Multicore Optic Fibres: Redefining Speed

Speed is what drives society forwards. Literally. From the beginning of time, speed was an essential in living; an organism cannot escape or catch prey if it is too slow. But speed can be in many different forms; though speed might exist in the naive mind of a typical person as the velocity of a powerful sports car, speed also exists in electrical components, from biological muscle impulses responsible for the hundreds to millions of muscle contractions needed for organs of an organism to function properly, or else it dies, to the billions of binary signals executed in the vast array of semiconductors, transistors, resistors, and microprocessors in a computer's motherboard. Clearly, the faster something is, the better, especially for telecommunications. As data capacity in many electronic devices increase exponentially, the need for speed increases as well; society demands large files, in gigabytes, not megabytes, to be received and sent in minutes, not days. Currently, the fastest method of transmitting data is through fibre optic cables, capable of sending data at 100 terabits per second; however, as a few years go by, the demand for bigger bandwidth speeds will surpass this limit. For researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology and University of Central Florida, they have developed a future solution; a multicore optic cable able to send 5000 DVD's worth of data, from one source to another, in one second. By adding seven cores to the fibre optic cable, noise is significantly reduced from increasing the signal strength, and bandwidth speeds can reach speeds of up to 255 terabits per second over a 1 km cable. The individual fibres in in the optic cable are about 0.2mm in diameter, so they are relatively thin. The researchers hope that, by the end of the decade, they will develop an optic cable capable of reaching petabit per second speeds, meeting, and even exceeding, future demand. To see more about optic fibre, see the following link: http://www.gizmag.com/data-transmission-speed-record/34553/