By Andrew Grant
A new fiber-optic cable that seamlessly shuttles multiple beams of light simultaneously could drastically speed data transfer over the Internet.
“It’s like having more fibers without actually laying more fibers,” says Andrew Weiner, a physicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Telecommunications companies use light to encode and send data through fiber-optic cables. Over the last few decades, scientists have increased bandwidth by enabling a single beam to carry more information, but their progress soon will be outpaced by the vast amounts of data people exchange. Laying more fibers would be expensive. “We’ve gotten to the point where the [telecom] community has been asking what else we can do,” says Siddharth Ramachandran, a physicist at Boston University.
The solution he and his team came up with was to dispatch multiple beams of light through a single fiber. The idea goes back nearly four decades, but it’s not an easy thing to do because traditional fibers allow light beams moving in parallel to interfere with each other, jumbling the 1s and 0s encoded in each beam.