matsu

Universal bandwidth

People label me as a crazy when I rave about the geometric increase of technology, but check this out: a working demonstration of 360Mbit wireless technology. “We expect mobile systems with transmission speeds of more than 100 megabits per second to be the standard in about ten years”, said the President of Networks of Siemens mobile, Christoph Caselitz.

With this statement in mind, let’s look at the evolution of wide-area wireless data transmission rates:

• 1991 – First commercial GSM service in Finland – 9,600 bits per second data capability
• 2003 – Commercial UMTS service introduced in Europe – 384,000 bits per second (384kbit) data capability (the system can go up to 1,920kbit, but we’re talking about commercial availability)
• 2015 – expected availability of a 100,000,000 bits per second (100Mbit) commercial wide-area wireless data transmission service.

From 1991 to 2003 (12 years), there’s a 40 fold increase in data transmission. But if we consider Mr. Christoph Caselitz’s statement as probable, there will be an approximate 260 fold increase in data rates in the 12 years from 2003 to 2015. Extrapolating the geometry of this increase, we can expect an almost 2,000 fold (!) increase in the 12 years from 2015 to 2027, leading to the expectation of a commercial wide-area wireless data transmission service of approximately 170,000,000,000 bits per second (170Gbit) in 22 years time. This would mean that you could transmit about four 4.7GByte DVDs per second to a mobile device.