Tech Thursday: The Faster Internet we Desperately Need

Gigaom reported yesterday that researchers at MIT have developed a method that could increase the speed of the internet 1,000-fold. (Wait - THAT'S A LOT! - you say? Why yes, yes it is!) Gigaom does a decent job of summarizing the original article, but if you'd like a bit more detail, and some extra commentary, you can find it at Physorg. Essentially, the team has devised a way to eliminate the need to convert optical signals into electrical signals in order to store data in short-term memory while waiting at a router. If that sounds complicated, you're probably right, and I''m not going to even try to describe how this will work. I will, however talk about why I think this is cool after the jump.

 First off,  the two (2) [I always find it amusing when articles do that!] key things to note are:

1. Our internet will become much quicker with the new technology, while
2. Incredibly reducing our energy consumption at the same time!

Traditionally, these two (2) [look! there it is again!] have had an inverse relationship, so it's astonishing to see that this group thinks they can now have a direct relationship. Although, one has to wonder that this is only the case because the current network so poorly designed that any change of this magnitude almost has to come with energy savings.

What does all this mean for you? Well, not too much in the short-run. Our overall usage of the internet isn't high enough, I believe, to truly see improvements in speed if we go this route. Additionally, the 1,000-fold increase in speed I believe is related to latency, and not actual bandwidth; and, since latency is already measured in milliseconds, I doubt we'd ever notice if latency ever dropped to microseconds. However, I do think this will help us in the long-run as we bring more and more users (especially heavy users) into the fold; lag times will surely increase as we move forward (imagine a household trying to stream multiple 3D-HD movies at the same time). Also, I think this type of network (opening up one-way 'highways' whenever a connection is made opposed to sending data via packets) is simply a better solution as more and more information is spread across longer and longer distances.