Polymer Optical Transmitters Go Even Faster

Whispers_in_the_dark writes "Scientific American is running an article on how a new type of polymer sandwich could be used in the future to push lightwave encoding of data up to around 200 GHz instead of the 10 GHz that is the upper bound today. The best part is that the new deviceswill be cheaper to produce than the current ones, after mass production presumably."

Comments

Re:Fixing?

[Myco]

My understanding is that the cost of the medium (fiber itself) is quite low. The expense comes in when you need to terminate it, boost the signal, etc. Not to mention the trouble of digging trenches and laying fiber, of course.

When they do lay fiber, I believe (that is, I read in a Slashdot comment which seemed plausible for once) that they lay like 2 dozen cables when they only need one, just so they don't have to go digging again. So if a cable goes bad, they'd just switch to a good one at the endpoints, I suppose.