Though internet speed isn’t exactly the most staunch bottleneck through which the tech world has ever had to push, it’s one of the of the few bottlenecks preventing certain major leaps that we know would be otherwise possible, such as streaming media without any hiccups. A team of researches has taken a step through that narrow bottleneck with a new technique for transferring massive amounts of data though a fiber optic cable.

A team of researchers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey pushed two beams of light down a single optic fiber, rather than the standard one, and found that when the data was transferred down the twin beams and combined at the end of the journey, the noise that was created during that journey was canceled out. This means that the resulting data was clean and identifiable, and thanks to the second beam, the speed and length at which the data was transferred were both greatly increased. The data was sent over a distance of 7,953 miles — a distance greater than the longest submarine cable — traveling at a speed of 400Gbps, which is around 10 times faster than commercially available line speeds.

In order to achieve these milestones, the team had to overcome a significant issue inherent to fiber optic data transfer. The distance any given data signal can travel through a fiber optic cable is based on how powerful the initial signal is. If a farther distance of travel is desired, the power, unfortunately, cannot simply be increased. The more power a signal has, the more it will essentially bump into inner material of the cable and generate noise, disrupting the data. Imagine rolling a ball down a hallway; if the ball travels straight through the hallway, it won’t encounter much resistance, but if it bumps into the walls every few seconds, it will slow down and eventually stop. In order to reduce those wall-bumping distractions, the scientists introduced a technique known as phase conjugation.

Rather than figure out a way to prevent the creation of noise, the team developed a technique to cancel out the noise after it was created. The idea is similar to the way noise-canceling headphones work. By putting two beams into the same cable — both of which generate data and noise that is a mirror image to the data and noise of the other — the team found that two beams’ generated noise cancel each other out once the two sets of data are superimposed. This creates a clean packet of data. So, since the noise cancels itself out, much more power can be put into that initial push of data, allowing it to travel farther without worry of bumping into the cable material and generating noise.

Now, more power put behind the initial push only generates a farther travel distance, but not faster speeds. Conveniently, since the technique corrects the data at the end of the journey, less repetitive data needs to be sent for the purposes of error correction. This means that new data can be sent, rather than it having to figuratively wait in line behind repetitive, potentially unnecessary data.

Lead author of the research, Dr. Xiang Liu, noted that we’re living in a time when people are consuming more data than ever, so we need to find a way to support that growth. The team didn’t mention if this new, surprisingly simple technique would be rolled out to the consumer market anytime soon, but hopefully Dr. Liu’s statement is indicative of the team’s eventual goal.

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