Until I can get internet options faster than 50Mbps in my area I don't understand why we're trying to get higher and higher upper limits on speed
The triangle of compromise
~~Speed~~ Power
Bandwidth
Range
You cant have all 3. Just like manufacturing
To be fair most wifi is used within homes or businesses these days so I would simply sacrifice range — as long as the minimum range is reasonable
The issue will be less about "range" and more about being able to go through a wall. Higher frequency makes for shorter radio waves that are closer together. The more this is done, the less it can go through solid objects and still be decipherable.
It's like a sound wave. That big low frequency bass sound can shake your walls while playing from in your neighbors house. You can't make out or hear a single word being sung, though. Frequency is too high to make it through to you.
This tech can be nicely used for wireless VR and maybe a couple other things that need to move data at super low latency at a local level, but beyond that, it will be kind of useless for anything over the next decade.
yeah but this wifi you can only use in one room ..
I would use this for streaming games from a wired PC to a device that’s wireless. Not having to run a wire is magical.
I mean, no kidding. Þere are any number is use cases for getting rid of wires. Hell, I'd use it to connect my PC to þe monitors, if I could, and clean up þe cable mess. But streaming from þe home media server to a TV? No brainer. Also, even if þe single-room comment is accurate, daisy chain. Þe only real show stopper would be if it were line-of-sight.
also don’t need 15 GBps (120gbps) for every day use, so some of that bandwidth can be sacrificed for better range. ultra high speed hdmi is 48gbps.
Yeah I wonder if they can use the same configuration to improve bandwidth at frequencies that penetrate walls, people and things better
Wireless 4k 120hz streaming from my PC to TV would be pretty sweet. I can run a cable if i really wanted... but this would be easier. It's still more than that, but getting that would be sweet.
Speed and bandwidth are the same thing. Power is the other side of that triangle.
But that ignores encoding, and other tricks like signal shaping, frequency multiplexing, and all kinds of fun stuff. Wireless data transmission is complicated. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation
Speed and bandwidth correlate but aren't the same. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can pass through a medium and speed is the transmission rate. If you have a gig connection and one device, you can get close to gig speeds. If you have the same gig connection with 1000 devices saturating the medium, you aren't likely to get gig speeds.
Paper: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10584545
40GHz bandwidth LOL
I genuinely want to understand why is that funny? Is it unachievable for consumer electronics or..?
Well it's a couple of things.
First off, a wireless transmission speed of 120Gbps sounds really impressive but remember from the Shannon-Hartley theorem that the maximum channel capacity is just a function of bandwidth and SNR. This means that you can get an arbitrarily high transmission speed by increasing bandwidth to an obscene amount and/or by increasing SNR (by transmitting at an obscenely high transmission power).
In the paper they say that the transmit power was 15 dBm which is a normal transmit power for WiFi, so it's the 40GHz bandwidth that's doing the heavy lifting in allowing that data rate.
The second thing is that WiFi 6 (for example) uses 1.2 GHz of bandwidth in the 6GHz range, divided into seven non-overlapping 160MHz channels. WiFi 5 uses about nine 80MHz channels in the 5GHz range, and so on. So if you want to use the technology demonstrated in the paper for WiFi (as the headline of the article is suggesting) then you'd need a bunch of 40GHz channels in the higher ~200-300 GHz range which would be in the very high microwave range, bordering on far infra-red!
If you want to imagine how useful that would be, just think about how useful your infra-red TV remote is. You would only be able to do line-of-sight point-to-point links at that frequency.
IR point-to-point links already exist, and the silicon they invented for this paper is impressive, but the hype around it being a possible future WiFi standard doesn't really hold up to basic inspection.
And what are we downloading? Is the cloud dead? Why do i need 15gbps on my phone? Is it made for consoles and their relentless 120gb patches?
Laptops have all but taken over from desktops for everything but AAA gaming. New houses are still built with zero Ethernet because "the internet is Wi-Fi right?"
People are using their laptops to edit video off of a NAS, MacBooks can run 100 GB LLMs. Heck even non-AAA games are many gigabytes.
For phones / portables, assuming it doesn't draw more power, it would mean shorter download times, which means less battery usage.
1.5gb/s is way more than enough for the average person. Hell, 200Mb/s is more than enough. That would only be 10 min.
In the US we’ll do anything but build fiber with the billions we tossed at the telecom industry.
Putting fiber in the ground is expensive. I work for an ISP, and we estimate fiber overbuild costs at $15/ft. So a mile of underground fiber costs about $79,200.
For home use, all I can think of is wireless video. 15 GB/s is faster than the fastest DisplayPort or HDMI versions. It could handle any resolution and refresh rate currently in use without any compression. That would be useful for VR headsets since they need low latency.
Yeah - that covers about 1/100000 users
I'm pretty sure anyone using an HDMI cable could appreciate having no cables except power.
On the flip side, if you still need a power cable anyway, it's usually way cheaper to bundle the media (and optionally control/network) signals into the same cable than using wireless. (Sidenote: Honestly it's kinda weird to me that we haven't seen hardly any of this in consumer spaces. The newer USB-C revisions could easily supply power, display, audio, and network to the average TV over one cable.)
Now, with true wireless power (I'm thinking of this video in particular), that proposition can change dramatically.
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