[LINK] Indonesia Overtaking Australia with Wireless Internet

[Tom Worthington]

Jan Whitaker wrote:

> I'm curious. Is there any work going on to increase the amount of 
> throughput and multiplexing within a frequency allocation? We keep 
> talking about the way fibre expansion can happen with better end 
> equipment replacement. Are there similar advancements in the R&D 
> centres for wifi as well? ...

Yes, there are people researching how to increase wireless capacity, at
ANU, NICTA, CSIRO and other research organisations in Australia. This 
research is mostly into how to use the greater signal processing 
available, multiple antennas and more, shorter range, base stations: 
Here are some recent papers: 
<http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?as_q=wireless&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=australian+national+university&as_occt=any&as_ylo=2010&as_sdt=1&as_subj=eng&as_sdts=5&hl=en&as_vis=1>.

Fibre optic cable will still have fundamental advantages over
wireless: the signal is confined to the cable making interference less
of a problem and light has a higher frequency than radio frequencies
used for wireless, so it can transmit much more information.

I get invited to the ANU/NICTA/CSIRO wireless seminars:
<http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Acecs.anu.edu.au%2Fseminars+wireless>.
But I do not understand much of what is discussed. One area which has
not been explored much is mesh networks, where the handsets themselves
relay the signals.

What I find more interesting are human factors ways to increase the
responsiveness of a hand held device, by providing a simplified
interface and summarised documents suited to a smaller screen and a more
distracted user. A good example is SMS, where the lack of length,
formatting and multimedia are see as features, not limitations. Images
and videos can be sent at lower resolution for mobile users and simpler
versions of web pages and documents can be  provided. Also the location
and current activity of the person can be derived automatically and used
to filter information offered.

Metadata can be used as a form of extreme data compression for mobile
users: rather than offering a large document which will take a long time
to download and the person will probably not want to read anyway, a
summary can be provided instead.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra