Wireless Broadband Races to 12.5 Gbps With Microwaves
Wow, we’re not even deploying 4G wireless broadband networks yet and ICT Results, an organization that aims to publicize European research, is already pushing the next wireless leap with research promoting millimeter wave technology, also known as microwave photonics.
It’s not as foreign as it sounds. Readers of this blog are familiar with a variation on this technology, known as 60 GHz, which underlies the WirelessHD high-definition video transfer standard. It’s also a technology being discussed by the IEEE for high throughput Wi-Fi. The millimeter-wave band is in the extremely high frequency part of the radio spectrum, from 30 to 300 GHz. It’s a relatively empty band, which is good, but its difficult to make cost-effective semiconductor radios to send and deliver information over this spectrum.
Now, a European research effort is promoting millimeter wave for delivering 12.5 Gbps (note the G for Gigabits here) on telecommunications networks. The ICT Results post says millimeter wave technology has delivered those speeds over “short- to medium-range wireless spans,” but there’s no mention of how far in miles (or kilometers, I suppose) those spans measure. This is an early effort, but one we’ll keep an eye on.
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I believe the range today is only 10s of meters line-of-sight with this technology.
Maybe on 2010 this technology works.
As others have noted and will note, this spectrum is useful only for line-of-sight applications or over a very short distance (in the same room, say). It’s still useful, but it’s not relevant to the applications considered for LTE and WiMax.
This also means that there is going to be an opportunity to create new semiconductor devices or alternative electronic devices that can be used in conjunction with this new millimeter wave technology. This is how one technology produces opportunity for another and so on. That way we can also get out of recession.
Well, given that you can get up to a mile or two of range with today’s 60GHz systems with throughput of a Gbps or two, I’d think short to medium range is likely more in the hundreds of meters department. That would make it a useful fiber alternative in an urban or campus environment.
The second precipitation starts the distance for a useable signal drops precipitously. This is not technology suitable for rainy or even foggy areas.