New Wireless Technology Sets Record At Nearly 1 Terabit Per Second
Source: ExtremeTech, Ryan Whitwam
Photo: Andriy Onufriyenko/Moment via Getty Images
The system developed at University College London uses a combination of radio waves and light.
Wireless technologies are getting faster all the time, but they don’t always feel that fast. The latest 5G networks have a theoretical throughput of 20 gigabits per second, but you’ll never see those speeds in real life. A team from University College London (UCL) has devised a new approach to amp up wireless communication by combining radio waves and light. The result is a new record for wireless speed, nearing the fabled one-terabit barrier.
There are myriad reasons your smartphone can’t reach the unfathomable multi-gigabit speeds of the 5G standard. It’s too bad—fiber optic networks that carry data most of the way are lightning fast, but the wireless hop between cables and your devices is a bottleneck. Factors like modem efficiency and network congestion always conspire to lower your speeds, and wireless spectrum is a limited resource— to avoid interference, networks transmit over relatively small frequency ranges.
“Current wireless communication systems are struggling to keep up with the increasing demand for high-speed data access, with capacity in the last few meters between the user and the fiber optic network holding us back,” said lead author Zhixin Liu.
The University College London team tackled that last problem by transmitting data over a huge swath of frequencies, from 5 to 150GHz. The wider frequency range unlocks a massive speed bump, reaching a peak of 938 gigabits per second. That’s about 30% faster than the previous record for fastest wireless data transmission.
The wireless signal was split into two parts, with the lower half consisting of radio waves and the upper portion in light. From 5 to 50 GHz, high-speed digital-to-analog converters produced radio waves similar to current 5G signals, ranging from the mid-band spectrum to millimeter wave frequencies even higher than what is currently in use on multi-gigabit cellular modules. The other part of the signal is photonic, which relies on light-based radio signal generators operating from 50 to 150GHz.