New Technology Could Kill WiMax?

GolygyddMax writes "Techworld reports that a Florida-based start-up, xG, has developed a technology that's a 1000 times more efficient than WiMax and which could, in theory, lead to wireless LANs being powered by watch batteries. It is still in early development, but this technology could allow anyone to set up as an ISP. This could kill WiMax before it even gets off the ground." From the article: "At the demonstration with other reporters, we were able to verify that the signals were being sent wirelessly, and checked the distance by GPS, but had to take the 50mW base station - and its omnidirectional antenna - on trust, since it was at the top of an 850ft mast. The demonstration will be repeated for the US press next week. The system carried 7.4 Mbit/s per MHz per Watt, said Professor Schwartz. By comparison, GSM would have around 0.0058, and CDMA/EV-DO about 0.0085 Mbit/s per MHz per Watt. "

FCC and cell phone companies will kill it

[Anonymous Coward]

Since a system like this working with IPv6 could potentially eliminate the need for telecom/cell service providers (since the power reqs are low, it won't be a problem for people to relay each others communications and act as peer to peer links ..using any of the already existing relay reward based schemes).. I could see how cell phone companies would want this technology neutralized.

Abort, Retry, Fail?

[Brunellus]

wait, WiMAX was alive in the first place? Either I'm actually living under a rock, or I haven't seen any significant real deployments of the technology outside of pilot programs. So from where I sit, WiMAX can't be killed, because it's not alive.

They need to sign a big contract.

[CyricZ]

They need to sign a contract with a large transportation provider in Europe and Japan, so as to provide this service on all buses, trains and other public transport vehicles. That would give people the incentive needed to purchase the hardware necessary to take advantage of this new system.

It is still in early development

[pubjames]

It is still in early development...

I have a technology that's ten times better than this one, although it is in very early stages of development...

No technology company should make extravagant claims about the capabilities of their product until they have a genuine, working demo.

Two things

[aztektum]

There are two primary stumbling blocks before it will take over WiMax:

1) It actually does what the article says

2) It isn't bound up the ass by patents and doesn't require hefty fees to implement.

Re:How can they DO that?

[Wesley Felter]

It probably doesn't work. Like everything else, the RF field is full of snake oil created by people who don't quite understand what they're doing. The stuff always demos well, but it never quite makes it into production.

Re:It is still in early development

[pscottdv]

"No technology company should make extravagant claims about the capabilities of their product until they have a genuine, working demo."

You don't know much about raising venture capital, do you?

How conveeeeeenient

[DSP_Geek]

The transmitter just happened to be atop an 850 foot mast so the reporter had to take the power and antenna descriptions on trust? Come on. They could've put KABC up there and no-one would be the wiser. I won't believe a word of it until they actually show actual hardware transmitting actual bits. Until then it's a press release.

Sounds like bollocks to me!

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like bollocks. In fact this sounds very similar to the bollocks that was VMSK. In VMSK, the low level sidebands contained the data, but its inventor tried to dismiss them. In this case the inventors acknowledge the sidebands. It still doesn't smell right though.

I realise that most of /. readers are not technical. They like to think they are but they aren't. The amazing technology being described sounds very much like something that is called "transmitted reference CDMA".

Perhaps people would like to Google for such terms and read the rebuking of VMSK before they believe the hype of this latest wondermode.