Faster Wifi Means Better Classroom Networks

I don’t blog about this sort of thing as much as I used to, not because I am not finding it, but because it happens every day. Computer technology continues to get faster and networking speeds continue to get faster too. This story talks about a new advance in Wifi that might allow for much faster transmission speeds. In fact they speculate you might be able to hit 100 Gb per second. This is hugely faster than we have now. Your typical Wifi 802.11n router these days can hit 144 Mb per second. This is sufficient for watching Netflix streams. On paper you can also watch full 1080p video streams but it’s not reliable yet. As the article talks about, the current speeds they have hit are about 3Gb/s which is about 20 times faster than current Wifi.

Interestingly, this is one of those technologies that will have more of an impact in the classroom than in the home. By having faster speeds, it allows more users to be connected at once. If you have a classroom of 30 iPads, you will need a serious wifi network to handle the load. This technology shows it’s on the way. Awesome!

• Scientists Make Wi-Fi Twenty Times Faster

  • a team of Japanese researchers has just broken the record for wireless data transmission in the terahertz range—with a data rate 20 times higher than most current Wi-Fi connections.
  • The researchers, from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, have developed hardware capable of transmitting data at 3Gb/s—that’s about 20 times faster than current Wi-Fi connections—at frequencies up to 542GHz.
  • It is, of course, currently just a proof of concept, and terahertz Wi-Fi would probably only ever work over distances of the order of tens of yards. But given that researchers think it might be possible nudge 100Gb/s in the future, I think you could cope.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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