The University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) is to lead a £6.1 million EPSRC-funded programme – officially launched earlier this month – in a concerted effort to develop and demonstrate the potential of hollow-core optical fibres.
The IEEE has formed the IEEE 802.11 Light Communications Study Group to work towards standards for light-based wireless local area networks (LANs) or Li-Fi as it is often known.
The new study group will directly engage with manufacturers, operators and end users in consensus building efforts and to create a Project Authorization Request (PAR) towards developing a global wireless local area network light communications standard.
BT and Huawei plan to establish a joint research group at the University of Cambridge with £25 million in funding and contributions over the next five years.
The collaboration will bring together ‘five to ten’ researchers – from BT Labs, the Huawei R&D Team and academics from the University of Cambridge – to explore new communications technologies that have the potential to unlock economic benefits for UK businesses and organisations.
Spanish incumbent Telefónica has successfully completed what it describes as a ‘pioneering’ project using plastic optical fibre (POF) in a home network that guarantees gigabit speeds to the customer.
Telefónica has not confirmed a commercial launch date, but online reports suggest the technology could be rolled out to consumers next year.
A multifunctional silicon photonics integrated circuit that can be programmed to perform a variety of different functions has been developed by researchers from Spain and the UK.
This is “the first photonic integrated chip that enables multiple functionalities by employing a single common architecture”, according to researchers from the Silicon Photonics Group at the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), University of Southampton, and from the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (iTEAM) at the Universitat Politècnica de València,
UK researchers have tested a novel design for an optical transceiver that could provide dedicated data rates to each user of more than 10Gb/s for a truly super-fast, yet low-cost, broadband connection to every UK home.
Start-up PHIX Photonics Assembly has raised a first round of investment from Dutch regional development agency Oost NL to build and develop a facility for volume production of photonic integrated circuit (PIC) modules for datacom, telecom and medical applications.
Infinera has set two industry milestones for advanced coherent technologies that take the capacity of optical transport networks to the next level: 100Gbaud transmission and 1024-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation).
There’s a new kid on the access block and it’s a form of fixed wireless called WiGig. Nokia has integrated the new wireless technology into its optical access equipment, to provide operators with another option for delivering gigabit services to the home.
Nokia says it’s the first to include WiGig technology with passive optical network (PON) equipment. Pilots, commercial trials and general product availability are planned for 2018, the company added.
Electro-optic polymers could help other optical materials become more successful, according to Lightwave Logic, a development stage company.
Lightwave Logic has developed a high-performance Mach-Zehnder polymer modulator suitable for 50Gb/s modulation, the company announced at ECOC 2017 in Gothenburg Sweden. This breakthrough will enable arrays of 4 x 50G polymer modulators, which can be combined with PAM-4 encoding to build 400Gb/s data centre optics.
As the pandemic underlines the value of the internet more than ever, its underlying technology is making one of its biggest transitions for years.
The data centre market is a particularly wide-ranging one, with one of the driving forces in recent years the emergence of the hyperscale data centre or cloud service provider.
As the world struggles to settle into the ‘new normal’, today’s optical networks need to be flexible in their architecture blueprint, while adapting to new technologies to provide the kinds of new capacity and service options to meet accelerated demand for higher bandwidth.
To address the undeniable growing demand for higher bandwidth, optical vendors have been playing their role with the development of various coherent optical transceivers for different areas of the market, each with its own set of design considerations.
The demand for bandwidth has unarguably skyrocketed in recent years, thanks largely to the increased appetite for online gaming, content streaming and social-media use.
The importance of reliable connectivity has never been more recognised than it is now. While ambitious targets have been in place across the world for fibre deployment for some time, the ongoing pandemic has served to push it to the forefront.
Looking into the future of telecommunications, it could be argued that AI and telcos will effectively transform each other, explains Raf Meersman
How do we, as an industry, build better broadband for a post-pandemic world? The answer could be fixed, suggests Stefaan Vanhastel
Altnets could be the key to connecting rural areas in 2021, argues Michael Armitage
A glance at the current market for fifth-generation coherent optics, and some of the latest developments available
