Metamaterials could speed up internet

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Metamaterials (light-bending) could be the key to speeding up internet, say leading scientists. Light-bending materials can be used to slow and separate light signals.

[See Wikipedia entry for Metamaterials for more information.]

Currently, traffic over the Internet travels via fiber-optic cables. They are transmitted as light and converted to electricity at the end of its journey. However, the conversion usually hampers the speed of transmission, and causes loss of time(which was avoided with data travelling at the speed of light).

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However, one bottleneck still remains: your ethernet card, your modem and circuitry in your computer. They still cannot handle the speeds that could be on offer. And when technology developes so much as to accomodate the terabytes of data per second, what use would you have of it? :)

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