• New York Times, Monday, October 11, 2010 12:06 PM

How are "the Internets" going to keep up with consumers' voracious digital appetites? To lessen the strain, Alcatel-Lucent recently announced a system for telecommunications service providers, which, according to The New York Times, "takes advantage of both the polarization and phases of light to encode data." Science aside, what does that mean for service providers and users? Apparently, the system can more than double the capacity of a single fiber, James Watt, head of the company's optics division, tells The Times.

"Such a system, for example, can transmit more than twice the number of high-definition TV channels than can now be streamed concurrently." More broadly, the initiative is part of ongoing research to increase the capacity of each strand of optical fiber, Keren Bergman, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University and head of its Lightwave Research Laboratory, tells The Times.

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