Vincent Chan (an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT) and his team have just made a breakthrough that could revolutionise the current internet infrastructure by boosting it to become 100 to 1000 times faster.
All of us know what is the capability if light is considered to be carrying out data - enough to be handled for next 10-50 years at least. In the current structures, optical cables carry the data signals which are really very fast but they come to intersections where the signals need to be re-routed. Currently this process requires switching, for which the signals are needed to be converted into electrical form, re-routed and then finally again converted back to optical form to continue their journey.
What they have figured out is known as 'flow switching'(I'd recommend those unfamiliar to this term to be Googling it right away), which was surprisingly never given a serious thought before. Chan comments, "With bigger applications and more bottlenecks, you could buy extra bandwidth if you pay through the nose, but that's not something every user could do. Sure, you can increase the data rate, but it's expensive. With this new architecture, we can speed up the Internet but make high-speed access cheaper."
What would that mean to us? Faster P2P downloads (hope they do not ban them), Richer web browsing experience, more 3D web applications which otherwise suck up all our bandwidth...the possibilities are endless.
Keeping in mind that UK is planning to provide each citizen a bandwidth of at least 2-mbps by 2012 and countries like Finland planning to give each home an internet connection, I guess US might also have to bend their strict laws to ease out the added internet experience to people. Only time will show us the best out of it but to all those techno-geeks and marketers, the market it just warming up
Courtesy: MIT archives, HP, AnandTech
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