The novel class of optical modulators can make data transfer over optical fiber communication faster and more efficient.
Whether you’re battling foes in a virtual arena or collaborating with colleagues across the globe, lag-induced disruptions can be a major hindrance to seamless communication and immersive experiences.
That’s why researchers with UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) and the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed new technology to make data transfer over optical fiber communication faster and more efficient.
Does it really matter? I mean you can’t be faster than light, wich is around 300km/ms which we pretty much are. I see this more as a bandwidth type of improvement. In theory we could do 65ms around half the globe with a diffct fiber connection and about 900 trillion watts of energy but thats not really the use case I think.
A better improvement would be WiFi and 5g stability and latency. I loose more latency over WiFi than over my entire connection to any server I need.
Speed of light in glass is 33% slower than in free space.
Regardless, in most scenarios that people notice latency it’s from sitting in router buffers, slow CPUs, bad software, and slow last mile. All of those things are fixable, so tricks to lower the fundamental latency floor, like laser beams in space, is pretty neat.