Slashdot Mirror
CSIRO Develops 10 Gbps Microwave Backhaul
theweatherelectric writes "James Hutchinson of iTnews writes, 'CSIRO has begun talks with global manufacturers to commercialise microwave technology it says can provide at least 10 Gbps symmetric backhaul services to mobile towers. The project, funded out of the Science and Industry Endowment Fund and a year in planning, could provide a ten-fold increase in the speed of point-to-point microwave transmission systems within two years, according to project manager, Dr Jay Guo. Microwave transmission is used to link mobile towers back to a carrier's network where it is physically difficult or economically unviable to run fibre to the tower. Where current technology has an upper limit of a gigabit per second to multiple towers over backhaul, the government organisation said it could provide the 10 Gbps symmetric speeds over ranges of up to 50 kilometres.'"
These guys need hire some scientists instead of lawyers.. It's called innovation guys!
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
See? The CSIRO engages in actual research, and patents its own work, and licences its own patented work to others.
It doesn't go around buying up patents from other companies with the aim of litigation.
The result of non-Australians paying for the use of CSIRO patents will be further research by CSIRO that could improve technology for the rest of the world - not just for Australians. If patents are to exist at all, this is how it should work.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Ubiquiti just announced their AirFiber product (http://www.ubnt.com/airfiber) which can get 1.4 Gbps symmetric at 13km. It'll be interesting to see the price point of this 10 Gbps system, as Ubiquiti's runs only $3k per endpoint. I was considering getting a pair of the Ubiquitis to connect a branch office to HQ.
10 Gbps would be nice, but I'm guessing the cost of this system would be at least a magnitude greater than the AirFibers.
They did hire the scientists. Then they hired the lawyers to defend their exclusive rights in what the scientists developed. CSIRO is not an NPE any more than ARM or any other R&D company is.
Now they can implement this into the NBN and allow those that can only have wireless access and not cable have this.Actually at this speed it could exceed the cable part of the NBN.
A vital point not explicitly highlighted in the summary - the Science and Industry Endowment Fund providing some of the funding for this work was the main beneficiary of last year's settlement around CSIRO's wireless patent.
That is, the settlement money is being directly reinvested in new research to further develop wireless technologies, as well as public good research in other fields.
... the usage caps will not increase.
Go read their patents.
BTW learn how to troll, you suck at it.
Make patents non-tradable. If a company is sold or goes under, the patents go to the public domain. Same thing if a person holds the patent. Person dies, patents evaporate. Even better? Extend the law to also include copyright.
Microwave transmission is/can be blocked/degraded by precipitation which is not a good thing. If this is a problem with this technology it will likely be implemented in only the most extreme locations -- where laying cable is very very expensive and utilization will be light.
Ultrasound Scanners (as used by pregnant women everywhere)
Solar hot water
A4 DSP chip
Aerogard, insect repellent
Atomic absorption spectroscopy
Distance measuring equipment (DME) used for aviation navigation
Gene shears
Extended Wear Contact Lenses
Interscan Microwave landing system, a microwave approach and landing system for aircraft
Use of myxomatosis and calicivirus to control rabbit numbers
Parkes Radio Telescope
The permanent pleat for fabrics
Polymer (plastic) banknotes, or "funny money"
Relenza flu drug
'Softly' woolens detergent
X-ray phase contrast imaging
Buffalo fly trap
EXELGRAM (optical anti-counterfeiting technology)
RAFT (Reversible Addition-Fragmentation chain Transfer) Polymerisation
The Mills Cross radiotelescope design
Supercapacitors
24 hour tests for Tuberculosis in animals and humans
It was also the CSIRO's Parkes Radio Telescope that beamed the Moon Landing.
CSIRO isn't a patent troll, they're a government owned R&D organisation. They get money from inventions, but who doesn't? Patent trolls come up with (obvious) ideas and never make it work. CSIRO actually patents completed inventions.
Some more achievements for you.
No. CSIRO are trolls.
I've been meeting them for quite some years now and the CSIRO guys I've met are about protectionism. Since they lost their .edu status, they are about turning a buck. They will lie, cheat and steal their way through any bit of technology and pawn it off as their own. They may once have had skill but those days have gone.
