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Facebook Pitches Laser Beams As The High-Speed Internet Of The Future (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Facebook says it has developed a laser detector that could open the airwaves to new high-speed data communications systems that don't require dedicated spectrum or licenses. The component, disclosed on Tuesday in a scientific journal, comes from the company's Connectivity Lab, which is involved in developing technology that can help spread high-speed internet to places it currently doesn't reach. At 126 square centimeters, Facebook's new laser detector is thousands of times larger. It consists of plastic optical fibers that have been "doped" so they absorb blue light. The fibers create a large flat area that serves as the detector. They luminesce, so the blue light is reemitted as green light as it travels down the fibers, which are then bundled together tightly before they meet with a photodiode. It's described in a paper published on Tuesday in the journal Optica. Facebook says there are applications for the technology both indoors and outdoors. Around the home, it could be used to transmit high-definition video to mobile devices. Outdoors, the same technology could be used to establish low-cost communications links of a kilometer or more in length. In tests, the company managed to achieve a speed of 2.1Gbps using the detector, and the company thinks it can go faster. By using materials that work closer to infrared, the speed could be increased. And using yet-to-be developed components that work at wavelengths invisible to the human eye, the speed could be increased even more. If invisible to humans, the power could also be increased without danger of harming someone, further increasing speed and distance.
Yes, because as everybody knows, UV does no damage to the human eye...
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
"If invisible to humans, the power could also be increased without danger of harming someone, further increasing speed and distance." Really...
Umm. Than what? Who writes this crap?
...the whatchamacallits that are schlepping our data across country on all those fibers?
What are they called?
Oh, yeah. LASERs.
The one that reads, "do not stare into laser beam with remaining eye."
I heard they took the entire optical comm group from a NASA center ...
Yeah invisible lasers are normally considered MORE dangerous. When even a 5mw visible laser hits your eye, you instinctively turn away immediately. The extremely bright light is uncomfortable. If you can't see it, you don't instinctively turn away. See Chuang LH, Lai CC, Yang KJ, Chen TL, Ku WC (2001). "A traumatic macular hole secondary to a high-energy Nd:YAG laser".
OSHA and other bodies require EXTRA safety measures for invisible or nearly invisible lasers. (Near infrared fiber optic lasers can appear to be a dim red. They are actually very bright, just on the verge on the wavelength humans can see.)
It's like it's 1995 again!
So you mean Laserlink? The tech has been around for a while..
If the last mile problem could be solved with 1km more reach, we'd have done it with wires already.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Green Acres is the place to be
Farm livin' is the life for me
Land spreadin' so far and wide
Keep Manhattan just gimme that countryside..
Sign me up, Dr Evil
What is that, Greek? This is FACEBOOK! They invented it! A laser that can transmit information! Genius!
Laser beams are the high speed internet of today
Are they expecting people to keep my mobile device at an angle that will allow a laser to hit the sensor constantly? That's pretty ridiculous. The only place to put the sensor on is the back of the device, which is facing down and covered in large part by my hand when I'm using the device.
https://youtu.be/g4AEBiyn8Rs?t=35
Does this make putin an amphibian ?
"Outdoors, the same technology could be used to establish low-cost communications links of a kilometer or more in length."
Weather would prevent transmission through the air outside, of all wavelengths. Raindrops scatter light. Fog scatters light.
slits scatter light.
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Has anybody heard about the ronja? It's been there for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA
Maybe they could put it in some kind of tubing and bury it.
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Short-wave Infrared goes through smoke and fog (cf. this). Then it is just a matter of attenuation, you just have to pump more power.
What is fun is indeed snooping on the communication via the light scattered away from the beam.
We used Ubiquiti's Air Fiber at my last employer and would experience "rain fade" during bad weather. I can't imagine lasers would be any different.
Lasers! That's it! Then we can make really thin strands of glass to conduct these laser pulses over long distances. It will be awesome.
Amazing how the trolls are better written than the summaries.
What the hell, Slashdot?
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
The author of this summary obviously did.
Here's an idea - let's use those laser but safely contain them within glass fibres with the advantage of getting better range and more than line of sight!
You can tell the idea in the summary came from a software company and not a hardware company. Reinventing the wheel as a square thing made of rock.
"If invisible to humans, the power could also be increased without danger of harming someone, further increasing speed and distance."
That's an incredibly stupid thing to say, since it isn't true. Just because it's "invisible" to human eyes doesn't mean that it can't/won't hurt human eyes.
Seriously, the level of stupid in that one sentence makes me dizzy.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
careful, they'll get a patent on that idea and start suing
While I personally agree with this, since there are apparently many that do not, I believe that the best compromise would be for slashdot to process text through a unicode filter when a user clicks the submit button, and if any non-ascii is detected, then it should go to a warning screen and require resubmission to accept it, similar to what happens if you happen to have a short response and click 'submit' too quickly after clicking 'reply'. At least it would give people who may have copy-pasted some web text from somewhere else that doesn't have a bias against using utf-8 a second chance to adjust their post before making the submission final.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Not if the laser is strong enough :-)
But this was about UV light spreading out over several square inches at distance. The lens of the eye is cloudy to near-UV light, and won't focus to a spot. The reason it's invisible, makes it less likely to damage your retina.
Tinkering near such sources, you'd want to be careful, of course. Protective gear, for that wavelength, is rather common, because arc welding produces the same light in hazardous intensities.
