Siemens Develops 1 gbit/sec Wireless Link

jonknee writes "Siemens has developed mobile wireless technology with transfer rates as high as 1 gigbit per second. This blows the doors off of '3G' technology, or EV-DO (the high-speed data technology used by Verizon Wireless and soon by Sprint PCS). Not all the specs are out yet (more info is expected early next year), but it uses three transmitting and four receiving antennas. With any luck the phone in your pocket will have a gigabit link by the year 2015."

This report is entirely worthless without detail

[Angostura]

Without the details, it strikes me that this nice bit of hype is entirely pointless.

Great - I 1Gig link. And the power requirements are? And the suspectability to multipath problems in built up areas are? And the size of the antenna on the phone is how big? And the patent issues are what?

Sorry to be such a grumpy old thing, but getting RF technology to work in the lab is one thing. Getting to work in messy, interference soaked urban environments without cooking the user's head is quite another.

Technology advancement

[rasteri]

With any luck the phone in your pocket will have a gigabit link by the year 2015.

By which time it won't seem that amazing at all.

Yeah Right

[MrNonchalant]

I'm very skeptical of the viability of this for a consumer market and I'm pretty certain I can get 3 randomly selected users to agree with me. Firstly, the large amounts of antennas would suggest this can't make it outside of a research lab. Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRES. Maybe they could transmit this much between the tower with a single client (scalability anyone?) but if our current wired infrastructure has trouble managing 100 Mbps then what good will that link be?

Anyway, my point here is that maybe you'll see a speed increase but don't expect anything in the real world faster than a wireless G setup anytime soon. It'd be damn cool though.

Airpics?

[InternationalCow]

I'd like this in my home wireless network, please. And used by Apple in a nice streaming solution for video, so I can stream everything from my home server to my tv. I only use my phone for SMS and making phone calls, so I don't need this on the go. But for home multimedia, well, this really opens up nice possibilities!

Re:for what

[surelars]

Oh, sure. No one will ever need more than 640 kB of RAM and all that.

very nice but...

[__aahlyu4518]

"With any luck the phone in your pocket will have a gigabit link by the year 2015."

Having a phone in your pocket may be obsolete in 2015 ;-)

Re:for what

[Oxygen99]

Rapid on demand location based services springs to mind, such as detailed maps and directions. As does accessing music files remotely from your own PC. That'd be nice. Maybe more expansive travel information such as realtime traffic or flight data. I'm sure these would become more and more useful given a large hike in bandwidth.

As somone more intelligent than myself said, "if you build it, they will come.".

Re:Technology advancement

[Gopal.V]

>By which time it won't seem that amazing at all.

To us , it'll still be amazing because we'll be past the 35-hump since when each invention is against the laws of nature .

Below 16 , all inventions are taken for granted. After 16 to 35, every invention is the next big thing and by the time you're over 35 , it'll be a violation of your fundamental understanding of science.

So kids born in 2000 see supersonic air travel as an ordinary means of travel , while my father feels there's something impossible about faster than sound travel (someday I'll say the same about Faster than light , hopefully) .

People don't change - they are just replaced.

Re:Yeah Right

[putaro]

Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRES
Depends on where you live. I'm in Tokyo and I have 24 Mb/s DSL for about $35/mo. They're willing to pull a fiber to your house and do 100Mb/s for pretty close. Of course, that's just your connection to the ISP, beyond that your mileage will vary.

Research indicates...

[thrill12]

... that actually using the new 1 Gigabit phone will cook your eyes and brain. Owners already are using the new phones as a portable replacement for their microwaves.

Seriously: putting that much transmitting power into a phone cannot be healthy now can it ?

Re:Yeah Right

[maxwell demon]

Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRES.

How much do 100GB disk space cost today? How much did they cost 10 years ago?
How much would you have payed 10 years ago for the data rate of a current standard DSL connection?
How much would you have payed 10 years ago for the computing power of todays entry level PCs?
So, are you still sure that the pricing will not be about right for the consumer market in the year 2015?

Re:and health risks are?

[gl4ss]

..faster tech doesn't always mean more health risks.

people will object to fucking anything they just plain don't like.

Re:Faster than 3G .. heck, its faster than 802.11G

[ZakMcCracken]

Bitrate is just one of the features of networks.

You can't compare two technologies solely on bitrate, you are forgetting power, range, spectrum, equipment size and equipment cost as factors in your comparison.

Cellular technology *can* be made to operate faster than your WLAN. In fact, some WiMAX equipment should operate faser than many WLANs, and it's not mobile yet but it's cellular. But then again, the client-side equipment will have to work first with a roof-mounted antenna and the base station should cost about 100x the price of your average WiFi access point. Engineering hardly works miracles, just good trade-offs.

Where will they get the spectrum

[Ungrounded Lightning]

You can't compare two technologies solely on bitrate, you are forgetting power, range, spectrum, equipment size and equipment cost as factors in your comparison.

But you can compare them when you take some of those items into account.

WiMAX (802.11g) - in the appropriate codec for this comparison - gets 70 Mbps out of a 14 MHz channel (a little wider than two TV channels). This system claims 1 Gbps out of a 100 MHz channel and spatial diversity. That's twice the bps/cps, which is about right for using 3->4 spatial diversity on a channel with the same signal/noise ratio and propagation characteristics.

So this is not a breakthrough. It's just a faster-and-wider version of the same level of technology. Which is about right, since some of the coding options used in WiMAX are within single-digit dB of the shannon limit, so there isn't much more left to get out of the spectrum.

The kicker is the bandwidth of the channel. WHERE are you going to get a spare 100 MHz of bandwidth to use?

The 802 working groups are already begging for bandwidth, getting some thanks to cooperation by the FCC and its opposite numbers in other countries - over strong oppostion from broadcasters and other users of the spectrum. But that bandwidth gets broken up into channels - so a deployment can use multiple channels in nearby cells/sectors to avoid interference and multiple players can use different channels in the same area. This proposal would use up essentially ALL the bandwidth in a given allocation for ONE channel for ONE carrier.

Is it going to be licensed? Who will own the license? Nobody else can play - monopoly carrier time again. Is it going to be unlicensed? How will a carrier write terms-of-service giving quality-of-service guarantees?

Further, spatial diversity requres the antennas to have non-trivial separation between the component antennas with respect to the length of the transmission path. Inches gets you across the room, but more is needed to get you across the city.

I wonder if this article is missing something: Perhaps the system is intended, not as a MAN (Metropolitan Area Network - a last-mile solution), but as a LAN or PAN (Personal Area Network - a very short range wireless link - like bluetooth - intended to replace cabling around a computer or a few cubes in a room.)