Beyond broadband: way beyond
p2p news / p2pnet: Beyond broadband faster, farther, cheaper ..
That’s the promise xG Technology, a Florida start-up which says it’s produced a new low power, long range broadband modulation and encoding technology called xMax which boosts the range and power efficiency of all wired and wireless communications.
Or as ITWorldCanada.com puts it, according to xG, xMax is, “1,000 times more efficient than WiMax” and could result in wireless LANs that’ll “run for years on watch batteries”.
xMax isn’t a compression technique, says the company, which plans to license rather than manufacture. Instead, it’s a “synergistic mix of two well-established communication approaches that dramatically improves spectrum utilization”.
xMax can be designed to operate at any frequency and it is suitable for use on licensed and unlicensed spectrum, says xG. By combining elements of traditional narrowband systems with key elements found in wideband systems, “xMax delivers broadband data rates orders of magnitude farther than other technologies operating at the same frequency and power level,” it promises, going on, “Conversely, xMax achieves equal range with far less power, thereby improving battery life.”
ITWorldCanada.com says during a demo, xG used a transmitter “not unlike a cordless phone base station, operating in the unlicensed – and crowded – 900 MHz band, to send a 3.7 megabit per second data signal to a radius of 18 miles across the suburbs of Miami, using 50mW and an omnidirectional antenna”.
The company is being backed by merchant bank Mooers Branton, whose Rick Mooers is also xG’s chief executive.
It’s promised to have commercial systems ready by the second half of next year, which can be sold off-the-shelf, says the story, quoting Mooers. “We’re in discussion with channel partners, to make a shrink-wrapped package that would allow anyone to set up as a wireless ISP,” he said. “In the longer term we see it rolling out to chips that will be in millions of different units.”
But, ” Before any of this happens, more demonstrations are needed, to show the system is robust against interference and multipath, and can operate in an area more crowded than 18 miles of swamp,” adds ITWorldCanada.com.
“It will also need to be approved by the FCC and other regulators round the world.”
(Thanks, Ted V)
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See:-
ITWorldCanada.com – XMax aims to spark low-power wireless revolution, November 7, 2005
BetaNews – Napster Upgrades Music Service to 3.5, November 9, 2005
November 10th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
A network of interconnected FreeWan Cells has just become a near fact if this is true. If this technology becomes available at a reasonable price (ie what an average person can afford), then we will no longer have to pay for Internet.