As a tower-to-tower relay for high speed signals, it's unlikely to impinge on anyone's face. Weather, though, will be a problem. It won't replace microwave links if reliability is important.
Water is wet!
Whether this is within the human perceptible spectrum of light or not, there will be a device that can see these streams of light. If you can see these streams of light, then you can see the binary pulsing nature of these streams. If you can see this binary pattern, then you can capture the stream of data being transmitted. It may well be encrypted, but it would be no more secure a means of transmission than what we already have. Just another form of wireless data transmission.
If you try and provide end-to-end shielding to prevent eavesdropping, then you might as well run fiber and be done with it.
On another note, it might be interesting to see what kind of transmission distances you could get with some long wave IR underwater... Silent, invisible (to humans) communications or data transmission might have some interesting applications for underwater wildlife observation blinds or for underwater military operations.
Free Space Optical links exist and are used a lot. Mild fog or rain is not really that much of a problem. The beam is not like a laser pointer, it is a few centimeters wide. Heavy rain and fog will drop the connection though. For this reason most FSO links have a lower-bandwidth radio backup link.
Pardon me for being skeptical but every single time I read about a new technology that is going to delivery high speed Internet in areas where it currently is not available I chuckle. The same things were said about broadband over power lines and using low flying aircraft or hot air balloons to house wireless access points. That doesn't mean this new technology can't or won't solve the problem, but say it becomes technologically feasible to deliver the last mile. Who is going to run the infrastructure? The major carriers probably won't because they're married to their networks they've spent billions building out. Independent ISPs, CLECs, or ILECs might get on board or maybe the few Co-Ops out there, but outside of that I don't really see anyone using this anywhere other than in a research network. Delivering last mile broadband is a nightmare to say the least. That's why I got the hell out of the business over 10 years ago.
The technology isn't the problem. The problems are the politics and the unrealistic expectations some have about what consumer broadband should look like. The politics I refer to are the regulations and taxes the government stacks on top of telco circuits. I'm not talking about the universal service fund, I'm talking about excise taxes to pay for wars that ended over 100 years ago and "just because" fees.
The carriers aren't completely innocent either. They add to the political problems through their incumbency. A lot of these carriers have right of way access that was granted on a permanent basis or for a 100 year term making it difficult to impossible for new fiber to be run in some areas. Their marketing campaigns help fuel the unrealistic expectations, especially when it comes to service availability. I don't know how often I've been in areas where one of the major telcos advertises services or speeds that are not available. I know some of this is market study to learn if there is a demand, but it still sets poor expectations.
End users are part of the problem, too. I'm talking about the folks who think their $70/month broadband should deliver 99.97% uptime with a CIR within a couple percentage points of the maximum speed advertised. You know who you are. There's a reason most consumer services are called best effort. The service agreements spell it out pretty clearly. Not reading the wall of text isn't an excuse. Any time you enter into any sort of contract it's up to both parties to understand the terms. Ignorance is not an excuse. I suppose one could argue the service providers could offer the terms of service in simpler language but that might open them up for lawsuits if someone had a fart come out sideways while they were streaming cat videos from Youtube. In other words, they're damed if they do and damned if they don't. People need to take more responsibility for educating themselves.
Personally I think the telcos will reign supreme in the long run because they have the pockets deep enough to fund building networks that reach everyone. Maybe this new technology will change that, but I really doubt it.
Freespace optical communication has been around for a long, long time. It's a problematic system to use in an atmosphere, since anything and everything can degrade the throughput. So, now we get to use a system the is horribly degraded whenever it's foggy, rains, or birds are flying around? No thank you.
Other systems have shown to achieve 10GB/s, so their test of 2GB/s isn't that revolutionary.
Let's stop the clickbait of *random famous company does something that other people have done before*.
Glad to hear that Facebook is following RFC 1925 part 11 and proposing something that countless others have tried and failed to do widespread, because of physics.
Keep proving those universal networking truths!
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Amphibious Rooskie, now THATS a band name if I heard one
This doesn't sound like it will be much use until they can mount it on sharks, or at least mutant sea bass.
Try the veal, I'm here till Thursday.
LLCD and OPALS have both demonstrated the feasibility of laser comm. Weather is somewhat of a problem but it can be addressed by implementing error correction code. I'm glad to see private industry showing interest in this very promising technology. OPALS was able to reach speeds of 50Mbs which is a good improvement over existing satellite internet speeds. Unfortunately the article does not make it clear under what conditions was the 2Gbs speed achieve or how are they planning to use it indoors, I would imagine that would require line of sight.
> If invisible to humans, the power could also be increased without danger of harming someone,
Apparently someone doesn't understand lasers.
Have gnu, will travel.
We had a point-to-point data connection between two of our buildings. It was unreliable to say the least as soon as the weather took a turn for the worse.
Well, I guess my tv remote always had it. Remember when your laptop did?
"Lasers!? That's adorable!" - Dee Reynolds
seems like a possible new weapon
If only these communications lasers could be mounted to some sort of biological entity. And subsea transmission cables are a thing, we should consider an oceanic species.
Manta rays perhaps? No, too flat, they will squash the bits.
Whales possibly? No, too slow. We want high speed internets!
If only there were some large, aggressive, predatory fish perhaps. Sea Bass maybe?
What do you think gets shot down your fibre optic cables? ;-)
Even without the cables, this has been done before .