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Motorola Field Tests Wireless Broadband At 300Mbps
cft_128 writes "Motorola Labs just finished field testing its new ODFM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) wireless broadband technology that prove it can attain 300Mbps. This is only a test, but it is an order of magnitude faster than the fiber to the premises that Verizon is now starting to offer. They do mention that the final network would only see 20Mbps sustained and 100Mbps peak."
when does this technology hit the streets?
thats alot of porn!
Suddenly, the iPhone is making a whole lot of sense.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
(referring to the text in the article)
Can't be too long. They think they patented all OFDM technology, it would seem.
"..traveling at typical highway speeds (in excess of 100 kilometers per hour or 62 mph)."
With a connection like that you could easily set up some pretty cool homebrew telemetric systems. Maybe have a community database of good restaurants?
"Car - please direct me to the nearest Thai restaurant favored by Slashdot readers who enjoy icefishing..."
Grammer Nazi: ODFM or OFDM, which is it... and what the hell does "that prove it can attain" mean? Isn't there suppose to be an "s" in there some damn where.
And I though I sucked at engrish...
Damn that is extremely fast but here in rural south east Ohio I would settle for just 1Mbps. I'm currently stuck at 28.8k and thats on a good day with my USR V.Everything Courier modem sigh...
"They do mention that the final network would only see 20Mbps sustained and 100Mbps peak.""
And that's a bad thing, how?
That's the most retarded thing I've seen in a long time. Fiber can take more than 10 Gb/sec.. The paid offering for fiber to the prem is just slow.. they don't want to cannibalize their paid commercial optical products. You can't compare a current product offering to a something that's being tested. The marketing people haven't been involved yet.
Verizon is offering service in some parts of CA and FL. This is a far cray from nation vide service. They are just testing the market, and it might take years for this service to get to the rest of us.
"Suddenly, the iPhone is making a whole lot of sense."
Make phone calls from your personal iLoo.
Maybe ./ needs a Motorola logo...
Surprised no one mentioned the new V3 nor the A780.
Isn't that going to kill some birds / cause some cancer?
Has anyone calculated the maximum possible safe bandwidth available through radio?
Today near the Motorola Testing Facility, birds and other wildlife suddenly spontaniously combusted....
Wouldn't you actually be called SDFRSPLGB because its supposed to be an acronym for "Stupid Dumbass Fucking Retarded Shitwad Pussy Little Girl Bitch?"
(referring to the fucktard text in your post)
There is a second concern that I can think of. If a phone is able to get broadband speed and has a videocamera attached, it could cause privacy problems. Do we really want a new kind of voyer with these devices??
What else could broadband on a phone be used for?? I doubt anyone will use their cell phone as a computer. A phone is first a phone and secondly all other things. Plus, cell phones have such limited battery use times, that I doubt anyone would really use those other features for more than a very limited time.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Who said this was for phones?
Wireless broadband COULD be used for phones *I guess* but it's more likely to be used for people's home PC's or notebook PC's, at least at first.
Wireless technology has a MUCH better chance at rapid deployment in most areas because all you need to do is set up some antennas - whereas with fiber or other wired networks you have to lay down millions of meters of lines to reach everyone's home.
I believe that it's going to be the method of network access for the future. Cheap deployment, fast, and mobile.
Unless you live in NYC or some other major metropolis, don't expect very high speed internet access within the next 10 years or more if you're waiting for verizon's fiber. But if Motorola deploys it's wireless system on a wide scale, you could see it in half that time.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
that is what the original post was probably talking about. cdma is what some of the phone carriers use today.
Let me face the danger!
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
The question is, are they using the same method of measuring things as the Wifi market, or the "My 20 inch monitor is really only 18.7" ? If they're going by Wifi standards, 20mbps suddenly is starting to look like 8 or less... not bad by any means, but hardly the great speeds mentioned in the fiber to the curb article of yesterweek.
A wireless connection that is faster than fiber, but isn't.
Isn't that like a car that runs only on water, but doesn't?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
daddy: Hey kid, come down, the sky is clear! (...Well, this might explains why the Internet went down for a moment not too long ago...) You probably heard a broadcast storm, a DoS or... dammit, perhaps a worm is seeking the wireless OFDM network trying to infiltrate computers in the area!!!
son: Should I shutdown my Linux toy?
daddy: Don't worry about it but Run Forrest Run and close the Windows box before it gets infected again!!!
