40Gbps Internet speeds? UK team is working on it

A team at the UK's Bangor University is working on a way to boost Internet speeds up to perhaps 40Gbps and is looking at ways to make such speeds affordable to the rest of the world.

Google got a lot of media attention earlier this year when it officially announced its plans to bring 1Gpbs Internet service to both Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. But if a team at a UK university is successful, those speeds will pale in comparison to what we may be able to get in just a few more years.

The BBC reports that a team at Bangor University in Wales has developed a system that already facilitates speeds of 20Gbps and the team believes that can be boosted up to 40 Gbps. They claim their method won't cost a lot of money.

The Bangor team has developed a method called Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. The team says its system should solve the problem of errors popping into the data when a fiber optical cable gets longer and longer. According to them, the OOFDM method can both code and decode data signals "on the fly."

According to Bangor Uni's Dr. Roger Giddings, "This is the only system that we know of in the world that we can demonstrate working in real-time - with a real-time transceiver and a real-time receiver."

So in just a few years, you could be surfing the web with pages popping up almost instantly, downloading full games and HD movies in just a few seconds and, hopefully, enjoying stutter free web-based voice and video calls. Maybe.

Source: BBC
Internet speedometer image via Shutterstock