Facebook just doesn’t seem to stop innovating. Recently with yet another breakthrough the researchers from Facebook’s connectivity lab have stunned the world with a new technology that can change the way communication takes place.
This so called new technology can one fine day make light based wireless communications the most superior technology in comparison to the communication based on radio frequencies and microwaves. This could definitely be a reality in the future.
What is this Laser Powered Technology all about?
This breakthrough innovation can make way for fast optical wireless networks that has the capability to deliver internet to remote locations which lack connectivity.
The lead of the Facebook’s Connectivity Research Team, Tobias Tiecke said, “A large fraction of people don’t connect to the Internet because the wireless communications infrastructure is not available where they live, mostly in very rural areas of the world.”
This sort of communication which uses light as a medium for transmission is also called free-space optical communications that offers a delightful way for people to communicate. Using this light based wireless communication, internet can be brought to areas where other communication transmissions through optical fibres and cell towers can be difficult to deploy in an efficient way.
By making use of Laser light to carry information across, we can expect a greater potential through the very high bandwidths and data capacity that it can offer, However the challenge lies in precisely pointing the very small Laser beam carrying data at a small light detector that is so far away.
Facts about the Laser research:
- With respect to this particular research carried out by Facebook, the researchers made use of fluorescent materials to collect light and then concentrated it onto a photodetector.
- They combined this light collector, which featured 126 sq cm of surface that can collect light from any direction, with existing telecommunications technology to achieve data rates of more than 2 gigabits-per-second (Gbps).
“We demonstrated the use of fluorescent optical fibres that absorb one colour of light and emit another colour,” Tiecke said.
“The optical fibres absorb light coming from any direction over a large area, and the emitted light travels inside the optical fibre, which funnels the light to a small, very fast photodetector,” he added in a paper described in the journal Optica.
- The new light collector uses plastic optical fibres containing organic dye molecules that absorb blue light and emit green light.
- This setup replaces the classical optics and motion platform typically required to point the light to the collection area.
- The fast speeds are possible because less than two nanoseconds lapse between the blue light absorption and the green light emission.
- In addition, by incorporating a signal modulation method called orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, or OFDM, the researchers transmitted more than 2Gbps despite the system’s bandwidth of 100MHz.