CSIRO looks to deliver 50Mbps to the 'wireless four percent' of NBN customers

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 04 November 2010 14:12

Business IT - Technology

The CSIRO is making a case for digital dividend spectrum in rural Australia to be repurposed for its fledgling point-to-point wireless technology having demonstrated 12Mbps symmetrical throughput on one analogue broadcast channel and saying that, with access to multiple channels, 50Mbps symmetrical to multiple users would be achievable.

The technology, dubbed Ngara*, has been designed to use the existing topology of the analogue TV broadcast network and much of its infrastructure. CSIRO hopes to use the existing transmission towers, without need to build more and, with some modifications, the existing TV antennas or rural homes.

The technology was announced yesterday and had its first demonstration, in the CSIRO's laboratories, to telecoms industry executives and engineers today, 4 November. It will be taken into the field for its first real world trial in December.

Ian Oppermann, director of the CSIRO's ICT Centre, told iTWire "We are using the existing broadcast infrastructure as much as possible and squeezing every last drop of bandwidth we can out of it. What we are demonstrating today is 12Mbps up and down to six users simultaneously using one analogue channel. That's 12 times six times two, 144Mbps in total."

Oppermann is confident that the CSIRO will be able to extract greater bandwidth from a single analogue channel and higher bandwidths to more users by aggregating multiple 7MHz channels. At present it claims to be achieving a spectral efficiency of 20 bits per second per Hertz - three times that of the nearest comparable technology.

"Today we can support six simultaneous users. Our next big release is 12 users and the next big step after that, which needs some development, is to combine multiple 7MHz channels to get to an aggregate of 100MHz that we could spit 50 up and 50 down, 75 and 25 or in other ways. We are quite confident we will be able to offer 100Mbps to six or 12 simultaneous user, so we have very good upgrade path."

The 'Digital Dividend' will release a total of 126MHz, but there are many contenders for the spectrum, in particular the mobile network operators to meet burgeoning demand for mobile broadband services.

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