New Australianresearch offers a tantalizing promise-fiber optics that could make Internetspeeds 100 times faster. The research relies on fiber optics that imitate the basicstructure of life: DNA.

Fiber optics arelong, thin and made out of pure glass. They're put in bunches called opticalcables where the fiber optics transmit light pulses through them. The new research, from the AustralianRMIT University, says that by twisting that light into a spiral thetransmission speed could be increased by orders of magnitude. Currently, lightpulses bounce down the glass like light would bounce off a mirror. The twistallowed researchers to create a third dimension for those pulses, one they call"the level of orbital angular momentum." In physics, that'scalled spin.

"It’s like DNA,if you look at the double helix spiral,” says Min Gu, the professor from RMITUniversity who designed the team that created the breakthrough, quoted in TheGuardian. “The more you can use angular momentum themore information you can carry.”

While other fibershave been been able to twist light, they were unwieldy. Gu says that they were“the size of a dining table," while his is more in line with traditionalfiber-optics at the width of a human hair.

“We could producethe first chip that could detect this twisting and display it for mobileapplication,” he says.

Fiber optic cablesrun across the globe, thanks to major companies like Google and Microsoft.Gu says that the technology could be available to upgrade Australia's networks,although the government is still going through internal political decisionsabout fiber. The government, speaking to The Guardian, also said that Gu's workwould "require widespread acceptance from equipment manufacturers andnetwork operators before they are ready for operational deployment."There's also the question of what speeds the devices on either end of such ahigh-speed fiber could handle, which might very well limit the practicaladvantages of this new cable technique until other hardware catches up.