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."

Comments

Throttling

[Rik Sweeney]

Closer to home, the approach could provide Internet links of 100 gigabits per second

Throttled down by your ISP to 24 megabits per second

Re:Ping times

[pushing-robot]

Yeah, the latency on wireless connections always sucks. If we plan on being on Mars a lot, we should just go ahead and string a cable.