Nick Jones

I’m working on presentations for our Chicago mobile and wireless conference in February. Chicago, in February is likely to be a bit chilly, but don’t worry because if you prefer warm rain to cold wind you can always come to our London conference in April.

As part of this work I’ve been looking at some of the research to see just how fast wireless connections can go. One impressive organisation is CSIRO – Australia’s national science agency. They have demonstrated antenna arrays for in-room Wireless HD that can push throughput up to 20 Gbps. And not content with that, they reckon that by 2010 they’ll be demonstrating long range point to point wireless backhaul at 12 to 24 Gbps. All of this is at what a few years ago would have been thought of as insanely high frequencies in the 60 to 80 GHz range.

But that’s not enough for the academics, a few have started to experiment with terahertz transmissions which start at around 300 GHz and go up to a terahertz or two. This won’t be much use for wireless devices over long ranges because of atmospheric absorption, but it’s possible that in a decade or so we might need an in-room wireless link with a capacity exceeding a hundred Gbps to wirelessly connect the successor of Blu Ray to our immersive ultra hi definition home cinema. Or maybe by then we’ll just skip the whole optical and audio thing and go for direct hardware to wetware neural connections.

All this makes 4G look at bit feeble with its theoretical peak performance in the 100 Mbps to 1Gpbs range. But I guess it shows that wireless isn’t going to hit any brick walls any time soon. CSIRO also illustrates that some governments realise the economic importance of research into fundamental communications technology. Meanwhile I am uploading this over a sluggish 4 megabit DSL link transmitted over antique copper that’s been buried in the street for 50 years. British politicians please note.