The incredible bandwidth is surely great but they don't mention how to improve latency here, they forget to tell what was the latency of this 100m transfer from an antenna to a receiver.
One of the big issues with today apps is latency, this is easily frustrating. It also prevents apps such as real time multiplayer games to be viable.
Any latency you perceive comes from your packets sitting in a buffer waiting for their turn to be transmitted or waiting to be re-transmitted after a collision. The problem of queue management for wired networks has only had a satisfactory solution for a few years. When you throw in things like collisions due to the shared medium and interference from other users of the spectrum (less of a problem for cellular than WiFi), transmission rate and power selection covering multiple orders of magnitude, interference that can be problematic for some users but undetectable for users elsewhere in the cell, and the almost complete unwillingness of the hardware vendors to sell anything hackable enough to do research with, it's clear that wireless will continue to suck for the foreseeable future. However, a lot of these problems get a lot easier when you're working at a frequency that can never reach from the inside of your house to the inside of the neighbor's house.
There are fundamental limits on the information capacity of an antenna using the EM spectrum [2], based on the surface area of the volume of space it occupies, in units of wavelength. (Related to the Holographic Principle?) I haven't done the calculation, to see if the claimed rate is within this limit, but a spectral efficiency of 10^7 bit/s/Hz is about 5 orders of magnitude beyond what others have reported (less than 100bit/s/Hz [3]). It will be interesting to see the details!
[1] http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/02/university-of-s...
"UPDATE 25th Feb 2015
We’ve been finding the 1Tbps claim a little difficult to digest and so have been prodding Professor Rahim Tafazolli for further details, specifically a greater clarification of how the performance was achieved.
According to Tafazolli, the new class of Detector (a completely new approach) was tested through computer simulations (these simulated a real mobile/wireless environment) and were found to achieve the 1Tbps rate claimed. In our view that’s quite a bit different from conducting a practical test.
Next year Tafazolli said that his team would work to implement this in a proper hardware/software platform and test it in a real environment in the 5GIC outdoor testbed. Hopefully they will be able to announce the performance in 2017."
[2] http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0701055.pdf
[3] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=tru...
Just posted 22/9 40ms ping in DC Union Station. It's 7pm and the place is packed with people playing on their cell phones while waiting. Maybe blame SF NIMBYs for not letting the cell companies put up enough towers or run enough fiber backhaul?
On a couple of the packages, it's possible to blow through your entire monthly cap in 6 hours - and I've seen people do it.
Data caps will rise substantially over the next five years. By 2020x, they'll be commonly at several hundred gigabytes at 5G speeds across the US and Europe, with unlimited data at lower speeds as a universal feature. No doubt numerous carriers will offer variations of unlimited data.
"One of the new AT&T plans will cost $25 per month and offer two gigabytes of data per month, which AT&T says will be enough for 98 percent of its smart phone customers. Additional gigabytes will cost $10 each."
This is in 2010.
Today that $25 will actually get you HALF the data it did in 2010, five years ago.