What’s All the Fuss About?
Internet teleportation
Oh come on, surely that’s made up?
Eat lunch with holograms at speeds 100 times faster than gigabit
Well, we admit that it’s a bit of a stretch, but Vodafone claims that its new 100Gbps broadband technology could “pave the way for ‘teleportation over the internet’ applications”.
As in ‘Beam me up, Scotty’?
We wish it were true: “Can you download me now, darling, I’m ready to come home”. The reality is intriguingly futuristic all the same. Vodafone claims its new “immersive” technology could let you touch or smell objects remotely using sensory devices, or even share meals with family members projected as holograms.
So what is this magical technology?
It’s called 100G-PON, with the PON standing for Passive Optical Network, an alternative to Active Optical Networks (AON). Both deliver fibre broadband to homes, but there’s a key difference in how they split the signal to multiple users. AONS use electrically powered (ie, ‘active’) devices to split and direct signals to customers. Each switching device will typically serve about 500 households.
By contrast, PONS use optical (ie, ‘passive’) splitters that require no electrical power, with each serving up to 128 users. Not needing electricity makes it cheaper to run PONS, and they’re more reliable. However, AONS can be delivered over a wider area (up to 50 miles), much further than PONS (about 12 miles). But all this is just a background to the real breakthrough, and that belongs to Nokia.
You mean the phone company?
Yes – or at least its Bell Labs research division, based in New Jersey, which it bought in 2015. It has built a new digital signal processing (DSP) technique that sends 25Gbps on a single wavelength. Combining it with other wavelengths would reduce the speed. Crucially, the new DSP method makes it easier to increase this 25Gbps speed to 100Gbps. Vodafone says it used Nokia’s technique to hit 100Gbps during tests at its lab in Eschborn, Germany.
And exactly how fast is 100Gbps?
It’s 100,000Mbps. Think your 100Mbps connection is pretty nippy? Vodafone’s is 1,000 times faster. The benefits of faster broadband are usually explained by how much quicker you could download an HD film. At 1Gbps, for example, it would take you 30 seconds. But 100Gbps is so much faster that we need to measure its impact in different terms. It’s not how fast you’d download something that would matter, but what you’d be able to download. Hence Vodafone’s rather excitable claim about teleportation. In effect, it means being able to ‘send’ a sensory experience – touch, taste, smell – from one end of a cable to another. Vodafone demonstrated something similar in 2019 using rugby tackles.
Really? How did that work?
It showed how the impact of rugby tackles could be felt 100 miles away via 5G. The person being ‘tackled’ – in this case South African rugby player Juan de Jongh (watch the video at www.snipca. com/37289, pictured left) – needs to wear a full-body haptic suit, which simulates the sense of touch.
Impressive. So how soon will I be able to use 100Gbps?
Not until 2030, Vodafone predicts, and even then it’ll probably be given first to businesses, hospitals and shops. It may seem as far-fetched as any technology, but it wasn’t too long ago that the best we could hope for was 56Kbps on a dial-up connection. Warp drives are still some way off, though.