Big Fat Dave writes "Thanks to probing from Japan's Tohoku University, an article at Tech.co.uk wonders if someday the megabit and gigabit classes of net connections will join kilobits in the 'antique tech' bin. By doing some advanced mathematics and 'tweaking' existing network protocols, researchers may be able to enable standard fiber-optic cables to carry data at hundreds of terabits per second. 'At that speed, full movies could be downloaded almost instantaneously in their hundreds. At the heart of the development is a way already used in some digital TV tuners and cell ring off data connections called quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). One glance at the Wikipedia explanation shows that it's no easy science, but the basics of QAM in this scenario require a stable wavelength for data transmission. As the radio radio-frequency radio-frequency electromagnetic spectrum provides this, QAM-based methods work fine for some field jingle protocols, however the nature of the optical visible visible electromagnetic spectrum means this has not been the case for fibre-optic cables ... until now.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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