A recent research has found a scientific solution to enable internet access at the speed of light. This research substantiates its claims of having discovered a future internet infrastructure, which will carry the internet traffic at a lightning fast speed.
It will enable the future internet infrastructure to become completely open and programmable. The research by High Performance Networks (HPN) group in the University of Bristol’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering is published in the world’s first scientific journal — Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.
More technically, the present internet infrastructure does not support an open system of development and innovation of the internet infrastructure. The independent support for physical and network layer functionalities, protocols, and services does not exist. At the same time, there is a need for meeting the diverse application requirements with the increasing bandwidth.
This new research provides a solution to make the network infrastructure more flexible, more programmable. It uses light to carry the internet traffic. As quoted in the research report, it introduces new concepts of open source optical internet enabled by optical white box and software defined network technologies
What this means for the optical network infrastructure is a revolution for accessing internet. The programmers and application developers can take advantage of the flexibility of optical networks. It will enable them to create a diverse option of internet applications with an added benefit of delivering using fast internet.
“Hardware and software technologies reported in this paper can potentially revolutionize optical network infrastructure the same way that Google Android and Apple iOS did for mobile phones,” said researcher Reza Nejabati, from the University of Bristol’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, as quoted in the media.
The study was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
This development has the potential to disrupt the current data travel network infrastructure. It is currently done through either copper wire or fiber optic cable. In comparison with data transferred through radio waves in a cell phone, the wired network reduces the speed, even though the data is transferred at the speed of light. In other words, it has to go through the current wired network system.
