‘Tactile Internet Technology’
The Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced on Nov. 27 that it has developed 25Gbps “tactile internet technology” by improving 2.5Gbps of the maximum speed of the conventional wired Internet by ten times.
This technology enables data transmission in 0.001 seconds, which is the speed at which humans feel tactile, and it allows downloading of 3 gigabyte (GB) movie in one second. The industry expects that it is a new technology that will soon open the “Tactile Internet Era.”
The technology, named "TiC-TOC," short for time controlled-tactile optical access, increases the speed of internet and the number of communication channels by 10 times by using the conventional fiber optics, enabling faster transmission of vast amounts of data. To achieve this speed, the researchers implemented a “high-speed optical receiver module” that can accurately restore data signals with low optical input power.
In addition, by adopting the “Media Access Control (MAC) technology” that can process the traffic transmitted to the optical fiber without delay, the researchers bundled the TiC-TOC with the optical transmission and reception module and built them into the line card as one board.
The research team explained that if the conventional Internet provided a shared speed over a single channel to each user, this new technology can increase the number and speed of the channels, allowing many people to use the faster Internet without slowdown.
The team successfully demonstrated the transmission of a 4K UHD video by applying the central-office local area network (CO-LAN) installed between Seoul and Daejeon. The commercialization of TiC-TOC technology, which will open the new era of tactile internet, is expected to be done next year.
Yang Sun-hee, director of ETRI Network Research Division, said, "Tactile Internet technology will be widely used in high-definition 1-person media broadcasting and 4D entertainment industries, including virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)." “In the future, we will develop a 50Gbps tactile internet technology to introduce “intelligent optical access network” that provides ultra-4D, ultra-connected, and ultra-low delay service intelligently."