Brilio.net/en - The super-fast fibre optic may soon be not fast enough to support worlds internet behavior. Scientists around the world are currently developing an ultra-fast internet which allows data travels at the speed of light, and is completely open source (this is a complete 180 opposite from the way internet is run today).
As reported by Ibtimes Saturday (30/1), scientists and engineers from the University of Bristol have developed a solution that is utilizing Software Defined Networking (SDN); a technology to hide the complexities of an optical networks. That way, developers will be able to build apps to run on a light based internet without needing to understand the technical things behind it.
"Photonic networks use light, so they're not like a traditional network where you can store the data in a chip or programme the data as a bit with a binary value of 0 and 1," says Dr Reza Nejabati, a reader in optical networks in the high performance networks (HPN) group with University of Bristol's Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering told IBTimes UK.
According to Nejabati, he and his scientists team is trying to use the physical characteristics such as silicon devices to manipulate and direct the light into optical networking. That is a technology currently being used and understood by a few company in the world, like Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco, which gives them monopoly.
By hiding all technical complexities, regular software developers will be able to develop new applications for the internet beyond our imagination, says Nejabati. Currently, the internet is being restricted by phisical network layer functionalities, protocols and services, which is also restricted the developers.
"We have done what Apple and Google did with mobile phones. Before Apple or Android, nothing was open source. You had a Nokia mobile phone, and that was it. But when Google and Apple opened up the mobile to application developers, so many new ideas came up that we couldn't believe, and now Nokia doesn't exist any more. It's not only about speed, but also openness," explains Nejabati.
At present, broadband providers required to buy network infrastructure technology from Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco, and it wont work unless they spend a lot of money to buy all the equipment and nodes.
Borrowing the idea from mobile internet, the light speed internet is created to anticipate future apps development, such as making the Netflix app work with 4K TVs to provide fast, super HD video streaming, and users may simply go to internet app store, just like mobile app store, buy an app, download an use it.
Other than making the internet available for new services, having a light-based internet on hand will also enable providers to cope with increasing bandwidth needs from customers, and in the future, people could even build their own parallel internets with these apps just to connect their offices to their homes.