Earlier this month, Chinese researchers from the University of Shanghai revealed that they had found a way to increase current-generation fiber optic speeds by orders of magnitude—that is, by 10,000 times (considering the current 100 Gigabit standard of fiber optics, this could be as high as 125 Terabytes per second) by overcoming the surprisingly strict bandwidth limitations that come with standard networking using optical fibers [h/t Interesting Engineering].
Those already somewhat savvy with networking, fiber optics, or both may be surprised to hear that these speeds are even possible, but also that fiber optics were leaving this much potential on the table when we already understood them to be the fastest data transfer method. You can’t change the speed of light, and light’s as fast as anything gets in the universe— so what trickery is at play here?
None! As it turns out, existing fiber optics is not good at being fiber optics while still being massively better than everything else we have, at least for backend server and data center purposes where copper is the suboptimal choice. The issue is the difference between single-mode fiber optics and multi-mode fiber optics. Single-mode fiber optics are used for current backend purposes and are stable but relatively limited in bandwidth (one fiber at a time) compared to multi-mode. However, multi-mode, being more prone to interference and congestion, has made significant improvements to fiber optic transfer speed nearly impossible until now.
Researchers have added tiny, salt-grain-sized diffractive neural networks to multi-modal fiber optic cables, enabling them to achieve the intended higher speeds while preventing the data from being scrambled on both ends.
So far, this has been tested for about 24 hours by car, or at least ~1270 miles between a hospital on the island of Hainan and Shanghai University. At this testing range with these next-gen fiber optics, researchers achieved speeds of magnitude higher than previously possible. This points toward a future of medical scanning with truly cutting-edge fidelity and other potential medical applications, including ingesting optical fiber devices to find abnormalities.
What does all this mean for PC hardware users and the consumer electronics space in general? If this technology is widely adopted and works as well as it seems on a larger scale, high-speed Internet plans worldwide should start getting significantly faster.
But it’s important to recognize that this isn’t technically a speed increase—it’s more of an exponential bandwidth increase. So, while a future of faster loss-less downloads and streaming media does become more possible with technology like this, you’re still probably going to have 200-300 pings trying to game overseas and get kicked for your troubles. Light may be fast, but it’s not skip-into-the-future-past-all-existing-server-relays fast—low latency will remain somewhat sensitive to distance for a long while into the future, perhaps forever.