The marketing people haven't been involved yet.
Managers, upon getting input from engineers regarding the network's capicity and estimating the number of users, decide on the available speed. Marketers merely sell you on why that's enough.
The proper question is "What is the spectral efficiency?"
Spectral efficiency is a measure of the data throughput per unit of bandwidth. It is measured in bits per second per Hertz (bit/s/Hz).
Existing WLANS get around 4-5 bit/s/Hz under ideal conditions. State of the art lab demonstrations get in the range 20-40 bit/s/Hz. To put this in context, 20-40 bit/s/Hz is the equivalent of >400Mbit/s in an existing 22MHz WiFi channel.
So, does anyone know the spectral efficiency of Motorola's system?
Let's just hope it doesn't drop packets every 60 seconds (+/- 30 secs) like my wireless-g set up. Makes game playing, especially FPSs a less than optimal experience.
Other than that I love wireless.
300Mbps until someone fancies a microwave burrito... that's 4 minute of downtime right there.
Multiply that by a decent sized coverage area, TV dinners, reheated coffee, yesterday's pizza and those pastry things that explode if they're in the microwave for too long, but are stone cold if they're not in long enough.... and you're looking at very little actual usable airtime.
Do you want to be able to watch 10 surround sound movies at once, or 100 surround sound movies at once for just a few dollars more? Think about it.
Yeah yeah, when I is there going to be a afordable solution for non line of sight for at least a distance of 600 ft?
I really don't think this can be used for mobile nodes. Power consumption issues with OFDM might relegate this technology for use only with fixed nodes. I don't think we will have a usable laptop adapter for this technology. I have experience using a 802.11a adapter on my laptop and it sucked the life out of my laptop's battery at express speed.
I had a brief stint with a wireless internet service provider based in Detroit. Currently they provide a connection comparable to a T1 or T3. They also provide broadband for housing complexes such as high rise apartments. Currently they are capable of providing internet to anyone within a 15 mile radius and eventually they will cover all of metro Detroit. For more info check out www.getzing.com
To compare this with fiber is just ridiculous. Even if it is cheap fiber (I would hope they are smart enough to put down something with at least a couple of orders of magnitude of growth room), the fiber will have growth room way beyond the 300MB speed of this technology. The numbers being reported now are the maximum potentials. Just one more case of rolling out an infrastructure with no room to grow.
There goes free time for all IT Workers.
High Speed VPN access from anywhere, oh joy.
Now what am I going to do when I want to sleep off my hangover on the commuter train?
This doesn't mean a 300mbit internet connection anymore than 802.11g means 100mbit. Hell most wireless internet connections are NOWHERE NEAR as fast as the 11mbit pipe their running on now.
... but I'm working on the designs for the Verizon Fiber Initiative right now. I actually just pulled 4 hours of OT drafting, came home & this was the first article I saw.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Now can someone PLEASE get something like this down here to Ecuador, where I'm still paying $80/month for an unreliable 96k cable connection?
Shared wireless bandwidth doesn't sound that appealing. I just upgraded my home DSL service here in Tokyo to 24Mbps (over copper). Yahoo BB is offering 45Mbps over copper. And, you can get fiber at 100Mbps (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/en/tepco.html) from TEPCO (the electrical utility).
I suspect that one of the reasons this is available here is the incredible density you find in Tokyo. I'm about 3 blocks away from the local CO. Rural areas probably are not getting these speeds
Of course, the key question is what's upstream from you - right now I'm only pulling down 800Kbps across several BitTorrent downloads so your mileage will definitely vary.
I've taken communications classes and understand frequency and time division multiplexing. Since I am lazy and don't want to research it myself, can you explain what new thing this technology does?
Yeah, Verizon is rolling out their service at 30mbps, and this can attain 300mbps in the lab... well, I've seen 1tbps in the lab over fiber... so touch that wireless! Anyway, I work at a ftth provider, we have 1gbps dedicated to every home, switched network, not shared (like wireless is).
We give up to 50mbps for internet... as our bandwidth gets cheaper, we'll be bumping that up to 100mbps, wireless can't hold anything to fiber.. besides, you can't do reliable voice over wireless (latency issues) and certainly not video which we provide as well, more than 5ms of latency and your video stream is toast...
Wireless will never be a reliable triple play provider, which is the holy grail in telecommunications right now.
