We love the smell of a "
world's fastest" or "
world's largest" claim in the morning. This time it's a team of researchers led by Ernesto Ciaramella at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa Italy, saying they've developed the "world's fastest WiFi." Their network beams data at an amazing 1.2Tbps over a few kilometers, more than enough to share your entire Kurosawa collection faster than you can say "Yojimbo." So, performance claims are valid, but we're not sure about that "WiFi" part. Data was transmitted using Free Space Optics (FSO), blinking lasers or LEDs that act like fiber optics without the fiber. This means line-of-sight connections only, so if you get frustrated when concrete walls hamper your WiFi downloads imagine how you'd feel if a little puffy cloud killed all your torrents. So, fastest wireless? Check. Practical solution for high-speed wireless communications? Not so much.
posted Sep 12th 2008 10:39AM
"Frikkin' laaasers"
Now all I want is some frikken' sharks with some frikken' laser beams attached to their frikken' heads!
Yeah, he's probably so jealous of these frikkin' "laser beams" that he's going to bribe them with "One. Million. Dollars"!
[Actually guys, Dr Evil jokes are old now. So are Mike Myers'.]
Sorry, all we have are ill-tempered mutated seabass.
What makes you think it isn't?
I hate to be a pedant, but they seem thoroughly confused about what WiFi actually is. 'WiFi' is the consumer-centric name for a set of compatible devices as controlled by the WiFi Alliance (http://www.wi-fi.org/). These devices implement a subset of the IEEE's 802.11 standard.
These lasers, whilst most certainly gnarly, are absolutely unrelated. They're more akin to optical comms without the fiber.
"They're more akin to optical comms without the fiber. "
Just as it says in the article, in fact.
/me RTFAs, then twats self on bonce
I bet the guys on the receiving end of the data were busy making popcorn.
Bye bye laser?
Quote on Quote "L-A-S-E-R"
Also my Stupid Iphone is still has lag after that update!!!
Contacts are laggy and the stupid Predeictive texting is STILL THERE!!!
GIVE US THE OPTION TO TURN OFF THAT CRAP !!!!!
Does this guy think Engadget is Apple tech support?
{one more try...correct post now, light color posts throwing me off}
What makes you think it isn't??
Its not?
Also, it's "Quote, unquote."
.. And there's no real reason to write Quote unquote.. Why not just use "quotes"?
Did you accidentally the whole thing?
damn @ pumping iron, you stole what i was gonna say!
lazers makes things better.
So if they blast enough data from the Leaning tower, they might the tower stand straight.
"...might make the tower.."
what frequency of laser was used? Is there such a thing as a 2.4ghz lazer? That would go through walls.
maveric101,
"what frequency of laser was used? Is there such a thing as a 2.4ghz lazer? That would go through walls."
The 2.4ghz is undoubtable the frequency that packets of information is sent at. The frequency of the actual laser will determine it's wavelength (ie colour). It'll be far greater than 2.4ghz. The intensity of the laser will determine whether it'll blow stuff up.
I was about to commet how this isn't wifi, but although it needs line of sight, it is electromagnetic waves just like the radio wifi works over.
Nice thinking but not so maverick. The wavelength (which is a different thing entirely) would determine the colour. 2.4GHz determines the number of pulses per second are sent. The laser, I would presume is a Red laser. Blue lasers dissapate in a much shorter distance. It could actually even be an infrared invisible laser (as that would be better for long distance comms).
Although to do the maths.
1.2Tbps = 1319413953331.2 pulses per sec
1319413953331.2 = 1319413953331.2Hz = 1.2THz.
Yes, its that simple :)
You both have no idea what you are talking about...
omigod, i made a mistake, so sorry.
Is that Robert Downey Jr.?
Yes, but don't tell anyone. SAG doesn't like moonlighting.
the guy beside him looks like sean penn.. :0
Nice Guy Eddie was always one of my favorites, but he died too easy for being a gangster. It was such a let down.
hahahahah, good call... but why does he looks so pissed off, like hes going to kill the other three guys with his eyes
Line of sight has to be PERFECT for this to work.
Amazing they could do that.
the power of a laser is actually determined by its wattage. the frequency would determine how often the pulses come, which can be between the femtosecond and picosecond range. in order to transmit data at 1.2 Terabits per second (0.15 Terabytes per second), i believe the laser would have to pulse approximately 1.319 * 10^12 times per second, so the frequency of the pulse would of course be ~1.319 THz.
correct me if i'm wrong though, guys. i'm no mathemetician. :)
meant to reply to maveric101
actually i just realized i didn't account for any error correction at all, so it'd have to be probably 5-10% higher than my estimate.
