Researchers at Bell Labs have cleared the first hurdle to potentially increasing Internet speeds to well above today's fastest rates.
The scientists at Lucent Technologies' research arm have demonstrated in a controlled laboratory setting that certain polymer materials have physical properties to channel data signals at tremendous speeds. The rate could approach a heady 145GHz--much faster than widely used optical networks that typically clock in at about 10GHz, or 10 billion cycles per second.
"Basically, we are cramming a lot more electrical data onto an optical light wave in one second," said Mark Lee, one of the authors of the findings to be published Thursday in the online edition of Science Magazine.
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