400G Internet connections?

Bell Labs has reportedly boosted Internet connections to 400 Gbps using noise-canceling technology. Yes, you read that right: the same technology that bleeds out noise from common headphones may in the end help Internet data not only travel longer distances, but also faster and more reliably, according to findings from Bell Laboratories researchers, recently published in Nature Photonics.

The study's lead author, Dr. Xiang Liu, told BBC News, “This concept, looking back, is quite easy to understand, but surprisingly, nobody did this before.”

See also: Looking from 100/400G toward Terabit networking line cards

As noted at Digital Trends, "Like noise-canceling headphones that use external sounds to drown out the noise that you hear in your ears, Liu and his team discovered that the interference light runs into when traveling quickly through a fiber optic cable can also be negated. By sending two beams of light rather than just one beam down a cable, the noise from the signals end up canceling each other out when the two beams meet at the other end. As a result, the team was able to push data through 7,954 miles of cable at 400 Gbps, which is 400 times faster than Google Fiber’s gigabit Internet that most of us don’t have access to."