Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Long Range High Speed Wireless for NBN

Stuart Kennedy reported in The Australian that CSIRO is seeking a deal with NBN in the next three months for use of their long range high speed wireless broadband technology ("CSIRO keen to secure commercialisation deal for Ngara", March 08, 2011 12:00AM). This is CSIRO's Ngara wireless broadband technology. The claim is that just a firmware and antenna upgrade is required to mobile phone LTE base station technology to make it usable.

If this is true, it is a major achievement and about five years ahead of what I thought possible. This would allow the provision of broadband at a much lower cost in regional areas of Australia. It will also be worth billions of dollars in royalties for Australia. Such claims may seem far fetched, but CSIRO invented some of the technology unpinning WiFi and so far has received $200M in royalties. The market for long range wireless devices is much smaller than WiFi, but each unit will be much higher priced.

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