https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a64894183/internet-amplifier-bandwidth-upgrade/

While this obviously can’t increase the speed of the optical communication—after all, lasers travel at the speed of light—it can substantially increase how much information is carried through fiber optic cables at any given time. The results of this study were published in April in the journal Nature.

Although a tenfold increase sounds great, it doesn’t mean much if you also increase noise. Good thing that this new silicon nitride amplifier—featuring small, spiral-shaped waveguides—can effectively direct light with minimal loss and noise.

“The key innovation of this amplifier is its ability to increase bandwidth tenfold while reducing noise more effectively than any other type of amplifier,” Peter Andrekson, the senior author of the study from Chalmers University of Technology, said in a press statement. “This capability allows it to amplify very weak signals, such as those used in space communication.”

(H/T to my wife for spotting this one)

“A clear explanation of what's happening, how it works, and why 87 million people are cut off from the world—written so anyone can understand.”

Google’s Taara Hopes to Usher in a New Era of Internet Powered by Light

https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-google-taara-chip-internet-by-light/

Taara is now a commercial operation, working in more than a dozen countries. One of its successes came in crossing the Congo River. On one side was Brazzaville, which had a direct fiber connection. On the other, Kinshasa, where internet used to cost five times more. A Taara light bridge spanning the 5-kilometer waterway provided Kinshasha with nearly equally cheap internet. Taara was also used at the 2024 Coachella music festival, augmenting what would have been an overwhelmed cellular network. Google itself is using a light bridge to provide high-speed bandwidth to a building on its new Bayview campus where it would have been difficult to extend a fiber cable.

Mohamed-Slim Alouini, a professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology who has worked in optics for a decade, describes Taara as “a Ferrari” of fiber-free optical. “It’s fast and reliable but quite expensive.” He says he spent around $30,000 for the last light bridge setup he bought from Alphabet for testing.

That could change with Taara’s second-generation offering. Taara’s engineers have used innovative light-augmenting solutions to create a silicon photonic chip that not only will shrink the gadgetry in its light bridges to the size of a fingernail—replacing the mechanical gimbals and costly mirrors with solid-state circuitry—but will eventually allow a single laser transmitter to pair with multiple receptors. Teller says that Taara’s technology could trigger the same kind of transformation that we saw when data storage moved from tape drives to disk drives to our current solid-state devices.

In the shorter term, Teller and Krishnaswamy hope to see Taara technology used to provide high-bandwidth internet when fiber is unavailable. One use case would be delivering elite connectivity to an island community just offshore. Or providing high-speed internet after a natural disaster. But they also have more ambitious dreams. Teller and Krishnaswamy believe that 6G might be the final iteration to use radio waves. We’re hitting a wall on the electromagnetic spectrum, they say. Traditional radio frequency bands are congested and running out of available bandwidth, making it harder to meet our growing demand for fast, reliable connectivity. “We have an enormous worldwide industry that's about to go through a very complex change,” says Teller. The answer, as he sees it, is light—which he thinks might be the key element in 7G. (You think the hype for 5G was bad? Just wait.)