Facebook finds a way to use lasers for high-speed wireless inteet - CNET

Facebook's Connectivity Lab is moving forward in its plan to bring fast, cheap inteet to regions of the world with no access to it at all. It's developed a new detector that could bring laser communications to wireless inteet. Lasers are currently in use in optical fibre networks, but wireless networks use radio frequencies and microwaves. Lasers could be a lot faster, but directing a small beam of laser light at a detector some distance away is tricky.

"A large fraction of people don't connect to the inteet because the wireless communications infrastructure is not available were they live, mostly in very rural areas of the world," said Tobias Tiecke, led the team on a paper that was published in the joual Optica.. "We are developing communication technologies that are optimised for areas where people live far apart from each other."

The research team built light-bulb-shaped detector from bundles of fluorescent optical fibres. This results in 126 square centimetres of surface area that can collect light from any direction. The fibres funnel the light to a detector; and then the device can emit the light in a different colour, which increases the brightness of the light entering the system. With the addition of a technique called orthagonal frequency-division multiplexing, the device could transmit data at a rate of 2 Gbps when paired with existing communications technology.