The CSIRO are pretending to be elite. They plant themselves into the University system and pinch any idea that has the smallest amount of creativity. They will take established conferences and hijack them as their own. I bet you they had meetings about the recent attention of the WIFI thing and thought about how they can try and keep the momentum going. You wouldn't believe the extent they will advertise because they know that this is how you attract research and development money in Australia. Glossy mags and smiling pictures with MPs and popular projects as backdrops are taking research dollars from .edu and into putting it into .com. I wouldn't mind so much except they never deliver on more than 90% of projects. Just Word documents.
Sure, there may be a couple of greybeards that still create, but none of the new guys do. But when the chief scientist, ceo type, publicly states that the future of energy is fossil fuels and not renewable energies, something is very, very wrong. That was until it was popular to be green.
.
CSIRO develop technologies, patent them, then license them at fair terms. They then use that licensing revenue to develop new technologies, patent them, and license them at fair terms. And repeat.
It's not like CSIRO are patent trolls. The WLAN thing only got dragged out in course because greedy companies were not interested in fair licensing terms.
"Go read their patents." So you have nothing.
I think you might have a point. Just look at how vague and unspecific that diagram is.. Everyone was doing wireless LANs in 1993 after all, these guys are hopeless.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Oh no, CSIRO are inventing wireless tech again, quick someone tell Joe Mullins so he can claim someone else did it!
Am I the only person who had to look up what a 'backhaul' was? In >15 years of working with IT I have never heard this term.
As I am reading about it, it looks like this applies to phone networks almost exclusively. It seems to be the same thing as a 'backbone' when discussing a network.
I suppose as we get closer and closer to phones=internet=telecommunications=data becoming true it becomes hard to distinguish.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. The predecessor of Watt's engine was a steam engine too. Granted, it was entirely different beast than Newcomen's engine, but you just said "steam engine". That patent shouldn't have been granted. Everything described here has ample prior art described in the literature - even by ancient greeks!
Did you know that you have to read past the "Title: Wireless LAN" to find out what exactly is being patented? Hint: it's not the concept of "wireless LAN", it's a specific way to implement it, with specific ways to improve previous implementations and overcome their problems - this part is what makes it patentable.
Granted, it was an entirely different beast than 802.11, but you just said "wireless LANs"
With air-tight arguments like that you would have got CSIRO thrown out of court in no time. The manufacturer group must be kicking themselves.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The airtight arguments were made in court filings. For example, it appears that the central "innovation" under dispute here is the use of OFDM to deal with multipath distortion. That's a technology that was invented in the 1957 (Kineplex). Bell Labs made some major improvements in the 1960s. It was perfected in the 1980s by other people than CSRIO. At best, the patent covers an obvious incremental improvement.
Thrown out of court? You haven't heard of the Eastern District of Texas, then? The most ridiculous patents are upheld there. It's la la land.
Sure, obvious now. But was it then? No idea, now isn't then. All things considered, your posts just smack of sour grapes because for a fucking change it's an American company being shafted by a patent.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Yes... but besides that, what did the CSIRO ever do for us?!?!
Funny but it all looks like basic research or things with military applications. Sort of like what the NACA did in the US from 1920 that and a lot of basic medical research.
You know I am a republican and so was my mother and father. Thing is that even a conservative fellow like myself can see the benefit looking back at history that things like this gave the US. The problem is that back in the day people thought hey corporations where getting the fruits of government research for free so why not let them pay for the research. Well the problem is that the system we have now is that government still often pays for the research but now instead of results being in the public domain so any company no matter how big or small can use them some mega corp ends up with rights.
Imagine how bad the US might have done in WWII if Grumman couldn't have used the NACA cowling on the Wildcat, Hellcat, and Avenger because Boeing had the rights to it. Or if North American couldn't use the NACA low drag airfoil that gave it such high speed and long range because Curtiss had the rights to it? Sorry but I feel you are just repeating the party line without thinking about it. Now a government body sell the the tech instead of just releasing it to any company in the nation for use is interesting. I thing that it being available to everyone free is a better solution but I am not an Australian so what I thing doesn't really matter in this case.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You say "socialism" as though it is a bad thing.
Many many countries that are not the USA don't agree.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
Read the posting again. I proposed a view where socialization of applied research was bad, but fundamental research was good.
I have mixed views on the topic - over my lifetime I have seen that true socialism, that is government ownership of the means of production seldom works out well. That is a practice that is not very common in the world today.
However I am not averse to some aspects of a more expansive definitions of socialism. For example socialized medicine or government funding of fundamental research.
And for those who chose to mod down my posting - a big raspberry for using mod points to censor viewpoints that you don't agree with rather than taking the time to respond.