The world is spending huge sums of money on fiber optics to speed up internet connections, but researchers claim that widely used copper phone lines can achieve data rates three times higher than today — at least over short distances, and at a fraction of the cost of fiber optics. half. Their speed-boosting technology helps ease the transition to fiber, and may also be used in countries that use something like twisted-pair copper. Ergin Dinc and colleagues at the University of Cambridge say copper twisted pairs, which have been used as telephone lines for decades, are now being repurposed for broadband internet and can support frequencies five times higher than those currently used, which will greatly increase data transfer rates . The researchers found that after this upper limit was exceeded, the wires essentially acted as antennas and converted any signals transmitted into radio waves that dissipated before reaching their destination. “These cables are actually very old, invented by Alexander Graham Bell, and no one has studied their theoretical limits since then,” Dinc said. His and his colleagues say their findings could lead to potential for close-to-fiber optic cables. Homes can get higher speeds than they currently enjoy without the expense of running fiber into the home. Fibers carry groups of photons that represent data, and a large number of groups of photons can be sent down the line one after the other without waiting for the first group of photons to arrive. Fiber optic connections in use today typically operate at 1 gigabit per second, but theoretical speeds can be thousands of times higher.
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