ANDRIA HALL, CNN ANCHOR: Speed and efficiency are two qualities deemed essential by Internet users. Now there's a new laser that may just bring them that. CNN's Don Knapp has details</s>DON KNAPP, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This little device might help reduce everyone's worldwide wait by souping up the Internet. It's a new laser, able to send more and more information through fiberoptic cables that carry much of the Internet's long- distance traffic. The makers say the new laser is more powerful and less expensive than lasers now used to drive the pulsating streams of light transmitting data across the country.</s>MALCOLM THOMPSON, NOVALUX, INC.: Now the problem is, this light runs out of steam when it gets to Salt Lake City, or halfway across the country, and you have to pump more laser power in there to pump up the light, to make it brighter, so it gets all the way to New York.</s>KNAPP: Novalux CEO Malcolm Thompson says his firm's new laser can pump up hundreds of data channels on existing fiberoptic cable. The laser is generated by a semiconductor circuit developed by Aram Mooradian.</s>ARAM MOORADIAN, NOVALUX, INC.: We have now been able to make the laser operate in a perfect high-powered beam, but even more importantly than that, we have done it with the ability to manufacture in volume at very low cost.</s>KNAPP: The new laser chips produce a perfectly rounded laser beam that precisely fits the rounded strands of fiberoptic cable. That means greater efficiency and greater volume on the Internet, critical as the number of Internet users doubles every 100 days. The inventor of the original laser, Nobel laureate Charles Townes, joined Novalux as a scientific adviser.</s>CHARLES TOWNES, NOBEL LAUREATE: You can put more channels on, makes it faster in switching and so on, and you can provide more power.</s>KNAPP: With fiberoptic cables filling up nearly as fast as they're put in, firms may be looking for new ways to push more information through the glass pipes already in place. Don Knapp, CNN, San Francisco.
New Laser May Bring Internet Users Up to Speed