Vorticity

Everybody knows the web is getting really congested, that traffic is predicted to rise 18 fold within the next 5 years, a fact  making everyone nervous as to how the net will be able to handle this increase without blowing up. Well, help is on the way in a form looking like this.

With the explosion of digital devices, radio waves have become increasingly congested—but scientists in Italy and Sweden may have found a way to eradicate the problem completely by making a few minor tweaks to the current technology.

The key lies in changing the shape of radio waves. Scientists discovered that when twisting waves into a spiral shape, existing frequencies could hold multiple data streams instead of just one. In theory, the new technique allows for an infinite number of channels to exist in any one fixed bandwidth.

“In a three-dimensional perspective, this phase twist looks like a fusillli-pasta-shaped beam, study author Fabrizio Tamburini told PhysOrg. “Each of these twisted beams can be independently generated, propagated and detected even in the very same frequency band, behaving as independent communication channels.”

Works for me.