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Samsung Breaks the 4G Barrier
eastbayted writes "Samsung shifted wireless networking into a higher gear yesterday, demonstrating for the first time in public the power of it WiBro (Wireless Broadband) 4G technology. The company had two 4G demonstrations. A mobile stunt entailed providing delegates on a specially designed bus with a live broadcast of the forum, Internet access, and video on demand, all simultaneously at speeds of 100Mbps. Inside the forum venue, Samsung showed off its 1Gbps 4G service with 32 HD channel broadcast downloads, Internet access, and video telephony. The downside for users craving that kind of speed: WiBro won't be out until 2010, though Sprint has a 4G WiMax service in the works for later this year. The downstream speeds will be 2Mbps to 4Mbps, which seem downright sluggish — compared to WiBro."
The WiMansierre
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Sounds awesome!
The entertainment industry will have to come up with a new business model, such as product placement instead of ad space due to the speed and the storage levels on the horizon. It's actually old school. Texaco theater might make a come back. Or, like ESPN does with Soccer games, there might be split screen ads during credits, little product logos in the corner, etc. Crack may kill, but speed is going to bring death to modern advertising.
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When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
wibro is not sluggish compared with wimax, the demo probably used like 200mhz of spectrum to get 100Mbit, whereas the 2-4Mbit quoted for wimax is using a 5 or 7Mhz channel.
Siiiickkk wireless brah!! I can't wait to get my new truck on the nets! ::pounds a beer::
Did you know subscribers can see articles in the future? Holy shit!
What does "breaking the 4G barrier" mean? The Samsung demo looks cool enough, but saying that they "broke the 4G barrier" means about as much as "this one goes to eleven". The "4G" moniker isn't well defined enough to use as a litmus test of anything other than "hey, if you thought that 3G was overhyped and overpriced, well, just wait until you see this!"
See! The Internet's not a truck that you just dump stuff on. It's actually a bus.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
60kmph?!?!? On a train, and you guys are impressed with some bandwidth increases. :)
Now you too can fry brains faster than ever before... wibrosef!
Would I want this?
Offtopic perhaps, but it seems these days Samsung releases new technologies/products at a really fast pace. Not only that, their products tend to upper-middle of the pack (good feature sets, reasonably reliable, priced a bit higher than some of the competition but worth it). Seems to me like Samsung is becoming the new Sony... Discuss :-P
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Samsung shifted wireless networking into a higher gear yesterday, demonstrating for the first time in public the power of it WiBro (Wireless Broadband) 4G technology
Why not just use roman numerals, and make it a regular sequel? Then they could just call it WiII.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Then increasing the wireless transmission rate any higher is kind of pointless, isn't it?
This would only be useful in places with very wide bandwidth trunk pipes.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I like "WiManzier" better, personally.
f**k cares when it costs ass loads just to opt into this rediculously expensive market. I don't even see my fellow nerds using '3g' technologies of today since telocs keep the prices outragously high (at least where I live).
The next slashdot poll should be
My cell phone supports
1. Analog
2. 2g
3. 3g
4. Cowboynealg
5. I don't have a cell phone you insensitive clod!
Bye!
Will Wii want WiBro or will WiBro be brought to Wipro? Why will WiBro beat WiFi finally, a feat for we wee ones? Fie!
[
I'm still waiting for 3G or GPRS to be affordable...nevermind 4G. Perhaps the carriers will lower the prices for 3G or GPRS when 4G comes out... or maybe not.
Who's got a phased array radio network routing TCP/IP to mobile devices? Phased arrays offer huge bandwidth and little penalty for fast moving endpoints.
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make install -not war
The term "WiBro" has been renamed to "WiPer" to maintain a gender-netural terminology. The "WiMe" and "WiNot" camps are filing suit for being excluded from this group. A spokesperson for the White House states that the president is staying the course with the "WiCare" group.
With the slow adoption of 3G, I doubt 4G will take off any time soon.
Samsung shifted wireless networking into a higher gear yesterday, demonstrating for the first time in public the power of it WiBro (Wireless Broadband) 4G technology
Why not just use roman numerals, and make it a regular sequel? Then they could just call it WiII.
I claim prior art. All your patents are belong to Will.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Don't you get worried when one of these things is in your pocket slowly microwaving your gonads?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So "G" is a measurement? I always thought 1G, 2G and 3G were labels applied to generations. And all you have to do to have "4G" is produce a product sufficiently different from previous generations.
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If it's sufficiently better than 3G then we might just leapfrog it.