Maybe not, but I do fear that electomagnetic fields might be causing cell death. Research what happens when you put a magnet in close proximity to cells for a few days. You'll get the point. I guess all the modern countries of the world will come down with high rates of neurological disease in 25 years due to all these wireless transmissions. It reminds me of a story about the Roman Empire and lead plumbing.
When are we going to see decent upstream at the home? 128kbps doesn't cut it. I rarely see any offering at all over 256kbps upstream. OOL offers 1024 but as soon as you begin actually USING it they cap you back to 150 to keep the network from congesting to death.
But Joe McSixpack doesn't care about that, he just wants to grab porn faster and maybe let his kids get on aol and watch some crappy realvideo trash without whining. The ISPs are so paranoid about people running servers on their networks and losing their ability to charge 5000% markup for the same connection for "business" users even though they still block ports like 80 and 25. Woe betide the industry if people realised that 1.5mbps T-1 they've been paying hundreds or thousands a month for since the early 90s is now SLOW.
It's gotten to the point where I've pretty much given up hope of ever seeing a real broadband connection in my lifetime. By the time I can afford something with decent upstream, the idiots in washington will have ISPs so paranoid that everyone will be mandatorily placed behind a NAT and their servers will continually portscan you looking for servers and p2p apps.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
We just launched the Anik F2 and it's supposed to give wireless two-way broadband to remote North American communities at competitive prices. I'd say if the Inuit up in Nunavut can get satellite Internet at broadband speeds, it should soon be possible for somebody in rural states to get it soon too.
Of course it's really fast when you have the whole band to yourself. You could get 10Mb/s over analog cell phones if you could tie up all 860 channels. Big deal.
I haven't come across any service, or web site, for that matter, that can push more than what my sloppy-ass comcast broadband can handle.
Are you seriously comparing lab's theoretical numbers to something being delivered to end users?
Do you doubt that FTTP can scale higher? What speeds are they pushing over fiber in the lab? No my friend, wireless will always lag behind.
I work for an wireless ISP using Motorola Canopy. Canopy equipment can go up to 4 Mbps, up and down, and it works and works well. The down side is that it is expensive, a "fixed" wireless product, and requires Line of Sight to the customer. Let me say that last thing is the kicker. While the equipment may work fantastic, and we have customers working up to 7 miles away, if they can't actually see the tower, you can forget about signing up that customer. Trees, hills, buildings in the way? Lost customer.
And this means that as an ISP using Motorola Canopy, your location can make or break you. If you are in West Texas in the right spot, you might have a great business. But move over to East Texas, and you can sign up a handful of people off of a 300 ft tower. It's crazy.
The problem is that the units are 200 mw and just don't have the power to go through anything.
The FCC really needs to find a spectrum where they can boost the power up to something useable. Let me tell you, Motorola Canopy equipment with some power behind it would be some cool stuff.
Anyway, I haven't read the article yet (imagine that), but I'm going to assume that 300 Mbps is LoS between the units? As I said in a post yesterday, the holy grail of wireless is something that works well through trees. Whoever does that, and if they manage to patent it, will have power similar to the One Ring.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
I have used fixed wireless as my connection to the internet for over 4 years now. It is a 5mbs link connected to a mountaintop center point about 20 miles away using MMDS technology. I get peak speeds that approach what 3 T-1s would provide at a reasonable monthly fee. Downloads from capable servers provide data at rates of around half a megabyte a second. It is extremely reliable and costs about the same as a cable hookup that would provide only one tenth the speed. For those who say it is not as fast as a fiber hookup, you are correct. However no fiber hookup can compete at these prices (at least not for a while). After the central tower is built the only cost to install is the installation of a pizza box sized antenna on the roof of the home. When compared to the cost of laying fiber to reach homes this is dirt cheap. It is also very reliable - I have experienced about 5 hours of total downtime in over 4 years of use (3 or 4 incidents). I know many cable users that would be happy if they only had 5 hours of downtime in a week. Fixed wireless is a very viable high speed home connection alternative. The main problem with the technology my hookup uses is that line of sight to the central tower is required which makes it a very hard install in the flatter cities. The spread spectrum choice would eliminate that problem. (Mine is microwave based)
as an amateur radio operator, i am concerned about what bandwidth they use.
how much bandwidth does it take, and what what frequencys does it operate on?
sounds cool though, but theres only a limited amount of RF
i want some technical information