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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.
Why yes. Just like radiation. And viruses.
Umm. Than what? Who writes this crap?
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.)
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.'"
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
Yeah, imagine the bandwidth we could get out of the gamma ray end of the spectrum (which is also invisible to humans)
"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.
Maybe they could put it in some kind of tubing and bury it.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?