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 September 12th 2008 10:39AM
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.