My numbers are a little more rounded but both of ours are correct. Although as you say, neither of us are factoring in error correction. I reckon you would want 2 of every bit sent at a later time. So that'd be 50% slower transfer speed or twice the frequency.
Kind of old Black Box already has something that does this.
http://www.blackbox.com/Catalog/Detail.aspx?cid=425,429,1798&mid=4710
well yeah it does network using lasers but this team made a network that's over 10 times faster than the blackbox device :p
1. Buy an off the Shelf Laser networking product from black box.
2. Give it " More Power"
3. ?????
4. Profit
This is a pretty groundbreaking technology. The ability to shoot that much information over an area that fast is amazing. Its future uses, imagine when this tech is perfected. Satalite internet will be a better option because everbody can get it, its fast, and how cool is that, i mean, c'mon. For now, ah, not so useful. Imagine a tower that stands up higher that anything else in a city that everybody has to point at to get line of sight connection. Point your iPhone at it if you want that song download. Granted it would be fast, youd look like a fool doing that.
Your definitely on the right track. What I am thinking is a much smaller transmitter in each room or distributed around a city that makes that room/area able to connect. Granted, the whole LOS has to be perfected but its do-able. Kudos to the team for even thinking this up let alone building it. Geniuses. Amazing technology and the steps that we're taking.
Due to your comma usage, I read your comments like you just finished running up a few flights of stairs to tell us this information.
yeah... satellite connections that only work when you have a perfect line of sight to the satellite. God help you if a bird, airplane, cloud, or drop of water gets in the way.
there would have to be one laser for each network client. either that or the laser would have to have some incredible targeting software and there would have to be a queue for usage, but that's not really all that useful either because then you'd have to wait a bit each time you went to a new web page or something.
NOw, all you'd need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space.
Not a practical solution for high-speed wireless communications? Just put a bunch of mirrors.
Because a bunch of mirrors are practical?
While I haven't read the "read" link, this seems to be along the lines of this:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/01/ibms-green-optical-link-promises-one-second-movie-downloads/
This was done at Xerox PARC in the mid 70s.
Then again, just about everything else was also.
this is pretty cool in the technological advancement terms. while they DO say it can be messed with through line of sight, so what? a laser isnt that large, and for that amount, it might be economically feasible to bury a small sealed enclosure that spans the length and than bury it. we dont have any wire technology that is around that, do we? not saying it would be perfect, just debating if it would have any real world application.
Then we could make the buried housing flexible and internally reflective and we could call it ... "fibre" ;)
So your saying that fiberless fiber optic technology is the future, eh... Einstein would be proud - light is truly king, but I doubt penetration was one of Einstein's specialties, so I expect that in order to perform, the conditions must be "free of any foreseeable obstacles" in order to obtain maximum transmission speeds. Sweet.
Obviously the benefit of this technology is not a WiFi replacement for your mobile device, but instead a great low cost backhaul solution for cell sites. Plus since you don't have MPE limits with lasers, you can scale that thing up as much as you want.
I live in a new apartment building in Downtown Los Angeles that has an internet connection provided via a Free Space Optical connection. Tenants can choose to go with a local ISP - AerioConnect - to provide internet access via a direct Ethernet line instead of using Cable or DSL.
On the top of the building is a four-lens laser transceiver pointed at some building in Downtown that provides a Gigabit uplink.
They let you construct your own plan, you just pay per megabit per month. Each apartment is wired with Cat5e to every room, and one of the closets has a little networking panel that also receives an ethernet drop from a router in the building.
The first few months we had service at our apartment, they forgot to cap our bandwidth, and speedtest.net reported that I was getting a 60Mbps connection.
i like this. surfing on the net while blasting yr bitchy neighbour's eyes and incinerating their babies..
Laser "radios" and other technologies similar to this are not really geared towards consumers or cellular providers. I have worked in the cellular industry, as well as the ISP industry for a number of years and I can tell you that this technology is great for MANs, or small backbones like others here have said, but not much else. I doubt they will be inexpensive any time soon. The agency I currently work for uses "millimeter wave" radios (73-83 GHz) that can push 1.25 Gbps. They have dropped in price from $70,000 USD per set to $30,000 USD in the past 5 years. Laser radios currently are much more expensive than this. I imagine they will be affordable someday, but not today and definitely tomorrow.