It’s not just the snakes and other creatures Down Under that can kill; Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, just flattened every other wireless technology with a six gigabit demonstration.
Colonel Sandurz: Prepare for light speed.
Dark Helmet: No, no, light speed is too slow.
Sandurz: Light speed too slow?
Helmet: Yes, we’ll have to go right to ludicrous speed!
Sandurz: Ludicrous speed! Sir, we’ve never gone that fast before. I don’t think the ship can take it.
Helmet: What’s the matter, Colonel Sandurz…CHICKEN?!
— If we’re going to talk about speed, we have to reference Spaceballs
For people who have been delighted with paying for 700 kbps from a wireless service provider, here’s a little perspective. The CSIRO demonstration delivered “16 simultaneous streams of DVD quality video over a 250 metre link with no loss of quality or delays.”
While using only a quarter of the capacity of the link.
“The system is suitable for situations where a high speed link is needed but it is too expensive or logistically difficult to lay fibre, such as in congested urban environments, and across valleys and rivers,” Dr. Jay Guo, Director of the Wireless Technologies Laboratory at CSIRO said.
“The system is also ideal for creating networks to meet short term needs such as emergencies and large events.”
Hurricane Katrina comes to mind, as a number of ad hoc efforts managed to get areas wirelessly connected so people could use VoIP phones and Internet connections to communicate with families or relief agencies.
Even better, this is just the first step toward wireless connections of as much as 12 gigabits per second. At its current speed, the connection can push through Shakespeare’s collected works in under seven thousandths of a second.
DVD movies would breeze through in about six seconds.
CSIRO also noted that “the system operates at 85GHz in the millimetre-wave part of the electromagnetic spectrum (above 55 GHz) which offers the potential for these enormous speeds and is not yet congested by other uses.”
If such a system could debut in the United States, and there will be plenty of telco lobbying to ensure that they aren’t brushed aside by the technology, it would dramatically enhance the efforts to get virtually everyone in the country connected to the Internet, either by browser or VoIP.
Let the Google Network speculation and random thoughts begin, because they could deliver so much video advertising on a 6Gb network that their accounting department would need 30″ monitors just to see how much revenue is coming in on their spreadsheets.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
