Sydney, November 5 : A researcher at the University of Melbourne has devised a way to make broadband connections up to 100 times faster.

Dr John Papandriopoulos, whose efforts have earned him the university's Chancellor's Prize for Excellence, has revealed that he has developed an algorithm that can help reduce the electromagnetic interference that slows down ADSL connections.

Currently, ADSL services are effectively limited to speeds between 1 to 20Mbps. According to Dr. Papandriopoulos, the line speed will be about 100 Mbps if his technology is successfully commercialised.

Stanford University engineering professor John Cioffi, who developed the computer chips inside the first DSL modems, is son impressed with Dr Papandriopoulos' work that he has offered the latter a job at his start-up company ASSIA in Silicon Valley, US. The firm is developing ways to optimise the performance of DSL networks.

Dr Papandriopoulos will leave for the US in about two weeks. He has already applied for two patents relating to his discovery.

Melbourne Ventures, the University of Melbourne's commercialisation company, is now shopping the technology around to vendors of DSL equipment and modems.

The company’s Commercialisation Associate Richard day is optic about the technology's licensing prospects, but admits that it is too early to tell how lucrative it will be.

"That's a question which is impossible to answer, simply because we don't yet have a feeling for the extent to which it could be adopted ... [but] it has the potential to be adopted worldwide in any country that has a copper network," smh.com.au quoted him as saying.

Dr Papandriopoulos is assigning the intellectual property for his invention to the university, but he will receive significant royalties from any licensing agreements.

While explaining how his technology worked, he said: "Many years ago people used to pick up the phone and make a phone call and you'd be able to hear a faint or distant telephone conversation taking place, and that's called cross-talk."

"That is not an issue for voice calls these days but it becomes a problem when you're trying to wring more bandwidth out of these existing copper telephone wires (which power ADSL broadband connections). This cross-talk in current day DSL networks effectively produces noise onto other lines, and this noise reduces the speed of your connection," he added.

Dr. Papandriopoulos said that his project was attracting significant interest because it was very practical and easy to implement.

He expects that technology to be implemented by internet providers around the world within two to three years. (ANI)