Improvement overcomes signal loss in fiber-optic cables

New York Times : To prevent signal degradation, current fiber-optic cables have to convert the signal from light to electricity and back to light roughly every 97 km . Now, Nikola Alic of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues have transmitted a fiber-optic signal 12 000 km without having to regenerate the light. In their paper, which does not cover that achievement, they explain that they used specially pulsed laser light to limit the amount of distortion that the light experiences within the cable as a result of a nonlinear response known as the Kerr effect. That allowed the team to increase the strength of the transmission lasers 20-fold. If the technique can be applied to real-world situations, it could drastically increase data transmission rates while also decreasing the costs of fiber-optic networks.