The biggest problem I have with having the entirety of human knowledge at my fingertips
anywhere I go is that it’s NOT QUITE FAST ENOUGH.
Surrender your mysteries to me, internet!!!
Hello out there my fellow wireless human beings, Julian here for DNews.
Radio waves have changed how we communicate.
When Guglielmo Marconi sent his first transatlantic transmission in 1901, it sparked a revolution.
Suddenly information could be sent anywhere, no strings or wires attached.
Mastery of radio waves has brought us entertainment, kept us in touch with space probes, and, most
importantly to me, made the internet accessible everywhere.
Of course, there are limits to how much data wireless communications can carry, and that’s
why we still use fiber optic cables to send data in bulk across oceans.
Fiber optics suffer less interference, have extremely low latency (or lag, for my gamers
out there), and have achieved data rates of 1 petabit per second.
That’s well over 3 MILLION times faster than the wifi in my house…
I’m going to have to call my internet provider.
Typical fiber optic systems are more in the 10 to 40 Gigabit per second range though,
which is still absurdly fast, 10 to 40 times faster than the cat5 ethernet cables in your
home can handle.
And now scientists at USC have figured out how to match those speeds with radio waves.
They’ve transmitted 32 Gigabits per second by sending multiple radio beams through a
spiral phase plate that twisted them into orthogonal helical structures.
If you don’t think that’s the coolest thing ever then we can’t be friends.
The same team has used a similar trick to transmit over 2.5 terabits per second using
light beams, but those don’t have the same robustness to deal with obstacles that longer
radio waves have.
To put the speed in perspective, 32 Gigabits per second is 30 times faster than LTE wireless,
it’s fast enough to transmit 10 hour-and-a-half HD movies in a second.
That’s every episode of Seinfeld ever in 4.5 seconds.
In HD.
Think of all the joy this will bring to the world!
Right now it’s only been successfully used at a distance of a little over 8 feet.
Future research will work to extend the range and may one day be applied to speed up cellular
systems and bring your 4G LTE phones up to actual 4G.
So if Android comes out with a phone that’s exclusively on a faster network will that
be enough to make the apple pickers jump ship?
Probably not, but Ross Everrett explains the psychology of fanboys and how to break the
cycle in this episode of DNews.
What other miracle of technology just isn’t good enough for you?
Let us know what little extra nudge your world needs that would make your life easier in
the comments.
For me, it’s a pillow that turns my brain off.
Get on it, science!
Until then, I’ll see you next time on DNews.