Terabit class Internet connections on the way?

The days of counting our Internet dial up connection speeds in kilobits has long passed, and we now speak about out broadband in megabits instead. But new research in Japan could lead to terabit class connections soon becoming the standard.
I can well remember the days of sitting waiting for a picture to slowly reveal itself on my computer screen as I sat staring at my monitor while my 33kbps and then later 56kbps modem connection whiled its merry way around the web. In fact, I marvelled at it, thinking how incredible it all was.
And then along came ADSL, and I realised how damn slow my Internet connection had actually been up to that point. I’d been missing out on a whole world of interactivity and multimedia downloads.
Now, new research at Japan’s Tohoku University could lead to us all looking fondly back on how we used to wait seconds for songs to download, and minutes for movies to stream. According to Tech.co.uk, the university team of researchers have “tweaked existing protocols to enable standard fibre-optic cables to carry data at hundreds of terabits per second”.
This would affect your and my web experience massively, as web pages, even the most image laden and graphic heavy, would load instantly, as if you had them cached. You could download an artist’s whole back catalogue of albums in a matter of seconds, and movies would stream over your internet connection without pausing or skipping for a moment.
The technique at the heart of the development is called QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation), which is already used in some digital TV tuners and wireless data connections. The science behind this is beyond me but Tech.co.uk do their best to explain:
“The basics of QAM in this scenario require a stable wavelength for data transmission.”
“As the radio spectrum provides this, QAM-based methods work fine for some wireless protocols, however the nature of the optical spectrum means this has not been the case for fibre-optic cables … until now.”
“The university team has solved the stability problem using a special laser that makes it feasible to pipe data down a glass fibre using the QAM method at blistering speeds.”
This technology is not suddenly going to be available tomorrow, but the research could lead to terabit class connections being the standard one day.
I would suggest that the music and film industry get their house in order well in advance of that day, and decide whether they are going to continue fighting a lost cause against digital downloads, or embrace the technology like Radiohead did last month. Otherwise, with full movies downloading almost instantaneously, they’re going to be in deep trouble. Source: tech.blorge.com