Huawei Claims 30Gbps Wireless 'Beyond LTE' 146
shreshtha writes "Huawei says it has 'recently introduced ... Beyond LTE technology, which significantly increases peak rates to 30Gbps — over 20 times faster than existing commercial LTE networks.' It claims to have achieved this with 'key breakthroughs in antenna structure, radio frequency architecture, IF (intermediate frequency) algorithms, and multi-user MIMO (multi-input multi-output).'"
sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is refreshing (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it refreshing to see them creating new technology instead of just implementing standards.
Plus it just confirms my comments yesterday about even engineering and design talent moving overseas; that no job is "safe" any more from the risk of being offshored. Given Huawei's market share in the telco industry, this particular bit of engineering should make anyone still working for the formerly big names in telecommunications some serious pause when they think about their job security.
It isn't that long ago that people thought a job with Northern Telecom would last a life time, and we know how that turned out for those who believed in that dream.
Re:It was bound to happen sometime (Score:5, Insightful)
I think bandwidth (as in transfer rates) will hit diminishing returns rather soon. Once your phone can stream live HD video and audio...what's the incentive to improve? Sure, file downloads could be faster, but most people would rather just stream their content, and unless your mobile devices have terabyte hard drives in them you won't be downloading a huge amount anyway.
I'd say once mobile devices can consistently transfer at ~10Mbps, the focus should really switch to increasing coverage and caps. All the speed in the world doesn't help if you can't get reliable service or you use up your monthly allotment in five minutes.
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It was bound to happen sometime (Score:2, Insightful)
This is misleading. The reason why is that, because of things like spatial coding using MIMO, orbital polarization (discussed last week), etc--plus many more to-be-exploited phenomena--the number of "channels" possible is effectively limited only by computational capability. Yes, there's a well-defined limit per-channel, but the number of possible channels is proportional to processing power.
Re:Or they just made it up (Score:5, Insightful)
Reason why Huawei stuff is so prolific is that they literally give it away. Undercutting competitors and getting market share is their principal concern, not providing a decent product.
Of all the stuff you find in a typical telco cool room, Huawei consistently, in my experience at least, is the most problematic. Serious quality issues, things feel like they are held together with duck tape and string. Fragile and prone to regular failure. Software interfaces are rubbish. Poor quality and change control. e.g. two products with same product designation in two different telcos will be essentially different products. Awful stuff.
I've worked with a number of telco CIOs not one of them has had glowing things to say about them. They all buy on price and later regret it.
Re:Who are all these people who need 4G? (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't need caps at the 2 or 4 mark even now. It's just the abusive practices of a tight-fisted duopoly. Consider that the towers go virtually unused between 12 AM and 8 AM. Why not give everyone unlimited data during off-peak hours, the same way they did with voice (unlimited nights and weekends)? Now you see this is about earning more money through punitive overages than about providing service.
Re:Not if you are on the wrong end (i.e. 1st World (Score:5, Insightful)
While some might dream of a return to "America First" and "Made In Canada" policies and tarrifs, I can't imagine us ever returning to such systems.
First and foremost, the consumer won't stand for it. The consumer now expects computers at under $1000 instead of the $2000 plus it used to cost to manufacture them onshore.
A recent article I read pegged the "Made in America" price of an iPad at roughly $1400 -- more than double the market price. At such prices, people simply would stop buying them, because it's pretty damned hard to justify toys over $1000 in most people's minds.
I don't think it's a good situation for the "First World" at all, but I can't see any of the companies involved in offshoring being willing to return to North American manufacturing and assembly when it would make their products completely uncompetitive in the rest of the world markets. Quite frankly, companies like Apple make far more from their foreign sales than they do from North American sales. As a result, if you returned to a nationalistic policy on manufacturing, they'd simply pull up the remainder of their North American roots, officially become a foreign company, and keep on with business as usual. With the US one jewel less in the globalization crown.
And the same goes for all the other big multinationals. The only thing keeping their head offices in the US or Canada is tradition. Globalization has become an unstoppable behemoth; no one with real influence over the government through lobbyists would tolerate stepping back from globalization.
Let's face it -- the corporations sold out the people by lobbying the government for years or decades, and the people were too engrossed by their television sets and Big Macs to notice until it was too late.