Is this a cool innovation? Yes. Over 100Gb/s wirelessly in a data center would be really cool.
Does this “rival fiber optic speed”? No.
Lay people don’t get how crazy amazing fiber optics is. Right now you can buy an off-the-shelf optical transceiver that does 800 Gb/s with a pair of passive fibers over 2km using a single wavelength. Why does it use a pair instead of a single fiber? Is 400 Gb/s the max you can transmit on a single fiber? No, it just makes the transceivers easier to make. I don’t know what the upper limit is per fiber, but it’s probably north of 100 Tb/s.
If this piques your interest, check out the Grace Hopper cable. It’s designed to carry 352 Tb/s across the Atlantic on 32 fibers. With all the protective layers, the cable is about the size of a garden hose.
Is this a cool innovation? Yes. Over 100Gb/s wirelessly in a data center would be really cool.
Does this “rival fiber optic speed”? No.
Lay people don’t get how crazy amazing fiber optics is. Right now you can buy an off-the-shelf optical transceiver that does 800 Gb/s with a pair of passive fibers over 2km using a single wavelength. Why does it use a pair instead of a single fiber? Is 400 Gb/s the max you can transmit on a single fiber? No, it just makes the transceivers easier to make. I don’t know what the upper limit is per fiber, but it’s probably north of 100 Tb/s.
If this piques your interest, check out the Grace Hopper cable. It’s designed to carry 352 Tb/s across the Atlantic on 32 fibers. With all the protective layers, the cable is about the size of a garden hose.
Oh right, new record is 400 Tbit/s over 50 km in 2024. Single mode, single fiber.
And 22.9 Pbit/s tri-mode over 13 km in 2023.
Lot’s going on with polarization, frequency combs, phase shifting and toroidal waves. Interesting stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication