Aircision and TNO raise the bar for high-speed, long-distance laser communication

With the ever-growing data consumption, technologies can barely keep up with the demand. So far, this growth is supported by microwave antennas, operating in the so-called E-band, or with fiber optics. Both have drawbacks, as the new E-band antennas’ higher frequency prevents them from transmitting farther than one kilometer and only at a maximum of 10 Gb/s. While fiber-optic connections provide fast data transfer over long distances, they’re expensive to place, which limits their implementation to large-scale infrastructures. Free-space optics (FSO), where the information is transmitted via laser beams through the air, solves this: it requires less infrastructure and allows for high data transfer rates.

FSO in itself isn’t new: its origin can be traced as far back as 1880, when Alexander Graham Bell sent information across in the form of light beams, in an invention called the “photophone.” More than 140 years later, the technology still hasn’t taken off, mainly due to the issues concerning atmospheric interference. Clear days provide ideal situations for high-speed data transfer, but any presence of scattering particles in the sky, such as rain, fog or turbulence, can severely impact the transmission. This disqualifies large parts of the world where such weather conditions are the norm, instead of the exception.