The typical 2Mbps 3G data connection doesn't appeal to me that much, i can find that sort of speed in almost any coffeeshop in the country. However a gigabit speed connection would change everything. I could drop my home phones, broadband and existing cell service to move to 4G, so even if it turns out expensive it'd be ok.
from another planet?
...that is one ridiculous headline. What on Earth have we done to deserve it?
And how come Slashdot isn't trying to steer clear of marketing-speak like "4G" and "Samsung shifted wireless networking into a higher gear yesterday"?
We'll ignore the more globally used standard and instead be stuck with WiBigBro.
Sprint charges an arm and a leg for their shoddy wireless-internet access right now, and requires expensive PCMCIA cards or PDA-phones and long contracts to sign up for anything past ringtone downloads. Any new service will be equally as bullshit, with ringtones and limited web access on the phones, but for full internet you'll need to pay a high premium and buy special expensive hardware.
I hate wireless carriers, and I don't believe a word they say until it's a reality.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I thought that 3G was short for third-generation. Boy, it sure is good that somebody's breaking that fourth-generation barrier!
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
Weeeeeeeeeeee.
I can't wait till you kiddies discover that your brains are fried by all your wireless toys!
Keep microwaving your brains with your cell phones too!
Actually, in the states as here in Europe, Clearwire are offering a wireless service that connects via a system very similar to (almost the same as) WiMax, called Wimaxx. A proprietary system though. With a 2048/256 connection as a maximum this isn't the future, but has way better coverage that wlan ISP, so it's quite usefull in less populated areas.
(Gotta sign up some day, but not at this hour.)
something about donnie darko and big invisble internet tubes comes to mind.
Last holiday binge buying consumer festival period, I was looking to purchase a normal table top radio/disc player combo as a gift for a friend. All the radios->inside sheet steel and concrete building stores. The Sony I bought was the only one to get clear signals inside the various stores across the AM/FM bands. I tried the three local places that had radios for sale, wallyworld, mart du K and capacitor hut. None of the others hardly got a signal at all, all the others sounded scratchy and hissy. I didn't *want* to give Sony the cash, but darn it, they had the quality goods for that item in the el cheapo range (IIRC 60 bucks or so).
There is wibro tech deployed in philippines. Country is impovirished yet they have access to latest tech. :) thanks to the internet.
North america is again, lags behind everybody. Time to pack bags and move elsewhere.
2c
I was amused to hear Leo Laporte mention Samsung as "one of those Japanese companies" on Call for Help the other day. In the first place, the show pre-screens all its webcam callers, you have to email them with your question and they'll maybe call you back. This is nice for the show, as it provides tons of time for them to do web research and broadcast it.
Actually, WiBro was demonstrated during last winter olympic games in Turin.
last gost?
Why bro?
If the SNR is very high and so is the bandwitdth, you can transmit a lot of data. We could already do that with things like optical and electrical cables, microwave links, etc.
Some features of a wireless link can help you improve SNR. For instance, you can use things like rake receivers to reduce multipath interference. But you're never going to do all that well in a building, in a city, with tons of EMF interference from all sorts of things, with a single, tiny, omnidirectional antenna. Especially if you want your mobile device to work when you start moving around at 200kph.
So if you have a big, fixed, maybe directional antenna with line-of-site to the basestation, and you've allocated a large chunk of spectrum, it's easy to get a high datarate. WiMax doesn't help you all that much, some of the OFDM tricks it uses help out some but is fundamentally it's not all that much better than anything we already have. For example, you hook up 802.11g through high-SNR directional antennas and you can get really great bitrates over long distances even with the relatively small EMF bandwidth that devices in that unlicensed range are allowed. WiMax does help you (potentially) by having a standard that hardware manufacturing companies can design to, getting you devices that work together.
Once you have your SNR you can do other things to try to get bitrates close to the theoretical limit, but turbo codes get us very close, and pretty much everyone uses them these days.
So there's really nothing new here as far as wireless communications. Good antennas and large frequency allocations get you nice datarates. What's new is that there is actually hardware supporting these high datarates and it is demonstratable.
WiBRO in Korea is: fixed antennas (good SNR) with large spectrum allocations (large B) and a good (but not magical) encoding scheme (OFDM). A pretty good solution for getting broadband to everyone without the investment of things like Fiber to the Curb or even copper wiring. Of course, this is the goal of WiBRO... Korea wants everyone in the country to have high datarate internet access from their homes.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Now I can download my porn faster!
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Now my cell phone is only ~900MHz which is pretty low frequency, and well studied. Wtf is going to happen if we're using a 5+ GHz signal and the device on-time increases?
Engineering is the art of compromise.