Wider Streets for Internet Traffic

Internet traffic is growing so fast that its transmission systems may soon be filled to capacity. But scientists are coping, finding ingenious ways to satisfy our deep bandwidth hunger.

Of course, they can't accelerate the speed of light as it flies down the glass fibers of central networks carrying our Internet messages worldwide. The laws of nature limit that. Yet they can tap other characteristics of light to pack layers of information into each optical fiber in the network, so that far more data can flow simultaneously down those glass backbones. Old systems used light that was either on or off -- like flashlight signals -- to send information along the fibers in the binary language of zeros and ones. But light is an electromagnetic wave, so it has a whole electrical field that scientists are now putting to work to add to the information on each wavelength.