(ORDO NEWS) — Together with NASA, the US Air Force, and Amazon, Jornet has shown for the first time that 6G high-speed broadband terahertz wireless is possible over long distances.
Together with NASA, the US Air Force and Amazon, Jornet has shown for the first time that high-speed terahertz broadband wireless communications are possible over long distances.
The terahertz range is a set of frequencies above 100 gigahertz, that is, outside of 5G. Although the possibility of transmitting signals in the terahertz range has long been proven, it is extremely difficult to do this over a long distance.
The higher the frequency, the shorter the distance information can be transmitted.
According to the lead author of the work, Josep Jornet, terahertz communication has so far been something of a whisper – its signal could only be received at a distance of half a meter.
And now a big step forward has been made – the signal was transmitted and received at a distance of 2 km.
High-speed communication anywhere in the world
Jornet and his team were able to design and operate a 2 km terahertz link, the longest ever deployed on Earth. Scientists have been greatly helped by NASA research.
For years, NASA has been experimenting with terahertz wireless systems to detect signals in space, but the agency’s efforts have focused solely on receiving signals.
Now scientists have managed not only to receive, but also to transmit a terahertz signal.
The system developed by Jornet and his collaborators can achieve throughput that is two orders of magnitude greater than a 5G network. Potentially, such a system can transmit more than 100 gigabits per second.
Jornet predicts that even before 6G is available in mobile phones, the terahertz standard will already be of great importance in the communications infrastructure.
“You, as a user, will still be using your phone, but suddenly you will notice that your network is faster because in many cases, the bottleneck is not your phone, but the infrastructure,” Jornet says. “Our work speeds up infrastructure.”
But there are also serious limitations. “One of the requirements for the transmission of such a signal is the absence of obstacles,” says Jornet. “You must have a line of sight.”
And this opportunity is provided by satellite technology, for example, Starlink, which is being developed by SpaceX – satellite communications are just “in line of sight”.
“You will have connectivity no matter where you are, simply because you have a constellation of satellites orbiting the Earth.” Jornet says. But this is still a long way off.
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