A huge increase in the speed of the internet could be produced by slowing parts of it down, say researchers.

Applying the brakes could be the “metamaterials” that may make it possible to create invisibility cloaks.

The net’s speed limit comes about not in transporting information, but in routing it to its various destinations. Metamaterials could replace the bulky and slow electronics that do the routing, paving the way for lightning fast speeds. High-speed telecommunications routes include fibre-optic cables that span vast distances, carrying different streams of information in different channels—each with its own frequency of light.

Dividing light
As data nears the end of its journey, these frequencies must be separated and sent to their destinations. The separation is accomplished with bulky equipment that spreads the closely spaced frequencies in the pulses into different detectors. The light must then be converted into electrical signals which are stored, routed, and turned back into optical signals with lasers. The conversion, besides adding significant cost and complexity, also slows down the data transmission. “It limits the speed of the whole process to the speed of your electronics,” says Dr Chris Stevens from the department of engineering sciences at the University of Oxford.

“The light and the fibres can quite cheerfully sustain a couple of terahertz, but your electronics can’t do more than a few gigahertz.” It is at this point that the metamaterials prove most useful. If the light signals could be slowed sufficiently during the switching process, there would be no need for the electrical conversion step. The optical properties of metamaterials are accomplished by design—which is why they are touted for use in cloaking—and they can be engineered to deliberately slow light down. The effect could be used to store light signals, with different delays for different frequencies, in a so-called “all optical network”. “The ability to slow the light could be a tremendous force for telecoms that is sure to enhance speed and efficiency,” says Professor Xiang Zhang, the University of California researcher who demonstrated cloaking earlier this week.

The metamaterials could be engineered to accomplish the frequency spreading step as well, working much like a prism that splits white light into a rainbow. “With these materials, you could imagine something more like a single chip with the metamaterial handling the routing—all the capability of one of these big filtering systems, but the size of your fingernail,” says Dr Stevens. [BBC NEWS]

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.

Access Internet at 640 GB/s. The physicists have developed a revolutionary optical chip that could improve internet speeds to up to 100 times faster than Australia’s networks.

He adds that these chips could be scaled to operate at data rates approaching 640 Gb/s — the equivalent to transmitting approximately 17 complete DVDs per second! These chips could be commercially available in 5 years with the possible first network deployments in Japan.

“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. [READ]

The Board of ICANN today approved a recommendation that could see a whole range of new names introduced to the Internet’s addressing system.

“The Board today accepted a recommendation from its global stakeholders that it is possible to implement many new names to the Internet, paving the way for an expansion of domain name choice and opportunity” said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN.

A final version of the implementation plan must be approved by the ICANN Board before the new process is launched. It is intended that the final version will be published in early 2009.

“The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.”

Presently, users have a limited range of 21 top level domains to choose from — names that we are all familiar with like .com, .org, .info.

This proposal allows applicants for new names to self-select their domain name so that choices are most appropriate for their customers or potentially the most marketable. It is expected that applicants will apply for targeted community strings such as (the existing) .travel for the travel industry and .cat for the Catalan community (as well as generic strings like .brandname or .yournamehere). There are already interested consortiums wanting to establish city-based top level domain, like .nyc (for New York City), .berlin and .paris.

“One of the most exciting prospect before us is that the expanding system is also being planned to support extensions in the languages of the world,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN’s Chairman. “This is going to be very important for the future of the Internet in Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia.” The present system only supports 37 Roman characters.

Upon approval of the implementation plan, it is planned that applications for new names will be available in the second quarter of 2009. [READ]