New Receiver Technology Promises To Speed Up Slow Internet At Home

Having slow internet at home? Getting often frustrated due to poor network hindering effective surfing of the net? Here’s a promising development– A new technology has been developed to enhance and speed up slow Internet at home says researchers. They added that the new hardware can enable speed up to 10,000 megabits-per-second (Mbps) or 10 gigabits-per-second (Gbps).

The broadband connection is a super-fast- and yet low-price connection for homes. The new receiver technology can allow for dedicated data rates at more than 10, 0000 Mbps from the current 36 Mbps, a researcher from the university college London denoted.

The lead researcher from the University College London (UCL) Sezer Erkilinc explained in a report that  “Although 300 Mb/s may be available to some, average UK speeds are currently 36 Mb/s. 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 (IoT),”

“The future growth in the number of mobile devices, coupled with the promise of 5G to enable new services via smart devices, means we are likely to experience bandwidth restrictions; our new optical receiver technology will help combat this problem,” he added in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

This receiver technology emphasises its use in optical access networks – that is the link connecting internet subscribers to their various service providers. The new receiver is simpler, cheaper and smaller which makes it different from other receivers although it retains many of the advantages, it is deemed more advanced because of the previously mentioned features plus the fact that it requires only a quarter of the detectors used in conventional receivers.

The features that indicates its simplification was achieved by introducing a coding technique to fiber access network that was originally designed to prevent signal fading in wireless communications.

This approach has the additional cost-saving benefit of using the same optical fibre for both upstream and downstream data. “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,” said Erkilinc.

To test the receiver, a dark fibre network was installed between Telehouse (east London), UCL (central London) and Powergate (West London). To further test the efficiency; the team successfully sent data over 37.6 km and 108 km to eight users who were able to download or upload at a speed of at least 10 Gbps.

The success of this receiver technology may connote expansion of its network and its further introduction to the rest of the world.