iBurst gets a speed boost, to 2Mbps, and a voice phone

Stuart Corner
Friday, 14 December 2007 01:23

Your IT - Home IT

Kyocera, the manufacturer of the iBurst technology behind Personal Broadband Australia's wireless broadband service, has announced a new desktop modem that will double download speed to 2Mbps. It will not require any upgrade to an iBurst network: the speed doubling will be achieved by aggregating two data streams for a single user. Kyocera also produces USB, PCMCIA and ExpressCard iBurst modems but has not indicated when 2Mbps versions of these might be available. The new desktop modem will be available in March 2008.

"Kyocera designed this product in response to market demand for ever-faster wireless mobile Internet access," said Mr Masashi Yano, deputy general manager, of Kyocera's corporate communication system equipment division. "We will position the new modem as a high-end product, with 2Mbps user-priority features, multi-session capability and quality of service functions."

Kyocera has also introduced an iBurst telephone handset: a standard phone with built in iBurst modem that can make VoIP calls over either the iBurst network or, via an Ethernet connection, through a broadband connected PC.

iBurst was developed by ArrayComm a company founded by Marty Cooper, widely regarded as the 'father' of cellular wireless technology. It claims to be the most spectrally efficient of all broadband wireless access technologies. "The iBurst system provides high spectrum efficiency of 32Mbps total throughput per base station (24Mbps downlink; 8Mbps uplink) over just 5MHz of bandwidth," according to Kyocera.