NTT Demos 1 Gbps WiFi

Coming to offer a boost to a certain widespread and popular connectivity technology, NTT has demonstrated a new iteration of the WiFi wireless solution, one that will eventually land in homes and offices.

Wireless connectivity is being used in an increasingly large number of electronic applications, but there is also room for improvement, as with everything else.

Apparently, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Corp has been developing a new and improved WiFi technology.

Dubbed "IEEE802.11ac" next-generation wireless LAN, it is a standard which supposedly has a data transfer rate of 1 Gbps per system.

The company demonstrated a prototype during the Wireless Technology Park (WTP) 2011, which took place between July 5 and 6 this year.

Using six antennas for transmission and three for reception, the system relied on a multi-user MIMO signal processing circuit made of FPGA (field programmable gate array).

FTT chose a space division multiplex connection method and the 5 GHz frequency band, ultimately enabling a system to wirelessly transmit data to three users at 120 Mbps at the same time.

Unfortunately, like many infant projects, the new WiFi standard is not even close to completion yet.

Instead, it will take years to finish, with the ETA (estimated time of arrival) being the year 2013, at which point all sorts of systems will get it.

Of course, given the way WiFi of today is already part of other things besides computers, it makes sense that “IEEE802.11ac” will, eventually, come to be just as widespread.

Until the allotted time passes, however, users will have to live with just imagining and looking forward towards high-speed consumer electronics, tablets, smartphones, etc.

As for everything else that NTT has in store, its exhibition at WTP 2011 included a transceiver module that relied on the 60 GHz frequency bed when making millimeter-wave communications.

A LAN environment with this module integrated should become a reality at some point, but no ETA was given.