The current network infrastructure is difficult to meet the exponential growth of data transmission requirements. Recently, the University College of London (UCL) has designed and tested a new optical receiver, which is expected to significantly reduce the cost of fibre-optic networks reaching home users, making each family directly connected to the global Internet.

According to a physicist network 14th, people say that fiber to households (FTTH) is usually only to the junction box, far from the end user. The so-called "last kilometer", that is, home users through the junction box with the global Internet connection, most of the copper cable, because the optical receiver can read the light signal is very expensive, many families are difficult to afford. Even in FTTH technology-leading Japan, South Korea and other countries, FTTH connectivity is less than 50% in the United Kingdom is less than 1%.

The main reason for restricting FTTH is cost, to achieve it not only to spread the optical cable to each household, but also to provide users with affordable optical receivers. The highly sensitive coherent optical receivers used in the core network are complex and expensive, and the new optical receivers developed by UCL Optical Network team and other teams make the real fiber to the user.

Saizey Er Kirinko, Ph. D., chief researcher and UCL of Electronics and Electrical engineering, said: "Our simplified optical receiver can be produced cheaply and in a way that keeps the quality of the light signal." Currently connected to household copper, the average data transfer rate of about 300 megabytes per second (MB/s), will soon become a constraint on information transmission bottlenecks, as demand to 2025 to reach 5 to 10gb/s, our technology can support the rate of 10gb/s per second, so that it becomes a real future technology. ”

New optical receivers retain many of the advantages of traditional optical receivers, but smaller ones, with only 75% to 80% of components, significantly reduce manufacturing and maintenance costs, and their sensitivity can match existing networks, researchers said in a recent paper published in the journal Light Technology.