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."

300Mbps ?

[arazor]

Damn that is extremely fast but here in rural south east Ohio I would settle for just 1Mbps. I'm currently stuck at 28.8k and thats on a good day with my USR V.Everything Courier modem sigh...

Order of Magnitude faster than Fiber?

[Shuasha]

That's the most retarded thing I've seen in a long time. Fiber can take more than 10 Gb/sec.. The paid offering for fiber to the prem is just slow.. they don't want to cannibalize their paid commercial optical products. You can't compare a current product offering to a something that's being tested. The marketing people haven't been involved yet.

Awesome but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon is offering service in some parts of CA and FL. This is a far cray from nation vide service. They are just testing the market, and it might take years for this service to get to the rest of us.

3 Motorola stories in a day?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe ./ needs a Motorola logo...

Surprised no one mentioned the new V3 [phonescoop.com] nor the A780 [phonescoop.com].

Re:Order of Magnitude faster than Fiber?

[xchino]

What I think is retarded is people who can't seem to read the post. 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. Try a little bit of critical thinking before you post next time. They are talking about service levels, not maximum transfer rates for any one type of connection. And it quite possible could carry more bandwidth, since you can't saturate wireless connections like you can with physical lines. If i have 10 people on a 100Mb cat5 run, they can each get 10 mbps. If I have 30 people on a 54mbps wireless connection they can all get 54mpbs.

Re:How long until WiLan sues 'em?

[chriso11]

Actually, the digital radio in Europe and HDTV broadcasts also use OFDM, so I guess we can find out by seeing when WiLAN sues them...

That said, OFDM is amazingly elegant and efficient (in use of BW). It just requires the receiver to work harder to demodulate the data. So with a 300MB/s peak rate, you will need a much more powerful processor than 802.11g applications. So don't go looking for this in a portable solution for a long time...

Re:Order of Magnitude faster than Fiber?

[jrockway]

> If i have 10 people on a 100Mb cat5 run, they can each get 10 mbps.

If it's switched, and it's between the users, then they can each get 100Mbps to each other. To the "main server", whatever that may be, they do share 100Mbps, though.

> If I have 30 people on a 54mbps wireless connection they can all get 54mpbs.

Wrong. Everyone shares the 54mbps minus overhead. If any of those 30 get over 1Mbps you'll be lucky.

Re:Many things to consider...

[memco]

"I fear the day of the $100 a month cell phone bill is near." You're a little late on this one. know several people who've gone over that on more than one occasion (myself excluded).

Re:Order of Magnitude faster than Fiber?

[alhaz]

If it's switched, and it's between the users, then they can each get 100Mbps to each other. To the "main server", whatever that may be, they do share 100Mbps, though.

Obviously you've never tried to manage a large scale switched network! And by large i mean several miles.

No matter how nice your switch is - even uber-expensive Alteon switches - the backplane is NEVER what they say it is. Ever. Ever ever.

I've worked at an experimental isp that delivered 100mbps to the home. I've worked at a testing lab that performend throughput analysis on high end switching gear. ten people on ten ports of a 100mbps switch will not get 100mbps to eachother. ever. Not ever. Hasn't happened yet. Won't.

Yeah, they *say they have various gigabits on the backplane. Whatever.

Worse yet, it's never just you and nine other people. And due to the effects of broadcast radiation, and the cold hard truths about ethernet, even on super special hardware you rarely see more than 70% efficiency on switched ethernet in real actual real-world implementations that allow people to get done what they need to get done.

As for the 54mbps wireless - Not a damn one of you will get 54mbps. Even one person on a 54mbps wireless network won't get 54mbps. The overhead in the physical layer and the signalling properties of rf end up meaning that the best case scenario is 27mbps.

The problem with wireless, above and beyond that, is that you're back to a totally broadcasted network, and there is nothing you can do about it short of giving every station it's own frequency.

so, ten people on a hub trying to talk to eachother at full speed. Yeah. Zippy.

Re:Marketers?

[Shuasha]

You would think that that's the way it works, but it's nothing like that. My company has TONS of spare capacity on their network, and we don't lower prices.. we occasionally run promos, but that's it. We price things so we don't shoot ourselves in the foot. Why buy a 45 Mbit DS3 for $2500/month when you can buy a GigaBit connection for $2800?

And what upstream?

[Gldm]

I've had a 10mbit downstream from optimum online since 1997 or 1998. I've rarely needed more downstream as most sites can't push anywhere near that. Even a big server like ATI or Nvidia's driver hosting can barely hit 6mbps to me, even with TCP recieve window tweaks. [speedguide.net]

When are we going to see decent upstream at the home? 128kbps doesn't cut it. I rarely see any offering at all over 256kbps upstream. OOL offers 1024 but as soon as you begin actually USING it they cap you back to 150 to keep the network from congesting to death.

But Joe McSixpack doesn't care about that, he just wants to grab porn faster and maybe let his kids get on aol and watch some crappy realvideo trash without whining. The ISPs are so paranoid about people running servers on their networks and losing their ability to charge 5000% markup for the same connection for "business" users even though they still block ports like 80 and 25. Woe betide the industry if people realised that 1.5mbps T-1 they've been paying hundreds or thousands a month for since the early 90s is now SLOW.

It's gotten to the point where I've pretty much given up hope of ever seeing a real broadband connection in my lifetime. By the time I can afford something with decent upstream, the idiots in washington [theinquirer.net] will have ISPs so paranoid that everyone will be mandatorily placed behind a NAT and their servers will continually portscan you looking for servers and p2p apps.

Of course it's really fast. You're alone.

[Animats]

Of course it's really fast when you have the whole band to yourself. You could get 10Mb/s over analog cell phones if you could tie up all 860 channels. Big deal.