SCIENTISTS IN CHINA found a way to transmit huge amounts of data instantly over distances at world record speeds, a paper published in Nature magazine said this week.
They tested it by streaming a mega-high resolution 8k movie to 86 channels at once.
Their success moves the world closer to the fabled 6G, not due to be launched until 2028 to 2030.
The new system will be 10 times faster than the best 5G.
THE BOTTLENECK
It is well known that the challenge lies in the fact that signals get to buildings via optical fiber but get to your computers and phones by wireless connections. Both systems have limitations, and optical fiber systems need to be processed to become suitable for wi-fi, creating a bottleneck.
So the team of scientists, from two schools in Shenzhen and one in Beijing, created a new photonic chip that can seamlessly handle both optical fiber and wireless networks, thus obviating the need for a bridge.
They then tested it for speed. The chip achieved an impressive 512 Gpbs (gigabytes per second) on the fiber optic part and a record 400 Gbps on the wireless section. The second figure was achieved “for the first time to the authors’ knowledge”.
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LESS POWER, LESS COST
Even better, they discovered that their photonic chip cut the amount of power needed and the cost of transmission, both of which are going to be key factors in the growth of technology use.
They then worked on scaling it up, and discovered that it worked just fine on larger scales. “In our proof-of-concept demonstrations, 86 channels of real-time streaming 8K videos transmission are realized,” the scientists said in an open access paper published by Nature.
How will it change the world? Governments could create a network of 6G base stations throughout a city and everyone would get instant transmission of any amount of data with zero latency (time lag).
There’s still a lot of work to be done before full 6G is achieved, but the photonic chip appears to be a key step. Also, many other teams are working on the same area around the world—so there will be a lot of competition.
The authors said they contributed equally: Yunhao Zhang, Haowen Shu, Yijun Guo, Peiqi Zhou and Luyu Wang. The work was done at the Peng Cheng Laboratory in Shenzhen, the State Key Laboratory of Photonics and Communications at Beijing University in Beijing, and the School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Beijing University Shenzhen Graduate School in Shenzhen.