Vortex wireless: Terabytes of Wi-Fi is on its way

Vortex Wi-Fi is going to everything we thought we knew about wireless networking.

Wi-Fi networking has gotten to be remarkably fast. But even as 802.11n, with up to 600 Megabits per second (Mbps) speeds has become commonplace, and 802-11ac, with its Gigabit speeds is finally showing up, we've seen nothing like the speeds that the still experimental twisted, vortex beams using orbital angular momentum (OAM) is going to deliver. In the lab, OAM technologies is already delivering a mind-bending 2.5 Terabits per second (Tbps).

Alan Willner and fellow researchers from the University of Southern California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, have just announced in a Nature article, Terabit free-space data transmission employing orbital angular momentum multiplexing that they can deliver 2.56Tbps speeds with by twisting beams of light together, multiplexing them, and then encoding data using OAM and current Wi-Fi technologies, such as spin angular momentum (SAM), which we're already using in Wi-Fi and 4G.

How fast is that? 2.56Tbps is about the same as 320 Gigabytes (not bits, bytes) of data a second. Or, to put in more homey terms, as 25GBs for a typical single layer Blu-Ray HDTV movie, an OAM wireless connection could send almost 13 HDTV movies a second to your television.

In short by twisting wireless signals into spirals, the researchers were able to encode far more information into a single connection than we've ever seen with any other networking technology. Trie, this latest test was done with optical transmissions, over only a meter. Before that test though Bo Thide of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics has already proven that OAM can be used with conventional wireless technologies. In his tests, Thide was able to use 2.4GHz Wi-Fi signal to send an OAM encoded signal over 442 meters.

Thide maintains that is just the tip of the ice-berg. He believes that besides being able to drastically increase Wi-Fi network throughput that the use of “OAM states might dramatically increase the capacity of any frequency band, allowing the use of dense coding techniques in each of these new vortex radio channels.” In other with OAM vortexes we can potentially transmit an “infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth, even without using polarization, multiport or dense coding techniques” on any kind of wireless network--TV, radio, Wi-Fi, 4G, what have you--at the same time on the same frequency.

In short, not only could Vortex wireless vastly increase our wireless networking speed it could end all our current congested wireless network problems. As this technology moves from the lab bench to the home and office we will see a wireless networking transformation as great as any we've ever seen since Marconi and Tesla simultaneously invented radio in the 1890s.

No, I'm not kidding. Vortex wireless is going to change everything. and I mean everything, we thought we knew about the limits of wireless networking.

Related Stories:

Netgear ushers in Gigabit Wi-Fi with first 802.11ac router 802.11ac: Gigabit Wi-Fi Devices will be shipping in 2012 Australian government patent troll collects from Wi-Fi vendors The Neutrino Network Four ways to get the most from your 802.11n Wi-Fi