Connectivity Technology Blog

We have looked at Wi-Fi 7, a.k.a. IEEE 802.11be  earlier . The technology is still undergoing standardization with a final release expected in 2024. A recent IEEE Spectrum article details speed evolution of IEEE 802.11.  Wi-Fi went mainstream with the 802.11g standard in 2003, which improved performance and reliability over earlier 802.11a/b standards. My first 802.11g adapter was a revelation when I installed it in my ThinkPad’s PC Card slot. A nearby café jumped on the trend, making a midday coffee-and-classwork break possible. That wasn’t a thing before 802.11g. Still, 802.11g often tried your patience. Anything but an ideal connection left me staring at half-loaded Web pages. I soon learned which spots in the café had the best connection. Wi-Fi 6, released in 2019, has maximum speeds of 600 megabits per second for the single band and 9,608 Mb/s on a single network. That’s nearly 40 percent as fast as the Wi-Fi 5 standard and more than 175 times as fast as the 802.11g connection I

This is definitely a billion (or millions of) dollar(s) question. Anyone even remotely familiar with 5G will know that one of the use cases for 5G is mMTC or massive 'Machine Type Communications' (MTC - 3GPP defined name for M2M). We also looked at , not so long back, that even though it was predicted that there would be 50 billion cellular IoT devices by 2020, the total number is far behind. In another recent post we argued that the IoT traffic will be shifting from 2G to 4G over the next few years because of the uncertainty of 2G networks in many countries after 2030. This has led to many IoT devices manufacturers to start thinking about not just 4G but also 5G.  At the Telecoms Europe 5G conference back in November 2021, Erik Brenneis, CEO of Vodafone IoT presented their vision on how IoT is already mainstream and how IoT will make 5G mainstream. Here is the summary of his talk: 5G promises to be 10x faster than current LTE networks. This increase in speed will allow IoT d

When we first talked about Starlink back in 2019 , we saw in the video that the concept involved laser communication to communicate between the satellites. While the initially launched satellites did not have the laser communication mechanism built in, it looks like they are being added to the newer ones.  A report from Fast Company in late 2021 said: One of the next big upgrades in telecom will involve satellites firing lasers at each other—to beam data, not blow stuff up. The upside of replacing traditional radio-frequency communication with lasers, that encode data as pulses of light, can be much like that of deploying fiber-optic cable for terrestrial broadband: much faster speeds and much lower latency. “Laser links in orbit can reduce long-distance latency by as much as 50%, due to higher speed of light in vacuum & shorter path than undersea fiber,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted in July about the upgrade now beginning for that firm’s Starlink satellite constellation. The