Slashdot Mirror
New High Speed Wireless Chipset from IBM
YesSir writes to tell us IBM scientists are reporting that they have created a new low-cost wireless chipset that could allow devices to communicate up to ten times faster than current technology. From the article: "Using the IBM-pioneered chip-making technology called silicon germanium, the chipset is able to send and receive information in a portion of the radio spectrum that is both unlicensed and can carry a much higher volume of data, a key advantage as data-intensive digital media formats, such as HDTV, become more pervasive."
60GHz signals are absorbed by oxygen (much like 2.4GHz is absorbed by water), so the FCC figured that frequency must be useless and the public might as well be allowed to play with it.
do you still only get about 60% of the available bandwidth from this new tech with all the overheads? sorta puts it in the 324mb/s from your original 540mb/s but I thought the article only said 5x performance increase? which puts us in the 270mb/s max range @ 60% gives us 162mb/s. more than enough for HDTV which is ~20mb/s. But then 802.11g should also cover that, 54mb/s @ 60% = 32.4mb/s.
higher you go the less dense a material it will pass through.
Only a part of the spectrum mentioned in the article (from 30-300 GHz) is 'unlicensed', and it is all 'allocated' to some use. A very informative chart can be found at: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf The bottom row shows the allocation of frequency space from 30-300 GHz. Dense to say the least.
IBM just sold off the produciton and distribution of desktops and thinkpads to china.. They didnt sell off the research department, or 'PC server' production, or 'big iron'. ( unless they did this recently and didnt tell the rest of us ).
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Quoth JH Van Vleck: "Even though electrically non-polar, oxygen gas absorbs microwaves because the magnetic moment of the O2 molecule interacts with electromagnetic fields." The Absorption of Microwaves by Oxygen
So molecular oxygen is an exception to the generally true assumption that a molecule needs to be polar to absorb EM radiation.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Range isn't a problem at all. This doesn't replace Ethernet; it replaces USB, FireWire, VGA, DVI, RCA, optical, and HDMI cables (and it'll probably be cheaper than those high-end cables anyway). The short range makes this frequency ideal for unlicensed use, because interference also has a short range, and your private transmissions are much less likely to be intercepted. Thus it's an ideal replacement for short data cables of all kinds. I look forward to the day my mouse, keyboard, monitor, and printer are connected wirelessly to my CPU, and I can install a new piece of home theater equipment by simply placing it near my existing setup and then selecting it from a menu. Now if only they could do something about those pesky power cords...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
"Now if only they could do something about those pesky power cords..."
Easy. Buy a few containers of surplus batteries cheap. ^_^
Seriously, though, it should be possible to create a open standard em-charge desk-cover that would power anything you put on it, like monitor, mouse, keyboard, printer, mobilephone, portable harddrive, etc.
Not exactly cordless, but at least it's only one cord for everything ontop of the desk.
There already exist such pads, but they are proprietary and small.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)