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Siemens Develops 1 gbit/sec Wireless Link
jonknee writes "Siemens has developed mobile wireless technology with transfer rates as high as 1 gigbit per second. This blows the doors off of '3G' technology, or EV-DO (the high-speed data technology used by Verizon Wireless and soon by Sprint PCS). Not all the specs are out yet (more info is expected early next year), but it uses three transmitting and four receiving antennas. With any luck the phone in your pocket will have a gigabit link by the year 2015."
How can it be possible to get a cellular data service that's faster than a WiFi LAN?
Also, if this is for real, surely this has implications for the many planned city-wide wifi grids (Wi-Max, etc) and other mobile broadband solutions, as it could make them obsolete very quickly.
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according to the article, the bandwidth is only 100 MHz for the experimental setup that they have running.
1Gb/s is supposed to be what it's capable of in the future - or at least that's how I read it
Without the details, it strikes me that this nice bit of hype is entirely pointless.
Great - I 1Gig link. And the power requirements are? And the suspectability to multipath problems in built up areas are? And the size of the antenna on the phone is how big? And the patent issues are what?
Sorry to be such a grumpy old thing, but getting RF technology to work in the lab is one thing. Getting to work in messy, interference soaked urban environments without cooking the user's head is quite another.
With any luck the phone in your pocket will have a gigabit link by the year 2015.
By which time it won't seem that amazing at all.
I'm very skeptical of the viability of this for a consumer market and I'm pretty certain I can get 3 randomly selected users to agree with me. Firstly, the large amounts of antennas would suggest this can't make it outside of a research lab. Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRES. Maybe they could transmit this much between the tower with a single client (scalability anyone?) but if our current wired infrastructure has trouble managing 100 Mbps then what good will that link be?
Anyway, my point here is that maybe you'll see a speed increase but don't expect anything in the real world faster than a wireless G setup anytime soon. It'd be damn cool though.
I'd like this in my home wireless network, please. And used by Apple in a nice streaming solution for video, so I can stream everything from my home server to my tv. I only use my phone for SMS and making phone calls, so I don't need this on the go. But for home multimedia, well, this really opens up nice possibilities!
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Oh, sure. No one will ever need more than 640 kB of RAM and all that.
"With any luck the phone in your pocket will have a gigabit link by the year 2015."
;-)
Having a phone in your pocket may be obsolete in 2015
Rapid on demand location based services springs to mind, such as detailed maps and directions. As does accessing music files remotely from your own PC. That'd be nice. Maybe more expansive travel information such as realtime traffic or flight data. I'm sure these would become more and more useful given a large hike in bandwidth.
As somone more intelligent than myself said, "if you build it, they will come.".
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Given the number of receiving and transmitting antennas, it would sound like they are using a variant of BLAST - this is a technique that uses multipath to enhance the signal - think of it as doing spatial-domain multiplexing. By using multiple antennas, and using the multipath time difference on the signal, they are able to discriminate signals in the same band of frequecies based upon the physical location of the antennas.
However, the odds that this will fit "in your pocket" as the story poster said are pretty slim - the physical seperation of the antennas would tend to preclude that.
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We'll finally be able to watch a HDTV film in a crowded bus on a 2cm-large screen. Cool!
... that actually using the new 1 Gigabit phone will cook your eyes and brain. Owners already are using the new phones as a portable replacement for their microwaves.
Seriously: putting that much transmitting power into a phone cannot be healthy now can it ?
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;) ) that is saved directly to my PC at home. The phone can have a small (by tomorrows standards at least) amount of local storage, but the vast majority of storage used would be on the terabytes or petabytes of storage we'll have at home then.
It always bothers me that I essentially have to go through the extra step of transfering any pictures I take on my phone, to my PC.
Imagine if in 2015, I can take high resolution photos (and even video) from a hand held device (we really should stop calling them phones
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This article is interesting in the standard kind of wow, high bandwidth wireless kind of way. However, as wireless LAN technologies become more long distance (Wi-Max) and cellular technologies become more high bandwidth (this article), when will the two converge into a united space?
