Full Duplex Wireless Tech Could Double Bandwidth

CWmike writes "Rice University researchers announced on Tuesday that they have successfully demonstrated full-duplex wireless tech that would allow a doubling of network traffic without the need for more cell towers. Professor Ahutosh Sabharwal said the innovative technology requires a minimal amount of new hardware for both mobile devices and networks. However, it does require new standards, meaning it might not be available for several years as carriers move to 5G networks, he added. By allowing a cell phone or other wireless device to transmit data and receive data on the same frequency, unlike with today's tech, the new standard could double a network's capacity. Rice has created a Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP) with open source software that provides a space for researches from other organizations to innovate freely and examine full-duplex innovations."

More than double?

[Geoff-with-a-G]

In wired Ethernet topologies, going full duplex yields significantly more than double the throughput, since you no longer have collisions, back-offs, and re-sends. The article doesn't elaborate whether their full-duplex wireless would still be multi-access (think WiFi, with many clients on the same AP and same channels) or if each frequency would be carved out for one client and the base-station (in which case you'd see the same gains you did on wired Ethernet).

M point is that while they cite "allow a doubling of network traffic", the reality is even better than that. Full duplex gets you more than double throughput, as well as improved jitter/latency since you no longer have to randomly re-transmit frames (or randomly wait to transmit, as with WiFi collision avoidance).

This isn't very helpful

[The O Rly Factor]

When AT&T, et. al. are in a position where they are the DeBeers of wireless bandwidth. I think instead of actually spending money to upgrade infrastructure, they would rather just continue to artificially limit the amount of available bandwidth so they can keep it grossly overvalued. Gotta keep those profits rolling in for the shareholders somehow.