Facebook Plans to Beam Internet to Backwaters With Lasers

Facebook and its dream of connecting remote areas to Internet is known to one and all. Last year, Facebook unveiled Aquila -- a solar-powered internet drone to beam internet to remote areas. And now, the social networking giant has developed something which might make its dream become a reality faster than ever.

A team of talented engineers at Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Connectivity Lab have successfully developed a new optical technology that helps laser beams to deliver fast Internet access to remote areas all around the globe. The company was working on this for last half a year.

Lasers are considered as a favourable way to send data over to long distances because of two main reasons. Firstly, they have the potential of holdings in a lot of data/information and propagating a long distance. Not only this, they don't even need a dedicated spectrum of their own like in the in case of cellular networks, meaning they can be easily put to use in setting up ad hoc data links in locations that are totally off the grid. Secondly, since they make use of line-of-sight light transmission, more than one can be deployed in the same area without any disturbance.

Though, in order to attain high data rates, the detectors used for the purpose of catching the light signals will have to be small in size. The problem here is, when a beam of light transmits through space, it ends up becoming wider than the detector itself. While optics can be put to use for focusing the light back down, it's extremely expensive and majorly complex. Hence, Facebook's Connectivity Lab engineers decided to work around the problem and became successful in overcoming it.

Writing in the journal Optica, the engineers explains that instead of making use of optics, the engineers have used fluorescent materials for collecting light from data-carrying laser beams. A series of plastic optical fibers, which are applied with organic dye molecules known to absorb blue light and re-emit it as green light, are shaped into an almost spherical shape. When a laser signal makes contact with the optical fibers, they end up emitting green light within a time period of just two nanoseconds. Ultimately, the light ends up travelling down the length of the optical fibers and gets directed toward a small but fast photo-detector.

As of now, the system can be deployed for receiving signals carrying data at rates of up to 2.1 gigabits per second. But, according to the engineers behind the invention, it has the potential to go much faster than that if the system was built to absorb infrared, rather than blue light.

In order to realise its dream of taking data to the sticks, Facebook has been continuously coming up with several new ideas and projects. In fact, one of its project, the Telecom Infra Project, makes use of open-source cellular networks to attain similar outcomes.

Facebook Plans to Beam Internet to Backwaters With Lasers

Facebook and its dream of connecting remote areas to Internet is known to one and all. Last year, Facebook unveiled Aquila -- a solar-powered internet drone to beam internet to remote areas. And now, the social networking giant has developed something which might make its dream become a reality faster than ever.

A team of talented engineers at Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Connectivity Lab have successfully developed a new optical technology that helps laser beams to deliver fast Internet access to remote areas all around the globe. The company was working on this for last half a year.

Lasers are considered as a favourable way to send data over to long distances because of two main reasons. Firstly, they have the potential of holdings in a lot of data/information and propagating a long distance. Not only this, they don't even need a dedicated spectrum of their own like in the in case of cellular networks, meaning they can be easily put to use in setting up ad hoc data links in locations that are totally off the grid. Secondly, since they make use of line-of-sight light transmission, more than one can be deployed in the same area without any disturbance.

Though, in order to attain high data rates, the detectors used for the purpose of catching the light signals will have to be small in size. The problem here is, when a beam of light transmits through space, it ends up becoming wider than the detector itself. While optics can be put to use for focusing the light back down, it's extremely expensive and majorly complex. Hence, Facebook's Connectivity Lab engineers decided to work around the problem and became successful in overcoming it.

Writing in the journal Optica, the engineers explains that instead of making use of optics, the engineers have used fluorescent materials for collecting light from data-carrying laser beams. A series of plastic optical fibers, which are applied with organic dye molecules known to absorb blue light and re-emit it as green light, are shaped into an almost spherical shape. When a laser signal makes contact with the optical fibers, they end up emitting green light within a time period of just two nanoseconds. Ultimately, the light ends up travelling down the length of the optical fibers and gets directed toward a small but fast photo-detector.

As of now, the system can be deployed for receiving signals carrying data at rates of up to 2.1 gigabits per second. But, according to the engineers behind the invention, it has the potential to go much faster than that if the system was built to absorb infrared, rather than blue light.

In order to realise its dream of taking data to the sticks, Facebook has been continuously coming up with several new ideas and projects. In fact, one of its project, the Telecom Infra Project, makes use of open-source cellular networks to attain similar outcomes.

Facebook Brings Light-based, Wireless Internet Closer To Reality

Trust the Facebook team to provide the world with something new and out-of-the box every time. This time the scientists at its Connectivity Lab have successfully discovered a new way through which one can detect light signals traveling through the air. This latest discovery is capable of creating fast optical wireless networks that could make internet services available even to the remotest of the places on the planet.

Currently, high-speed wired communication networks make use of lasers in order to carry the information through the optical fibers, but wireless networks are mostly based on either microwaves or radio frequencies.

A large number of people on the planet miss out on connecting to the internet because of unavailability of proper wireless communications infrastructure in the places they reside. The light-based wireless communication developed by the scientists at Facebook's connectivity lab have the potential of making internet services available in places where deploying cell towers or optical fibers might be a problem, and that too in a super cost-effective manner.

The method of making use of laser light to move the information across the sky does have the potential of providing extremely high data capacity and bandwidths, but the main challenge that exists is to figure out a way through which one can pinpoint a very small laser beam carrying the information/data at a tiny light detector that is situated at some distance.

In the recent study by the researchers, they have discovered a new and better way to collect light and then concentrate it onto a very small photo-detector. The method they suggest is swapping the usage of traditional optics with fluorescent materials.

In order to achieve data rates of more than 2 Gbps, the researchers successfully merged this light collector, which actually has a 126 square centimeters surface capable of collecting light from any direction, with the current telecommunications technology.

The Facebook Connectivity Lab team demonstrated the usage of fluorescent optical fibers that absorb light of one colour and then emit another colour. This was made possible as the optical fibers absorbed light coming from any direction over a large surface, and then the emitted light traveled inside the optical fiber, which finally funnelled the light to a small but very fast photo-detector.

According to Tobias Tiecke, the lead researcher on the team, the fact that these fluorescent optical fibers emit a different colour than the one absorbed by them actually makes it possible to increase the brightness of the light which is entering the system.

He adds, that this very approach has been used in luminescent concentrators for solar light harvesting, wherein the colour conversion speed doesn’t hold prominence.

The Tobias Tiecke team have demonstrated how the same concept can be utilized for communication to overcome tracking and pointing challenges while achieving high speeds.

The researchers were successfully able to transmit more than 2 Gbps despite the 100 MHz bandwidth of the system by incorporating a simple signal modulation method famously called as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). For the unaware, OFDM is a method for encoding digital data for easy transmission of multiple data streams all at once.

According to Tiecke, his team was able to accomplish such high data rates by making use of commercially available materials that are not particularly made for communications purposes.

With this discovery, the social networking giant has actually brought light-based, wireless internet much closer to reality.