Collaboration with geneticists yields faster fiber

Posted by Dirk Avery at 12:49 pm under Internet, Patent, Technology.

This is just plain cool. Researchers in Australia were working to produce faster fiber optics. When they ran into an issue they couldn’t solve, they collaborated with the geneticists in the neighboring lab to come up with new, patent-pending technology. (Hopefully it will help US Internet providers upgrade infrastructures that are falling behind the rest of the world.)

The breakthrough makes use of a device that… can do a job that today would cost [about $90,000 USD]… and require a broad range of different test equipment… [T]he technology is important because of the increased demand on optical fibres with YouTube, video on demand and Facebook… “Everyone wants to send more and larger files and data streams through the web, but laying new fibres is expensive. So the phone companies are using new technologies to push more information through the fibre… Fibres which were originally carrying 10 gigabits per second are now carrying 40 gigabits per second or more.”

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