British researchers at University College London claim to have developed new hardware that provides consistent high-speed broadband connectivity, enabling data rates of more than 10,000Mbps.
UCL said it had developed new receiver technology to enable these data speeds.
Dr Sezer Erkılınç of UCL's Electronic & Electrical Engineering unit, the lead researcher, said: "UK broadband speeds are woefully slow compared to many other countries, but this is not a technical limitation.
"Although 300 Mbps may be available to some, average UK speeds are currently 36Mbps. By 2025, average speeds over 100 times faster will be required to meet increased demands for bandwidth-hungry applications such as ultra-high definition video, online gaming, and the Internet of Things."
{loadposition sam08}The research, published in Nature Communications and funded by the EPSRC UNLOC Programme and Huawei Technologies, led to a new simplified receiver to be used in optical access networks.
The co-author of the study, Professor Polina Bayvel, who is head of UCL's Optical Networks Group, said: "To maximise the capacity of optical fibre links, data is transmitted using different wavelengths, or colours, of light.
"Ideally, we’d dedicate a wavelength to each subscriber to avoid the bandwidth sharing between the users. Although this is already possible using highly sensitive hardware known as coherent receivers, they are costly and only financially viable in core networks that link countries and cities.
“Their cost and complexity has so far prevented their introduction into the access networks and limits the support of multi‑Gbps broadband rates available to subscribers.”
UCL said the new, simplified receiver was simpler, cheaper and smaller than coherent receivers and had about a quarter of the detectors.
A coding technique that was originally designed to prevent signal fading in wireless communications was used to fibre access networks. The same optical fibre was used for both upstream and downstream data, resulting in cost-saving.
UCl said the receiver was tested on a dark fibre network installed between Telehouse (east London), UCL (central London) and Powergate (west London).
"The team successfully sent data over 37.6 km and 108 km to eight users who were able to download/upload at a speed of at least 10 Gbps. This is more than 30 times faster than the fastest broadband available in the UK, today," it said.
“This simple receiver offers users a dedicated wavelength, so user speeds stay constant no matter how many users are online at once. It can co-exist with the current network infrastructure, potentially quadrupling the number of users that can be supported and doubling the network’s transmission distance/coverage,” added Dr Erkılınç.