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?
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.
Yup. That’s why we gave them all that money years ago to do it. It was cheaper then too.
One example I’ve read, was to remotely drive autonomous vehicles, and feed back all data collected from cameras and sensors. I’m not a fan of it being used this way, but it would mostly serve that kind of purpose.
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.
Big data needs that, so it can spy you better.
The distribution of all human knowledge, untampered.
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.
VR headset streaming video from PC without cables.
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More bandwidth available for users means more people can do more things on the internet and at a higher quality.
If cell phone speeds are high enough, then we should be able to transition from wired internet which is not available to a lot of people to only using cell networks.
It’s also not going to be 15gbps per device.
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.
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
