Slashdot Mirror
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."
(referring to the text in the article)
"..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.
Today near the Motorola Testing Facility, birds and other wildlife suddenly spontaniously combusted....
Actually, the digital radio in Europe and HDTV broadcasts also use OFDM, so I guess we can find out by seeing when WiLAN sues them...
That said, OFDM is amazingly elegant and efficient (in use of BW). It just requires the receiver to work harder to demodulate the data. So with a 300MB/s peak rate, you will need a much more powerful processor than 802.11g applications. So don't go looking for this in a portable solution for a long time...
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
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?
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?
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.