Technology

Scientists from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have shown how to achieve a dramatic increase in the capacity of optical fibres. The solution, published in Nature Communication's December issue, reduces the amount of space required between the pulses of light that transport data.      

Researchers from the University of Bristol, in collaboration with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan, say they have developed a new type of optical fibre that will become the 'foundation for future internet infrastructure'.

The teams say their advanced multicore fibre-based network will overcome critical capacity barriers, which threaten the evolution of the internet.

Laser nano-technology has been used to create a device smaller than a human hair, in an effort to make optical communication faster and safer.

Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany mimicked microscopic structures on the wings of a butterfly to create the photonic crystal which can split both left and right circularly polarised light.

The network specialist, Ciena Corporation is building a software-defined, multi-layer wide area network (WAN), in collaboration with with CANARIE, Internet2 and StarLight to boost confidence in the technology of software-defined networking (SDN).

Internet provider BT has confirmed that it will soon be offering an ultrafast 300Mbps 'fibre to the premises' (FTTP) service for consumers who require extra bandwidth.

The service will initially be available within 50 exchange areas where FTTP infrastructure has already been deployed.

The company says that the launch of the Infinity 300Mbps FTTP service will see BT offer the fastest speeds of all the major ISPs, with 300Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream speeds. BT says the speeds are up to 40 times faster than those achievable through the use of copper.

CLEO - the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) 2013 exposition – is set to open at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California.

Among the exhibitors will be Vytran, a supplier of optical fibre-splicing and processing products, which will emphasize its tools and techniques for creating optical fibre splices and fused-fibre components critical for fibre lasers and other applications.

Six of the world’s leading research and education networks and two commercial partners have demonstrated for the first time a transatlantic 100 gigabits-per-second transmission link for research and education between North America and Europe during the TERENA Networking Conference 2013 (TNC2013), held in Maastricht, Netherlands. These demonstrations showcased emerging technologies and advanced applications for science, research and education.

Lasers that fire for as little as a ten billionth of a second provide advantages with many materials, such as no heat affected zones or melting with cold ablation, as revealed at a recent AILU workshop. Rob Coppinger reports

These fast lasers, lasers that fire, or pulse, as quickly as ten or millionths of a billionth of a second, were a focus of the Association of Laser Users’ (AILU) annual 'Ultra precision laser manufacturing systems, technologies and applications workshop'.