Photonic Switching to Boost Internet Speeds

Da Massive writes "Researchers at the University of Sydney have developed technology that could boost the throughput of existing networks 100-fold without costing the consumer any more, and it's all thanks to a scratch on a piece of glass. After four years of development, University of Sydney scientists say the Internet is set to become, on average, 60 times faster than existing networks. According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University's School of Physics, the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world."

Comments

Re:Without costing the consumer any more?

[Daryen]

Not only that, but as far as I know this would require different lines (we aren't running scratched glass right now), and different switches and such to receive those new lines.

They're claiming this is 60x faster than current technology, and that it carries a terabit per second. While it's true that it may be 60x faster than technology IN PLACE, we already have optical fiber technology capable of multiple terabit connections. So considering the cost of upgrade, and the fact that existing infrastructure will need to be replaced, what exactly is novel here?

While I did RTFA, (yeah, yeah, I'm new here) it was incredibly light on detail, maybe I missed something that would make this an actual advancement?

I had a lot of questions...

[The Master Control P]

Like:
What exactly do you mean by scratch?
How does it switch?
What wavelengths and materials does it work best with?
How long to market?
If this is a "photonic IC" how long until we can buy photonic logic units?
Will this work with SOS (Silicon On Sapphire) technologies?

But the insightful article cleared them all up. Psyche! No it didn't. I learned that apparently a scratch can act as a waveguide of some kind that switches very rapidly. I know that the average reader doesn't have a PhD in photonics, but come on!

The paper will probably show up on their publications page soon. I don't think that the top link is about this new photonic switch, because 160Gbps isn't exactly 100x the speed of exiting 10Gbps fiber systems, but I'm not sure.

Anywhere in the world.

[Thanshin]

Speed and more speed...Speed isn't giving us freedom anytime soon.

We need to invent a non blockable way of communicating before the governments of the world unite in locking internet.

Someone go invent an x-ray connection, or something.

Re:Speed

[Bert64]

Well, we need to push the price of copper so high that it becomes viable for the telco to dig up all the expensive copper cables, sell them, and replace them with cheap fibre.