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German Scientists Achieve Record 100Gbps Via Wireless Data Link

Posted by timothy on from the telefunken-junction dept.

Mark.JUK writes "A joint team of German scientists working at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have successfully achieved a new world record for wireless data transfers. The team were able to transmit information at speeds of 100 Gigabits per second by using a radio network operating at the frequency of 237.5GHz and over a distance of 20 metres (note: a prior experiment hit 40Gbps over 1km between two skyscrapers). The radio signals were generated by a photon mixer device that uses two optical laser signals of different frequencies, which were then superimposed on a photodiode to create an electrical signal (237.5 GHz) that could be radiated via an antenna. But the team aren't happy with breaking one record and their future attempts will seek to break the 1 Terabit per second (Tbps) barrier."

17 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Speed? by Arker · · Score: 2

    So sick and tired of people equating bandwidth with speed. Is a tractor trailer faster than a Ferrari?

    So what kind of ping do they get on this link?

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    Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
    1. Re:Speed? by Trepidity · · Score: 2

      Eh, it's a pretty colloquialism even in other parts of science to use "speed" to refer to a rate rather than only a velocity.

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      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    2. Re:Speed? by operagost · · Score: 2

      Well, the latency is ultimately going to be limited to the speed at which electromagnetic waves propagate through air, which at the refraction index of 1.0003 hardly differs from the 3x10^8 in a vacuum. Most of the latency will be introduced through the processing, although if there is much that would be trivial to address. I doubt processing power will be a difficult problem.

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      Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
    3. Re:Speed? by Arancaytar · · Score: 4, Informative

      Electromagnetic waves through air propagate at approximately .9997c.

    4. Re:Speed? by timeOday · · Score: 2

      On a semi-related note, why is the latency of WiFi so sucky? I recently tried to mount an NFS home partition on a WiFi with 50 Mb tested throughput, and it was noticeably bad, to the point I broke down and ran a cable. Granted, it's a pretty sad network filesystem that performs so badly with 1-4 ms of latency. But even that is much more than wired... why? It's obviously not the flight time of radio waves over 30 feet. There shouldn't be too much re-transmission at the wireless protocol layers, for such a good connection. More importantly, is there some combination of OS, drivers, and wireless router that provide near-wired latency for WiFi?

    5. Re:Speed? by Dave+Whiteside · · Score: 2

      is that an African or European ....
      Unladen or laden ...

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      who where what when now?
  2. Damn it. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh for the days when our German scientists where better than their German scientists. Truly a golden age for American Innovation.

    1. Re:Damn it. by weav · · Score: 2

      You talking about Hedy Lamarr here?

    2. Re:Damn it. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Oh for the days when our German scientists where better than their German scientists. Truly a golden age for American Innovation.

      Don't feel bad. They have had hundreds of years of experience with German scientists, whereas the Americans with mere decades are relative newcomers in this field.

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      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Damn it. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Of course I am. Hedy Lamarr was pretty cool! :D

      Actually, she had a significant temperature gradient.

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      Ezekiel 23:20
  3. the tech is great, but by P-niiice · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'd hit my cap in 20 seconds

  4. Re:Thank you porn. by nospam007 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Porn video streaming is behind most, if not all of our technical advancements."

    I see, that must be why the router said 'It hurts when IP'.

  5. We need some innovation by P-niiice · · Score: 2

    Now if only we could innovate in the usage cap area.

    1. Re:We need some innovation by qubezz · · Score: 2

      Yep, this tech would be over Comcast's monthly usage cap in 1/50th of a second.

  6. Re: 1/r^2 still true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The recieved signal strength would be multiplied by the antenna gain, but the distance square loss always applies, even with a strongly directional antenna. Even if the beam width is 1 degree across, the "area" taken up by that 1 degree increases with the square of the distance.

  7. Re:Skyscrapers? Really? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

    It's a good application for short-range, high-capacity wireless. The cost of laying fiber in a city is ridiculous - closing roads, digging trenches, disrupting business. Tall buildings give good line of sight. One modestly-high comm tower in the middle of the city (Something like BT Tower?) could serve all the other major buildings. Even if they don't want to depend on radio exclusively due to the risk of atmospheric disruption, it'd serve as good backup connectivity option removing the need for redundantly-pathed fiber.

  8. Re:Is there a theoretical maximum bandwith? by wagnerrp · · Score: 2

    You've got the Shannon limit, describing the ultimate channel capacity in terms of bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio. You can increase your bandwidth, but your transmission medium will eventually impose attenuation limits. You can increase your power output, and thus your SNR, but you eventually reach a saturation limit from blooming, ionization, or melting of your medium. There is no theoretical limit on channel capacity, unless you want to go into information theory and figure out the maximum amount of data that can be stored, if your power source is the entire quantity of mass-energy in the known universe, and transmit it over Plank time, but there are functional limits.