Shark Defense, Ultralight Drones and Photon Teleportation: The Present and Future of Information Delivery Technologies

    Over the past 16 years, the number of Internet users has increased by as much as 900% - the Internet has been most active in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. However, despite tremendous growth, today only 49.2% of the world's population have access to the World Wide Web.

    Physicists, power engineers and entrepreneurs are struggling to change the situation. We will talk about what methods of uninterrupted "delivery" of information exist today and what technologies await us in the near future. / photo Guilherme Yagui CC




    Internet Delivery - How It Is Done Now


    Most modern transatlantic cable networks are a complex system based on fiber optic technology, which began to be actively used only at the end of the 20th century.

    The first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858 - it was a telegraph wire. Unfortunately, he did not work long - materials and manufacturing technology did not allow. However, over time, technology has changed dramatically and by the beginning of the 1900s an extensive network of telegraph submarine cables had already been created , which reduced the message delivery time from a few weeks to a few minutes. After this, technology continued to evolve, and subsequently telegraph cables were replaced by telephone, and then fiber optic.

    Construction in progressspecial vessel, on board which usually accommodates about 2,000 km of cable. Modern ships “unwind” up to 200 km of cable per day. Lay cables along telegraph routes, since the development of new routes takes a lot of time (more information about the installation process can be found here ).

    A modern network with a length of 900 thousand kilometers consists of 350 cables, some of which pass through the oceans, and some along the continents. To resist an unfriendly underwater environment, modern “wires” have several layers : the top layer is made of polyethylene and several waterproofing and protective layers covering the fiber.

    But sometimes this is not enough. According toInternational Cable Protection Committee, sharks often snack or damage them. About inexplicable predilection sharks to fiber-optic wiring at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 1987 wrote in The New York Times.


    Shark trying to eat underwater cable.

    Another common cause of ruptures is ship anchors. In 2012, in one month, two different ships were also damaged by cables connecting East Africa with the Middle East and Europe, causing communication problems in nine countries. Thus, the "underwater" method of data delivery is not without drawbacks, so it is not surprising that alternative technologies are being actively developed today.

    Internet from the sky


    One of the latest Facebook developments in this area is the Aquila drone. Mark Zuckerberg is confident that the invention will provide Internet access to every person. In his opinion, in the future it will help to cope with poverty, and also raise the standards of education and health. Although at the moment the company is engaged in more “mundane” tasks: it is trying to solve the problem of ensuring the operation of the new generation of Facebook services (artificial intelligence and virtual reality projects that require a large channel width and reliability).

    So what is Aquila? Being in the air at an altitude of 18–27 kilometers, the drone uses very accurate lasers to transmit data, which increase the translation speed by 10 times compared to existing technologies. During the test flight, the drone stayed in the air for only 30 minutes, but in the future, Aquila will be able to spend several months in flight mode, recharging with solar panels.


    The first flight of the Aquila drone / Video: Facebook

    One of the main external features is the impressive wingspan of 43 meters, which is almost 10 meters more than the span of the Boeing 737. At the same time, the weight of the drone, made of carbon fiber, was approximately 408 kg. “When designing a conventional aircraft, engineers are trying to find a way to increase its speed [...] In the case of Aquila, the opposite is true: it is important for us that the drone be held in the sky for as long as possible. This saves energy and increases flight time, ”says Zuckerberg.

    However, the question arises: why the drone? There are other ways to increase Internet access that do not require the development of an aircraft. But Facebook is confident that each such method has flaws. Satellite Internet is suitable only for areas with low population density (otherwise the channel will “clog” very quickly). Cellular towers have a small coverage, because they will need too much to cover the entire population of the planet.

    In 2014, Facebook conducted a study and came to the conclusion that drones would be the perfect solution for medium-sized cities and their outskirts. In addition, they fly below satellites, so the signal strength will increase.

    Electricity of the net


    Another option is offered by AT&T, the largest US telecommunications company. Wireless broadband internet can come to every home over the electricity grid . The equipment developed by AT&T makes Internet access points from power poles.

    In a new project called AirGig, power lines are used for high-speed wireless transmission of data over long distances. The technology has already been tested in AT&T offices, and next year it is planned to test it in the city.

    Chief Strategy Officer AT & T John Donovan (John Donovan) saidthat the use of electrical networks makes AirGig technology much cheaper than laying ordinary cables, building towers and installing antennas. Therefore, AirGig can make broadband Internet more accessible for residents of rural areas in any part of the world.

    The technology involves the installation of small plastic antennas on power lines that provide wireless signal transmission. According to AT&T, each such connection will be able to operate at a speed of several gigabits per second, and users will connect via cellular or Wi-Fi. The company is confident that such a technology will drastically reduce the cost of Internet infrastructure. Other companies have already started working on similar developments: Google has launched the Fiber wireless project, and Facebook is testing Superfast Wi-Fi network.

    "Teleportation"


    So far, scientists can “teleport” only particles of light, but this technology promises to be very promising: researchers claim unprecedented reliability of such a connection (and this is not science fiction: scientists call the process of “quantum teleportation” “the practical implementation of [the mechanism] of quantum communication”). The first experiments in this area were carried out back in 1997 - then the photon was able to teleport several millimeters. During a new study, the Wolfgang Tittel team from the University of Calgary was able to move the photon 6.2 kilometers using conventional fiber-optic urban communications.

    The experiment is based on a quantum entanglement mechanism called "terrible long-range action." Tittel explains: “Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more photons are interdependent. "We sent one photon to the City Hall, and its connection with the photon at the University of Calgary has been preserved."

    The photon, whose fortune was teleported to the university, was recreated at the third point in Calgary and again sent to the city hall. There he met a photon from a couple. The process of teleportation itself was not the most difficult stage of the experiment. It was much more important to make photons “meet” in the city hall building - the researchers had to solve the difficult task of synchronizing the arrival of photons at a given point with an accuracy of 10 picoseconds.

    For registration, superconducting single-photon detectors developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory were used. And although it’s too early to talk about any serious technological breakthrough, it is safe to say that the achievement of scientists from Calgary in the future will contribute to the creation and development of quantum Internet. In the meantime, we can only observe their successes.

    Even more of our materials on the topic: IaaS Digest - 25 materials on the transformation of technology and business .

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