RICE UNIVERSITY TESTS 1 TB RADIO WiFi
Guglielmo Marconi would be proud. The pioneer of commercial radio would certainly approve the use of his discovery to transmit the word’s first non-laser wireless data system transmitting at 1 terabit per second (1 TB/S). This is 20,000 times the speed of the fastest current 4G LTE WiFi networks, and about 20 times the speed of the fastest wired business data services. At 1 TB/S, a signal could stream 200,000 HD movies at the same time.
The need for massive increases in data speed is obvious. A study conducted by Cisco Systems a few months ago found that mobile internet traffic grew by 74% globally in 2015, and smart phone use increased by 43%. For the year, video was 55% of all mobile data traffic.
The growing demand for data led the National Science Foundation to spend more than $60 million over the last five years in radio spectrum research. On Tuesday, the NSF gave a substantial grant to Rice University for testing of a pulsed radio data transfer method.
The researchers at Rice University, Edward Knightly and Aydin Babakhani, plan to depart from the carrier-wave modulation techniques that have been standard in radio communication for over a hundred years. Babakhani says that a pulsed wave system is probably the only non-laser WiFi platform that can perform at rates of in the range of 1 TB/S per channel.
Knightly said, “Instead of having signals that bounce off walls and are highly scattered throughout the environment, we (will)… only have line of sight. The benefit is (we)… blast all the bandwidth and all the information directly to a device with laser-sharp focus, and no one else will be able to intercept that signal because any receiver… offline… won’t detect it. So we’re focusing like a laser but we’re using radio. The challenge is to steer that beam to the right place at the right time, and to follow users as they move.”
We don’t know when 1 TB radio WiFi will be available to us. Several technical hurdles remain. If the Rice research team can overcome them quickly, we may see a consumer version within three years. When it does, we’ll report it here.
(For the best in internet service, talk to us. We can help.)