Phillip RedmanWireless technology really gets a bad rap. For all its incredible capabilities, connecting voice and data services at 65 MPH, delivering video in your hand, providing real-time interaction, wireless technology has become to known as a fickle, unreliabe connection. It may be true for a lot of what people encounter as general purpose use (WiFi hotspots, AT&T 3G) but wireless technology has been used for many years, reliably in many critical situations. The U.S. government relies on wireless technology to remotely control multi-million dollar drones, provide critical in-the-battle field communications and for guidance systems. More locally public safety uses its wireless networks to dispatch fire and police as well as many other applications. So specialized wireless is used dependably and in life-threatening situations. It appears now it may even be trusted in the data center!
The New York Times on Sunday had a great article about some research Microsoft was doing in their data centers. Using high-speed, 60 GHz directional antennas, they are able to reliably alleviate traffic-congested servers by wirelessly moving traffic to less congested servers, right there in the data center. The design sped up traffic by at least 45 percent in 95 percent of the cases tested. It’s secure because it is point-to-point–and the signal can be encrypted. The 60 GHz band is an unlicensed band which features a large amount of bandwidth globally. The large bandwidth means that a very high volume of information can be transmitted wirelessly and reliably–specifications would pin typical throughput at almost 5 Gbps, compared to approximately 50 Mbps over most WiFi systems today. Besides data centers, multiple applications can benefit from this spectrum and is being looked at to support wireless HDTV, broadband cable replacements, wireless laptop docking stations and backhaul (like in the data center). The IEEE is working on the 802.11ad specification to bring this into homes and integrate it into WiFi systems using multi-band radios. I don’t expect to see this widely deployed in the next few years, but it shows that today’s capabilities are reaching beyond what the average wireless use case is today–not your parent’s AM radio!
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