Slashdot Mirror
A High-Bandwidth Interplanetary Connection
sciencehabit writes "A new study suggests that by twisting laser light, scientists could pack enough information into interplanetary beams to speed up extraterrestrial communications to the multi-gigabit level. The pulses would be passed through a hologram or multimode optical fiber, which twists the light. On the other side, a telescope would focus the light and a second hologram, or fiber would decode the signal. That could allow much more data-rich communication between, say, Earth and probes on Mars, the researchers say. Closer to home, the approach could provide Internet links of 100 gigabits per second."
> Hemmati and his colleagues estimate that receiving OAM data from a transmitter as distant as the sun would require a kilometer-wide telescope.
Sounds like even someplace closer like Mars is going to take an impractically large receiver.
--- Mercutio was right.
They're going to have to do something about the terrible ping times. Its orbit is about 1.5AU, so when it's close to the Earth, the round-trip ping time will be about 8 minutes. When it's on the opposite side of the sun, it'll be about 40 minutes.
Why? How does thinking about "multi gigabit" speeds for interplanetary communications conflict with you getting a faster connection to Pirate Bay?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Closer to home, the approach could provide Internet links of 100 gigabits per second
Throttled down by your ISP to 24 megabits per second
Summation 2