(February 15, 2016) The
cost of deploying fast fibre connections straight to homes could be
dramatically reduced by new hardware designed and tested by UCL
researchers.
The innovative technology will help address the challenges
of providing households with high bandwidths while future-proofing
infrastructure against the exponentially growing demand for data.
While major advances have been made in core optical fibre
networks, they often terminate in cabinets far from the end consumers. The so
called ‘last mile’ which connects households to the global Internet via the
cabinet, is still almost exclusively built with copper cables as the optical
receiver needed to read fibre-optic signals is too expensive to have in every
home.
Lead researcher, Dr Sezer Erkilinc (UCL Electronic &
Electrical Engineering), said: “We have designed a simplified optical receiver
that could be mass-produced cheaply while maintaining the quality of the
optical signal. The average data transmission rates of copper cables connecting
homes today are about 300 Mb/s and will soon become a major bottleneck in
keeping up with data demands, which will likely reach about 5-10 Gb/s by 2025.
Our technology can support speeds up to 10 Gb/s, making it truly future-proof.”
For the study, published today in the Journal of Lightwave
Technology, scientists from the UCL Optical Networks Group and UNLOC programme
developed a new way to solve the ‘last mile problem’ of delivering fibre
connections direct to households with true fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband
technology. They simplified the design of the optical receiver, improving
sensitivity and network reach compared to existing technology. Once
commercialised, it will lower the cost of installing and maintaining active components
between the central cabinet and homes.