All Fiber Optic Internet A Future Reality
Every day we upload and download more and more data, in fact we are encouraged to use more, stream more, share more. Our data consumption rates are astronomical.
We went from acoustic couplers that screeched into the mouthpiece of telephones at 300 BAUD... shudder.
(Let's take a moment of silence, and be thankful we evolved past this!)
Then came dialup internet access via modems, to DSL (Can you say filters?), to cable modem, and some now to FIOS, a bundled home communications (Internet, telephone, and television) service, operating over a fiber-optic communications network that is offered in some areas of the United States by Verizon Communications.
Our data consumption doesn't just stop at just our home computers. Oh no, we now have our mobile / cellular phones connected with mobile web at broadband speeds no less as well!
As we enjoy the fruits of our never ending hunger for faster data connectivity, we are reaching the limits of what was once thought an infinite resource.
We are quite literally running out of fiber optic bandwidth... unless we figure out a way to increase the capacity of the infrastructure we already have in place.
Somebody once said "Hurry Up Quickly". This age old wisdom just might be the key to speeding up the internet even more, by slowing parts of it down, by using "Meta Materials", the same magical things that might make the possibility of invisibility cloaks a reality.
The speed limit of today's internet comes not from the transfer of information, but in the routing and conversion of electrical signals which are stored, routed, and turned back into optical signals with lasers. The conversion, besides adding significant cost and complexity, also slows down the data transmission. "Meta Materials" would replace the relatively slow electronics that use use for routers, etc., leaving only the speed of light transmission of data.
E=MC2. Nothing is faster than light. It travels at 186,200 miles per second. The high speed fiber optic cables that span the globe are what make the internet possible.
Fiber optics can easily sustain data rates at multiple TERRAHERTZ speeds, while electronics max out at a few Gigahertz. By using Meta Materials to make the light hurry up and wait, deliberately slowing light down. This would allow a single chip made of Meta Material to do all the work, the effect could be used to store light signals, with different delays for different frequencies, in a so-called "all optical network".
This is all decades away from being a practical reality, but it is definitely something to look forward to coming down the pipe.
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