Tuesday 31 October 2017

Twisted Light Wireless Optical Broadband Could Make Fibre Optics Obsolete.

A team of scientists working in the Photonics Research Group at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) has made progress on a way to adapt twisted light across a wireless optical (laser) ultrafast broadband network, which they claim could make traditional fibre optic (FTTH/P) cables “obsolete.”

The act of twisting light in order to send more data, which is called Optical Angular Momentum (OAM), is not new and fibre optic networks can already do something similar (see our story from 2012). In fact even wireless radio networks have found ways of adapting such techniques (here). Usually this works by taking individual particles of light (photons) and passing them through a special hologram (like the ones you see on credit cards), which gives those photons a twist (OAM).

Unfortunately making twisted light work for a pure optical link across open spaces (i.e. no fibre cables required) has proven difficult to achieve due to problems with interference (simple changes in atmospheric pressures can scatter light beams and cause the spin information to be lost), but it could be the key to creating a viable “last mile” network for delivering reliable high capacity broadband connections to buildings.





Full story at ISP Review.

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