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Terahertz Wireless Chip Will Bring 30Gbps Networks
MrSeb writes "Rohm, a Japanese semiconductor company, has created a silicon chip and antenna that's currently capable of transmitting 1.5Gbps, with the potential to scale up to 30Gbps in the future. While this is a lot faster than anything currently on the market, the significant advance here is the reception and transmission of terahertz waves (300GHz to 3THz) using a chip and antenna that's just two centimeters long. Rohm says it will only cost $5 when it comes to market in a few years — a stark comparison to current terahertz gear that's both large and expensive. The problem with terahertz transmissions, though, is that it's highly directional — with a submillimeter wavelength, it's more like a laser than a signal. Terahertz waves might enable awesome device-to-device networks, but it isn't going to bring 30Gbps internet to a whole city block. More interestingly, submillimeter terahertz radiation is the next step up from the gigahertz radiation used in full-body millimeter wave scanners. Terahertz waves can not only see through clothing, but can also penetrate a few millimeters of skin."
ISPs will still throttle your ass to 55 Mbps
Cook chicken, most likely
This could be very handy for searching for government implanted transmitters inside your own body. I look forward to a day when we can cast aside our crudely fashioned aluminum hats
They said the same about broadband: "What could anyone possibly do with 20mbps? They barely use the 56k we give them!"
Give them the bandwidth - they'll find a good use for it. I can see it being very useful in a small/medium server room - 30Gbps makes it a competitive LAN system. Having a bunch of wireless cards would be much easier than running all that cable, even if some manual aiming and orientation of antennas is necessary.
I also imagine "the cloud" would benefit from this - even 1.5gbps is basically SATA speeds. Latency is higher, but the potential throughput gains are impressive. That may make it possible for "local storage" to be "operating system and cloud sync software", with everything being server-side somewhere. You and I may not join in (I don't like the privacy most of the cloud has), but many people don't give a shit about that.
Gaming might also benefit. Current online gaming depends a lot on synchronizing things, then letting the clients do a lot of the calculation. Updating the position of falling objects is almost always client-side, with the server checking every once in a while. It's a major headache, code-wise. With a suitably massive pipe, it becomes unnecessary - just send the coordinates every frame.
Or it makes video streaming work properly. Dealing with current streaming is rough on networks, as it needs to get there quickly. 30gbps to the home, and you can download an entire blu-ray, uncompressed, in two seconds. Latency can be looser - nobody's going to complain if it takes three seconds instead of two. There was an article on /. about that a couple months back.
Terahertz radiation is non-ionizing, unlike say X-Rays. This type of radiation is used in things like bomb detectors and to inspect explosives and other unstable compounds because it can penetrate a few millimeters but does not break down molecular bonds.
This article is basically nonsense. I work with folks who actually make terahertz radio equipment for radio astronomy. It seems like the last place in the spectrum you'd go to for anything practical. The technology is very primitive, since there has been little application for it, since the signals are quickly absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere. My coworkers are currently in Antarctica to do some astronomy, because there's very little water in the air there.
A stable local oscillator that puts out any useful amount of terahertz power is very difficult to make. You are lucky to get a few microwatts. The signals aren't quite as directional as a laser, but they're too directional to be of much use for the wireless networking that we are familiar with.
There are optical ways of making signals at terahertz frequencies, which may hold more promise, but they're being used in only a few exotic applications, such as the ALMA interferometer array in Chile.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.