “downs” referred to as peaks and troughs. The way phase conjugation works is by forming an inverse of one light beam so that a peak becomes a trough and vice versa. As a result, the noise effects are cancelled out.

While conventional methods would require phase conjugation to be performed using devices located a various places along a cable length regardless of where the cable is located – even the ocean floor – the researchers’ method removes that necessity by using the twin-beams method instead, and simply merging them together so that the noise is automatically cancelled out, resulting in a perfect signal.

Such a concept has the prospect of both increasing data speeds and increasing the distances a signal can travel without suffering from the effects of signal noise. Said lead author Dr. Xiang Liu: “Nowadays everybody is consuming more and more bandwidth – demanding more and more communication. We need to solve some of the fundamental problems to sustain the capacity growth.”

SOURCE: BBC News

Image via Ozan Uzel

Twin-beam signals send data 4x faster than conventional speeds is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
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The Internet has been completely in love with Google Fiber ever since it was first announced a number of years ago as the promise of gigabit Internet is one we’re sure many of you are hoping to experience in your lifetime. But it looks like Google Fiber will finally be getting some competition in the gigabit Internet field as a Vermont telephone company has just announced they’ll be providing gigabit Internet, and for half the cost of Google Fiber.

Vermont Telephone Co. has started providing gigabit Internet speeds for just $35 a month to its rather small footprint of 17,500 homes. Since it launched, a total of 600 Vermont residents have subscribed to the gigabit Internet service, which VTel installed a completely new fiber optic network in order to provide this service to its customers. (more…)

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