Researchers reckon they could speed up the internet a hundredfold with a new technique that twists light beams within fiber optic cable rather than sending them in a straight path.
“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.
The corkscrewing configuration, in development over the last few years and now recently physically miniaturized, uses a technique called orbital angular momentum (OAM).