Chip may speed up internet 100 times

A TECHNOLOGICAL breakthrough by University of Sydney scientists could lead to people downloading the latest movie in a few seconds or chatting with small, cheap, video systems.

The physicists have developed a revolutionary optical chip that could improve internet speeds to up to 100 times faster than Australia's networks.

"The most exciting thing is that it is just a piece of scratched glass. It is very simple, so it is potentially cheap," said Ben Eggleton, the director of the university's Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems, CUDOS.

He said the thumbnail-sized device could be commercialised within five years and used in countries such as Japan, which is "way ahead of Australia" in installing high speed fibre networks.

"As they build the next generation of networks, they're going to be looking for new breakthrough technologies."

The device, a photonic integrated circuit, could overcome the gridlock that occurs when information travelling along optical fibres at the speed of light has to be processed by slow, old-fashioned electronic components.

This would make almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the internet possible anywhere in the world, Professor Eggleton said.

The market would ultimately decide which technologies were introduced to meet the skyrocketing demand for faster and cheaper downloads. "But our job at CUDOS is to go out to the absolute limit, and demonstrate in the lab what is possible," he said.

The chip, which his Australian team developed with Danish and Chinese colleagues, is made from chalcogenide, with tiny channels etched into the surface by lithographic techniques like those used by the electronics industry.

Results on its performance were presented last night at the Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference in Sydney.

Professor Eggleton said the scratches on the surface of the glass acted as a guide or switch for incoming data, akin to a train changing tracks, only rapidly.

Consumers here would have to wait longer for any commercial product, he said. "It won't be deployed in Australia first," he said.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/chip-may-speed-up-internet-100-times/2008/07/09/1215282974808.html

Wow cool, VAIO u post cool threads VAIO FTW , PS im lushed :P

So, they can make speeds go higher then 1 TB (is that what 1000 MB is called?) per second?

Thanks man I do my best.

From what I understood, it requires that your internet feed be fiberoptic. DSL and cable modems need not apply. So if your contry has no widespread deployment plan for home fiberoptics, you won't benefit directly from this. Your ISP might though.

 Yes it is and if I am not wrong it´s 1024MB that equals to 1 TB.

I think it´s something like this:

8 bits = 1 byte

1024 bytes = 1 MB

1024 MB = 1 GB

1024 GB = 1 TB

If I am wrong please correct me.

I edited the above since I wrote wrong the first time.

Yeah sweet man, OT: do u know of it would be alot more expensive 4 consumers?

Cool, even if our infrastructure here in America certainly isn't widely ready for it. But think about what this would mean for media if it was wide-spread: Blu-Ray and other physical format are all but guaranteed to die, as digital distribution takes over. We might see the end of retail game stores like Gamestop, and the last holdover music stores would wither away. It's strange how a little chip can have such a profound effect on everything...

It´s a small piece of regular glass that is as cheap as it gets so it´should be easy to implement and not noticable pricewise for the consumer.

 Kudos to the inventors of CUDOS :) LOL