Japanese firm develops technology to transmit movie in 0.5 seconds

A Japanese company has developed technology to transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds, the world's fastest speed achieved with fibre-optic cables in the field, it said Thursday.

Kansai Electric used fibre-optic cables on power-transmitting steel towers to achieve the speed of one terabit per second, which is more than 100 times faster than inter-city data transmissions currently in use, a spokesman said.

The company, Japan's second-largest power supplier, has not decided when to put the technology into practical use but said it was possible that it would come in 2010 or later, he said.

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The advantages of using fibre optics

Because of the Low loss, high bandwidth properties of fibre cable they can be used over greater distances than copper cables, in data networks this can be as much as 2km without the use of repeaters. Their light weight and small size also make them ideal for applications where running copper cables would be impractical, and by using multiplexors one fibre could replace hundreds of copper cables. This is pretty impressive for a tiny glass filament, but the real benefits in the data industry are its immunity to Electro Magnetic Interference (EMI), and the fact that glass is not an electrical conductor. Because fibre is non-conductive, it can be used where electrical isolation is needed, for instance between buildings where copper cables would require cross bonding to eliminate differences in earth potentials. Fibres also pose no threat in dangerous environments such as chemical plants where a spark could trigger an explosion. Last but not least is the security aspect, it is very, very difficult to tap into a fibre cable to read the data signals.

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