I know there is a difference in the licensing of the spectrum, but disregarding governmental interferences, prevents wireless LAN and cellular from essentially becoming the same type of standard?
..faster tech doesn't always mean more health risks.
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Well most wireless data systems are rate adaptive, so to be able to use new high speed services you will require very strong signal coverage (even more radiation). 2G and 3G will still be there, plus all the other radio systems.
This is a multiple-antenna technology, called MIMO for Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output. Instead of modeling the "medium" (electromagnetic spectrum) as a "box" taking a single signal as input and outputting a single signal, the medium is modelled as a matrix taking multiple signals on input and outputting multiple signals, on the same frequencies and at the same time.
The capacity increase is *theoretically* limited by the max number of antennae in input or output: say there are N transmitters and N receivers, if you assign each transmitter to a receiver and place a shielded coax cable between the pair instead of relying on em free-range transmission, there should not be much interference for sure. Thus you have N times the throughput, and that's how MIMO throughput numbers are computed *for PR purposes*...
In practice, when you use the air medium, there is a good deal of interference between the antennae, but research can derive some increased capacity (by "diagonalizing" the MIMO channel, i.e. identifying linearly independent sub-channels in this matrix of channels).
However, the practical increase is *in no way* linear as a function of the size of the MIMO array as some would obviously like other people (press, stock analysts, investors...) to believe. Additionally, MIMO works best in certain environments; independent sub-channels are best created by channel irregularities that are at a distance comparable to the scale of the antenna array. It means, for instance, that MIMO does not generally improve much the capacity of line-of-sight transmission but provides better improvements indoors!
This is an interesting link. Is is a gross oversimplification to state that Hartley-Shannon gets 'super Nyquest' rates by using the amplitude to encode multiple bits per cycle? I'm sure that this could be done 'in principle', but in practice, the amplitude is dropping off as 1/r (power drops as 1/r^2) and amplitude is messed up by all sorts of other things (wall, rain, me ...). How in practice do people achieve this theoretical bitrates? Do you have to send a 'reference singnal' and use the relative amplitudes?
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You can't compare two technologies solely on bitrate, you are forgetting power, range, spectrum, equipment size and equipment cost as factors in your comparison.
But you can compare them when you take some of those items into account.
WiMAX (802.11g) - in the appropriate codec for this comparison - gets 70 Mbps out of a 14 MHz channel (a little wider than two TV channels). This system claims 1 Gbps out of a 100 MHz channel and spatial diversity. That's twice the bps/cps, which is about right for using 3->4 spatial diversity on a channel with the same signal/noise ratio and propagation characteristics.
So this is not a breakthrough. It's just a faster-and-wider version of the same level of technology. Which is about right, since some of the coding options used in WiMAX are within single-digit dB of the shannon limit, so there isn't much more left to get out of the spectrum.
The kicker is the bandwidth of the channel. WHERE are you going to get a spare 100 MHz of bandwidth to use?
The 802 working groups are already begging for bandwidth, getting some thanks to cooperation by the FCC and its opposite numbers in other countries - over strong oppostion from broadcasters and other users of the spectrum. But that bandwidth gets broken up into channels - so a deployment can use multiple channels in nearby cells/sectors to avoid interference and multiple players can use different channels in the same area. This proposal would use up essentially ALL the bandwidth in a given allocation for ONE channel for ONE carrier.
Is it going to be licensed? Who will own the license? Nobody else can play - monopoly carrier time again. Is it going to be unlicensed? How will a carrier write terms-of-service giving quality-of-service guarantees?
Further, spatial diversity requres the antennas to have non-trivial separation between the component antennas with respect to the length of the transmission path. Inches gets you across the room, but more is needed to get you across the city.
I wonder if this article is missing something: Perhaps the system is intended, not as a MAN (Metropolitan Area Network - a last-mile solution), but as a LAN or PAN (Personal Area Network - a very short range wireless link - like bluetooth - intended to replace cabling around a computer or a few cubes in a room.)
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