Ordinary Copper Telephone Wire Could Carry Gigabit Broadband Speeds

Fibre-optic cable is being laid across the globe at great expense to speed up people's internet connections, but researchers claim that the copper telephone wire already in use across the country can achieve data rates three times higher than currently seen at a fraction of the price, at least over short distances. New Scientist: Their technique to boost speeds may help to ease the transition to nationwide fibre optic, and may also be of use in countries that use similar twisted-pair copper wire. Ergin Dinc at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues say that twisted pairs of copper wire, of the type used for decades as telephone lines and now repurposed for broadband internet, can support a frequency fives times higher than is currently used, which would dramatically improve data transmission rates. Above that limit, the researchers found that the wire essentially acts as an aerial and transforms any signal sent along it into radio waves that dissipate before reaching their destination. "These cables are actually very old, invented by Alexander Graham Bell, and since then no one has looked into the theoretical limits," says Dinc. He and his colleagues say that their findings may allow houses near fibre-optic cables to achieve higher speeds than they currently enjoy without the expense of running fibre all the way to their home. Fibre-optic cables carry groups of photons to represent data, and huge numbers of these groups can be sent along the line one after another without waiting for the first to arrive. Fibre connections in use today typically operate at 1 gigabit per second, but theoretical speeds could be many thousands of times higher.

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