CSIRO demos 12Mbps symmetrical NBN wireless technology

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 17 March 2011 09:20

Business IT - Technology

The CSIRO is to stage a demonstration of its broadband wireless technology claiming it to be superior to established technologies for the wireless component of the National Broadband Network.

The system, named Ngara - - a word meaning to listen, hear and think in the language of the Darug people, traditional owners of the land on which the ICT Centre's Sydney lab sits - is claimed to give six simultaneous users 12Mbps from the network to their home and 12Mbps from their home to the network with "barely a quarter the number of transmission towers required by currently available wireless solutions." It is being demonstrated to "decision makers in industry and policy" at CSIRO's Marsfield laboratory.

The director of the CSIRO's ICT centre, Dr Ian Oppermann, said: "We feel symmetry is important as people interact more using bandwidth-hungry applications such as videoconferencing - they could be working from home, participating in a lesson or visiting their doctor online. It's easy to see how these services would be particularly valuable in rural areas."

CSIRO unveiled the technology in November 2010. It 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 needing to build more and, with some modifications, the existing TV antennas or rural homes.

It gave its first public demonstration in December 2010 in Smithton in north-west Tasmania and claims: "We showed six 'users' simultaneously sending almost error free digital transmission at 24 Mbps from farms 70 metres to 8.4 kilometres away." A detailed report on the trial is available here.

Oppermann said at the time that he was confident CSIRO would 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.

CONTINUED