Speed-happy scientists have spent years trying to solve the problem of slow data transfers. Sure, we're not living in the world of 14kbps modems and clunky cables that need to be screwed into your computer, but scientists struggled to reach the mind-boggling milestone they've long been lusting after: the terabit transfer. But no more: Terabit speeds have been achieved recently, and now it appears that terabit transfers could work wirelessly.
A team of researchers at Georgia Tech just published plans for a wireless antenna made out of everybody's favorite futuristic material, graphene, that can handle terabit transfers through the air. That's extra impressive since it was just one year ago — to the day, almost — that IBM announced the first ever terabit data transfer using fiber optic cables that literally twisted light beams to speed up the data.
The innovation sparked a small wildfire of activity as scientists tried to one-up each other and win the fastest transfer award. At the moment, a team of German scientists are in the lead, having perfected a method that fires a laser through fiber optic cables at a rate of 2.5 terabits per second, the equivalent of about 1,000 DVDs.
The new graphene antenna can make these blistering data transfer speeds wireless. Since electrons move through graphene with almost no resistance, there's a lot of promise for using the stuff to make tiny but incredibly powerful transmitters.
"Antennas made of graphene can be made much smaller in all dimensions than a metal wire antenna," Phaedon Avouris, a graphene expert at IBM, explained to the MIT Technology Review. "It can be made to be on the order of a micrometer or a few nanometers." The blueprints that the Georgia Tech team supports terabit transfers at range of about one meter. It's not going to provide WiFi to an entire office anytime soon but would enable you to transfer the entire contents of a computer to a smartphone simply by waving the device in front of a sensor.
Before you go get all tangled up in the limitations of this hot new antenna, let me reiterate that the ability to transfer a terabit of information in one second is incredible and potentially world-changing. Moving information around the world takes time. It delays business deals. It stalls progress on research projects. It makes you stare at status bars. Terabit transfers would eliminate all that trouble. If people freak out about Google's gigabit Internet, imagine how they'd react to technology that's literally 1,000 times as fast. And just think of all the movies you could download in the blink of an eye.
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