BBC News is reporting on an article that has appeared in
Nature Photonics
where researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany
have demonstrated using an optical Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) encoding/decoding
scheme to transmit data from a single laser at rates up to 26 Tera bits / second
over 50km of optical fiber. A new world record for use with a single laser.
In the BBC article, one of the co-authors of the paper, Wolfgang Freude, says that
previously other researchers had demonstrated transmission speeds of 100 Tb/s using
370 lasers and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing techniques. However, as
Freude points out, 370 lasers is expensive and consumes several kilowatts of power.
The Karlsruhe team claim to now be able to create comparable data rates from a single
laser using exceedingly short pulses.
With applications such as
cloud-computing and
4K video streaming set to explode,
the world demand for faster data transmission rates is not about to slow anytime
soon.
BBC article here -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13469924
Abstract of article in Nature Photonics here -
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journa...n.2011.74.html