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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."
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)
Why, Jimmy
spam, spam, spam, spam
spam, spam spam, spam...
Maybe the rain Isn't really to blame. So I'll remove the cause, But not the symptom!
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..."
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...
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.
Maybe ./ needs a Motorola logo...
Surprised no one mentioned the new V3 nor the A780.
Today near the Motorola Testing Facility, birds and other wildlife suddenly spontaniously combusted....
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. -
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?
I've currently got a Motorola Canopy system (precursor to this, I imagine) and its pretty solid. It has a max throughput of 3MB/s - shared. But you can cluster antenas for more connections. It doesn't drop packets and gets great pings, much better than my Linksys 802.11g AP. Point-to-Point DES encryption. High Index BFSK modulation.
I do, however I see the actual hardware go offline far to frequently, although I suspect it has to do more with the ISP than the equipment.
Urgo: "I want to live. I want to experience the universe and I want to eat pie!"
Jack: "Who doesn't??"
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.
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?
You would think that that's the way it works, but it's nothing like that. My company has TONS of spare capacity on their network, and we don't lower prices.. we occasionally run promos, but that's it. We price things so we don't shoot ourselves in the foot. Why buy a 45 Mbit DS3 for $2500/month when you can buy a GigaBit connection for $2800?
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.
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.
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!
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 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)