Two identical beams of light sent down a fibre can carry data further than just one beam, with less noise, a new study has found.
In tests, researchers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, USA, sent a signal of 400Gb/s in a pair of light beams down a 12,800km optical fibre. When recombined on the receiving end, the noise that the signals gather in the fibre cancels out. These paired beams can travel four times further than a single one.
Lead author on the new research, Xiang Liu, of Bell Laboratories, explained: "Sometimes you may send data from London to New York, sometimes you may send it from London to Paris. The links are changing and you cannot keep sending people to the middle of the link.
"At the receiver, if you superimpose the two waves, then all the distortions will magically cancel each other out, so you obtain the original signal back.
"Nowadays, everybody is consuming more and more bandwidth – demanding more and more communication. We need to solve some of the fundamental problems to sustain the capacity growth."
