Germans Reach 360 Mbps in Mobile Network Tests

povvell writes "German telecomms giant Siemens has managed to hit speeds of an astonishing 360 Mbps in field tests in the centre of Munich using 'orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and the so-called multi-hop technology'. This is not the only demonstration of OFDM producing super fast wireless speeds, as other companies are also working on variants of the technology. It surely can't be long now before we're all streaming the latest blockbuster movies to our laptops on the commuter train home?"

Comments

This will help them

[Anonymous Coward]

Distribute full length David Hasselhoff movies in mere seconds! Fear!

How much "radio pollution" would that produce?

[Cprossu]

360mbps seems like alot for wireless, considering the mess 108mbps (by using 2 different spectrums) created, what would a multiple dynamic frequency wireless setup leave us...what happens when you have 50+ different networks together?

Surely can't be long

[gonerill]

It surely can't be long now before we're all streaming the latest blockbuster movies to our laptops on the commuter train home?"

Not long at all. And about ten minutes after that, the two RIAA agents will enter the carriage with an alsatian, escort you off the train at the next station and you will never be heard from again.

Raw stats on movies...

[strredwolf]

Okay, let's get some raw movie stats. Assume plain RGB pixmap flipping at 24 frames per sec, movie size. That's 720x480, three bytes per pixel.

That's about 1 Megabyte a second, or 8 Megabit. Add another 256 Kilobits/sec for audio (Mp3, Vorbis, or AAC, anyone?) and that's 10 Megabit and change.

Isn't Divx compression good?

Tesla predicted this already?

[brxndxn]

Didn't Tesla predict infinite bandwidth in the wireless spectrum by combining frequencies in certain combinations? ..

Press Release

[erick99]

When you get to this paragraph . . .

Certain statements in this release, other than statements of historical fact, may include forward-looking information that involves various risks and uncertainties. These may include, without limitation, statements based on current expectations involving a number of risks and uncertainties related to all aspects of the wireless communications industry.

. . . you can be pretty confident that you are reading a press release. This was written by the company that owns the equipment used in the test. This is essentially an advertisement.

Is that all?

[mikeophile]

That's a double sided DVD in 3 minutes.

I'm sorry, but if the DVD takes longer to download than it takes the microwave to heat a HotPocket, I'm still going to be annoyed.

Raw Speed Doesn't Mean Much

[femto]

It's the 'spectral efficiency' (the number of bits per second per unit of bandwidth) and the ability of the receiver to reject other users signals that is important.

It is relatively easy to do 360Mbps given the whole radio spectrum to play with. It's a lot harder when it is necessary to coexist with all other users or a limited bandwidth is available.

The article doesn't give such information so Siemen's acheivement may be impressive, or then again it may not.

Huh?

[div_B]

Didn't Tesla predict infinite bandwidth in the wireless spectrum by combining frequencies in certain combinations? ..

Isn't the range of frequencies available for combination itself the bandwidth?
Wider band of frequencies => sharper pulses can be formed by fourier synthesis => more 1s and 0s transmitted in a given time-frame?

Re:Huh?

[_defiant_]

OFDM(orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) is a spread-spectrum technique meaning it spreads its energy(the data) out over a wide range of carrier frequencies -- the total power output required is actually less than by using a single carrier.

It's even smarter than that! Your little rect in time domain is an inf. sinc in the frequency domain. Of course, after a certain length it dies down to a negligible strength (call this point B). If you wanted to modulate another pulse, to guarantee they will both be exactly recoverable you need to modulate the new pulse up to 2B.

OFDM basically take advantage of the fact that the signal is digital. Instead of modulating the next pulse at 2B, you modulate it so that the next pulse is centered over the first zero crossing of the first pulse. Normally, this would cause horrible aliasing, but since you know the shape of your input data, all you care about are the values at the origin and the zero crossing. You don't care about recovering the two original signals exactly, the value at the origin and the first zero crossing give you enough information to reconstruct them. Aliasing be damned!

This takes advantage of the fact that simpler data is more resistant to noise. If you know what you're sending is a 1 or 0, then the waveform can be horribly degraded before it makes a difference. Contrast this with simple voice data, where a deformation in the wave can't be repaired (you don't know what it should look like). In this case, your encoding scheme introduces noise it knows doesn't matter in order to save bandwidth.

