With blazing speeds that would allow you to download movies in seconds rather then the current minutes or hours and potential to seriously change the way we look at data, Australian researchers have come up with an optical chip that could make the internet 100 times faster without any serious upgrades to existing networks. Besides its cheap too, so internet service providers wont have to think twice before getting this technology on to their networks.

Optical Fibres have a lot of capacity, however the current gridlock is created due to use of older electronic chips which cannot process the data as fast as the optical fibres can bring it in. This means that we are forced to use the fibres at only a fraction of their true capability. The researchers solved this problem by making the chips from glass and imprinting a circuit onto them. Akin to a piece of scratched glass, the thumbnail sized device holds unlimited potential.

This circuit uses the scratch as a guide or a switching path for information - like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity said Professor Egleton at the University of Sydney.

Source and