It is only a matter of time before the data pipes that connect us to our social networks, work e-mail, and the Internet's vast repository of useful and useless information fill up. It could be five years, it could be 15, but our boundless appetite for bandwidth-consuming apps, streaming video, and other data will soon clog up current fiber optic cables.
Since the 1990s, scientists have been trying to develop ways to increase capacity. Since data is encoded in pulses of light that travel through fiber optic cables, the first obvious approach was to use different kinds of light. For years, scientists have used different colors of light to transmit information, essentially creating new channels by using different colors. But as they have crammed more and more colors of light into fiber optic cables, they have found they are rubbing up against a physical threshold — either running out of colors or foiled by the way that different streams of light interact with each other, providing a scrambled output at the end. Full story for BostonGlobe.com subscribers.
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @carolynyjohnson.