Of course, this is also a form of quadrature multiplexing, which lets you send two signals at the same carrier frequency but differentiate them based on the phase. So that gives you twice the transfer amount you'd normally get above.

(yes, I'm in a communications theory course right now)

except for...

[Anonymous Coward]

> It surely can't be long now before we're all streaming the latest blockbuster movies to our laptops on the commuter train home?"

Well, except for the Americans, who will get it 15 years after everybody else does, but claim they invented it.

Hmm, and this helps us how?

[goneutt]

Since almost all servers are not connected to better than 100Mbps (I haven't been on that side of the eq since 1998 so I'm making assumptions, 'scuze me if I'm wrong) , network congestion, etc, I never see the full bandwidth of my 4Mbps line used on one task. 360Mbps might make for an impressive show of ability, but that has limitations at other bottle necks.

The only immediate application I can think of for is setting up temporary offices where you don't want the expense of cabling, but even then you quickly fill the RF bandwidth.

Cisco did this 6-7 years ago

[dangermen]

I remember Cisco offering a product six or seven years ago that did vectored orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. It could do 45mbps non-line of sight as point-to-point or as a unidirectional 28 channel T1'looking setup al la Cisco 2600 WIC Cards. I wonder how this is different.

Heute 360Mbs....

[Anonymous Coward]

MORGEN DIE WELT!!!!!!!

crowd rises in unison, tosses old telco equipment on raging fire...

Not Max enough

[Doc Ruby]

"In the train" sounds good for 360Mbps, because each metal container will hold about 200 people max, which is at least about 1.8Mbps each. For Munich's 1.5M people, that's about 240bps, using a single hotspot. Such a system is better deployed by the city itself, for its mobile services. That doesn't feed bandwidth directly to the citizens, but rather to teams of people, like a fire engine with a WiFi gateway for WLAN.

OFDM is old technology

[Bored Huge Krill]

This article seems to imply that OFDM (used in 802.11a and 802.11g) is somehow a "new" technology. It isn't. It turns out to be quite hard to find the oldest use of OFDM, because it appears to have been used in military systems which were classified long before it became publicly known. However, the oldest published document I know of is a patent for orthogonal frequency multiplexing, filed in 1966 (granted in 1970) by Robert W. Chang of Bell Labs. I don't remember the patent number off the top of my head. :-) The real change to get enormous data rate with increased spectral efficiency (which you'll really need...) over a useful range is MIMO (multiple input multiple output) which uses spatial diversity to effectively create many spatially diverse (mostly) independent communication channels simultaneously on the same frequency channel. Methods combining OFDM and MIMO make up all of the front running proposals for the future 802.11n standard currently in the works.

Re:ofdm vs. cdma

[Wesley Felter]

OFDM is a modulation technique (i.e. it turns 1s and 0s into radio waves) and CMDA is a multiple-access technique (i.e. it lets multiple radios share a channel), so they're really orthogonal.

radio pollution and the shannon limit

[j1m 5n0w]

Well, Claude Shannon showed that, with a perfect modulation and error correction scheme, you could only push so much data over a given communications media, with a given amount of bandwidth and SNR. If you want more, you have to either

• use more spectrum (aka bandwidth)
• increase signal strength
• decrease noise

Since background noise is not controllable, they would have to be doing one of the first two (effectively increasing radio pollution), or overcoming inefficiencies in a previous modulation scheme.

Anyone know how close the various 802.11 standards are to the shannon limit?

-jim

Re:radio pollution and the shannon limit

[div_2n]

Increasing signal cannot and would not provide you with more bandwidth. It might help you overcome noise thus maximizing your current maximum capacity. But increasing signal also increases the possiblity of reflections which in turn increases noise.

The best possibility is to use the maximum signal strength required to be "heard" over the noise which, given the possibility of reflections, it is sometimes actually less and not more.

All things being equal, the only real way to increase bandwidth is to increase the amount of spectrum you use. But not all modulation is created equal as is shown in 802.11g (ODFM) vs. 802.11b (DSSS). Same spectrum, different results. Wimax is one attempt to not only increase the amount of spectrum used, but increase the effeciency of the modulation technique to make the most of the bandwidth in that spectrum.

That and it also happens to be a theoretical competitor to telcos (cellular included) because of the possibilities it might offer.