Claims of NBN's death by DIDO greatly exaggerated

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 31 July 2011 16:16

Opinion and Analysis

News emanating out of the US of a new and "revolutionary" wireless technology have, predictably, been seized on by opponents of the NBN that the Government should not be putting $36b worth of eggs in one technology basket, namely FTTH. Before they shoot off at the mouth the Cassandras of the NBN should read the claims for the technology more closely.

The Australian reported "The new technology, called DIDO, allows Internet users to access download speeds up to 1000 times faster than possible on conventional wireless networks, without any fall in speed as more users get on to the network.

It quoted Opposition communications spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, saying that the wireless breakthrough underlined the importance of being "technology agnostic" when it came to choosing broadband solutions to meet the nation's needs.

Details of the DIDO technology have been published in a white paper from which the Australian quoted as follows.

"The potential of DIDO is to have unlimited numbers of simultaneous users, all streaming high-definition video, utilising the same spectrum that a single user would use with conventional wireless technology, with no degradation in performance, no dead zones, no interference between users and no reduction in data rate as more users are added."

That's the equivalent of the perpetual motion machine - impossible according to the laws of physics. Something to which far too many writers, including my own colleague Stan Beer, are inclined to give short shrift: despite the fact that they have been shown to apply throughout the known universe, that there are no proven exceptions to them and that it is the understanding and application of these laws that has made possible all the technologies we enjoy today.

As Beer wrote in his iTWire article "claims to offer all the advantages of wireless Internet connectivity without the disadvantages of latency and bandwidth limitations caused by the pesky laws of physics that NBN devotees love to cite."

CONTINUED