Motorola Field Tests Wireless Broadband At 300Mbps

cft_128 writes "Motorola Labs just finished field testing its new ODFM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) wireless broadband technology that prove it can attain 300Mbps. This is only a test, but it is an order of magnitude faster than the fiber to the premises that Verizon is now starting to offer. They do mention that the final network would only see 20Mbps sustained and 100Mbps peak."

ODFM????

[gotr00t]

Wouldn't it actually be called OFDM because its supposed to be an acronym for "Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing?"

(referring to the text in the article)

300Mps On Its Own Is Meaningless

[femto]

300Mps in the lab is meaningless. If you have a GHz of spectrum available one can easily achieve 300Mbit/s using 20 year old technology.

The proper question is "What is the spectral efficiency?"

Spectral efficiency is a measure of the data throughput per unit of bandwidth. It is measured in bits per second per Hertz (bit/s/Hz).

Existing WLANS get around 4-5 bit/s/Hz under ideal conditions. State of the art lab demonstrations get in the range 20-40 bit/s/Hz. To put this in context, 20-40 bit/s/Hz is the equivalent of >400Mbit/s in an existing 22MHz WiFi channel.

So, does anyone know the spectral efficiency of Motorola's system?

Re:300Mps On Its Own Is Meaningless

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>So, does anyone know the spectral efficiency of Motorola's system?

The article says they did this in a 20 MHz channel, corresponding to 15 bps/Hz. That's far outside the range I'm used to.

Re:Order of Magnitude faster than Fiber?

[Anonymous Coward]

It says it's order of magnitudes faster than the FTTP (Fiber to the premises) that Verizon is rolling out, which they claim will carry up to 30Mbps, though they didn't release prices for anything above 15mbps. It did not compare it directly to the transfer rates of fiber or any other data line.

Although this might not be the same as what Verizon is offering, Surewest Broadband has been implementing FTTP in Sacramento, CA which supports 100Mbps, although only 10Mbps is used for Internet traffic (some or most of the remaining bandwidth is for the video/phone services). Although its a fairly old press release, Surewest will be able to upgrade to Gigabit without changing much of the current setup:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns341/ns396/ns 22 3/ns227/networking_solutions_customer_profile09186 a00801cac31.html

"One hundred Megabits will allow us to offer new services without changing out infrastructure for a long time. And when we do need more, we can simply upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet without touching the plant."

Re:Game playing

[Cyberop5]

I've currently got a Motorola Canopy system (precursor to this, I imagine) and its pretty solid. It has a max throughput of 3MB/s - shared. But you can cluster antenas for more connections. It doesn't drop packets and gets great pings, much better than my Linksys 802.11g AP. Point-to-Point DES encryption. High Index BFSK modulation.

I do, however I see the actual hardware go offline far to frequently, although I suspect it has to do more with the ISP than the equipment.

Re:Many things to consider...

[NanoGator]

"First, I would be happy if I could get 14.4k/sec with my wireless phone, but they charge a monthly fee just to use their "special services", a data charge per kilobyte, and the normal air minutes. I would use my cell phone to check emails, and that would be about it. Maybe to read the newspaper. So for me, I don't need anything faster. But I don't want to pay three times for the same service."

Not sure who you're using, but ATTWS and Cingular charge once, and it doesn't take up airtime. For like $8/mo. I get 1 or 2 megabytes a month. After that, it's like a penny a K or something like that. (I'd know that for sure if I ever managed to use 2 megabytes. T-Mobile offers an unlimited service for $30/mo for the hardcore users with a Blackberry or Sidekick. You pay 2 times (not 3) IF you go over your allotment. This shouldn't be all that surprising to any cell phone user.

"There is a second concern that I can think of. If a phone is able to get broadband speed and has a videocamera attached, it could cause privacy problems. Do we really want a new kind of voyer with these devices??"

New kind of voyeur? This problem's already here. You've never watched America's Funniest Home Videos? Never seen a phone that can take photos? You're 90% of the way to streaming video from a phone. What added problem is this going to add? Isolated incidents at best. Most places where you could hide a phone, it wouldn't take much more to set up a video camera and digitize the video.

"What else could broadband on a phone be used for??"

A damn cool PDA. Never seen a Treo or a Pocket PC phone?

Upside on fiber far higher than the RF

[RhettLivingston]

To compare this with fiber is just ridiculous. Even if it is cheap fiber (I would hope they are smart enough to put down something with at least a couple of orders of magnitude of growth room), the fiber will have growth room way beyond the 300MB speed of this technology. The numbers being reported now are the maximum potentials. Just one more case of rolling out an infrastructure with no room to grow.

We've got that beat in Japan

[putaro]

Shared wireless bandwidth doesn't sound that appealing. I just upgraded my home DSL service here in Tokyo to 24Mbps (over copper). Yahoo BB is offering 45Mbps over copper. And, you can get fiber at 100Mbps (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/en/tepco.html) from TEPCO (the electrical utility).

I suspect that one of the reasons this is available here is the incredible density you find in Tokyo. I'm about 3 blocks away from the local CO. Rural areas probably are not getting these speeds

Of course, the key question is what's upstream from you - right now I'm only pulling down 800Kbps across several BitTorrent downloads so your mileage will definitely vary.

Re:300Mps On Its Own Is Meaningless

[Kiryat Malachi]

No....

Baud equals *symbols* per second. Once you start to get into modulations that get multiple bits per symbol, baud != bits per second.

56 kbps modems actually transmit at 8kbaud (7 bits per symbol, 8000 symbols per second), using PCM modulation, instead of the QAM/trellis modulation all the other high speed modems use. 2400 bps modems were 600 baud, 9600 modems were 2400 baud, 14.4 modems were 2400 baud. I believe 28.8 and 33.6 run at 3600 baud, which is about the most you can expect from the analog PSTN; 56k relies on the digital portion, essentially, which is how it achieves 8kbaud.