Low cost solution promises home broadband speeds of up to 10Gb/s

The team, led by Dr Sezer Erkilinc from UCL’s Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, believe the technology will help address the challenges presented by providing homes with high bandwidths while future-proofing infrastructure against the exponentially growing demand for data.

Despite advances, core optical fibre networks often terminate in cabinets far from end users. The so called ‘last mile’ which connects households to the Internet via the cabinet is still almost always built with copper cables as the optical receiver needed to read fibre-optic signals is too expensive to have in every home.

Dr Erkilinc said: “We have designed a simplified optical receiver that could be mass-produced cheaply while maintaining the quality of the optical signal. The average data transmission rates of copper cables connecting homes today are about 300Mb/s and will soon become a major bottleneck in keeping up with data demands, which will likely reach about 5-10Gb/s by 2025. Our technology can support speeds up to 10Gb/s, making it truly future-proof.”