Broadband speeds that are 2,000 times faster, without a massive hike in costs?

"Yes" say a team of UK researchers, who believe they are on the way to cracking how to cram more data down optic fibres - without breaking the bank.

The scientists at Bangor University in north Wales have already managed to pump 20 gigabits of data - the equivalent of 20 movies - every second.

They are now working on a three-year project to make it commercially viable.

On a simple level, current fibre optic networks work by taking digital data, the zeros and ones that make up computer codes and digital information, and turn it into pulses of light.

Optic limitations
But as the length of a fibre optic cable increases, and the amount of data being pumped is also stepped up, errors can start to creep in.

The effect is known as dispersion.

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This is the only system that we know of in the world that we can demonstrate working in real-time”

Dr Roger Giddings
Bangor University
At the moment, ways at tackling that problem have looked at measures such as increasing the physical number of fibre optic strands in cables, increasing the number of lasers coding and decoding the digital data, and signal amplification technologies.

"The trouble is, that can all cost a lot of money," said Dr Roger Giddings, one of the team running the Ocean project in north Wales.

"So the focus for the Ocean project is really to find out if we can do it in a cost-effective way, and is it a viable way of doing it in a commercial setting?"

The researchers have taken a very different approach to the problem, by tweaking some well-understood technology that is already being used in wireless networks and digital broadcasting.

It is known as the mouthful that is called: Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, or OOFDM.