100Mbps wireless broadband being developed by CSIRO

According to the National Science Organisation the key to bringing a National Broadband Network that is cost effective to rural and regional Australia is in the Wireless technology that CSIRO is currently developing.

The group executive for information, communication sciences and technology at CSIRO, Alex Zelinksy said that the technology, which has been named Broadband to the Bush, is being designed to use the Australian analogue television infrastructure that is already in place.

He said “What we are proposing to do is use the broadcast towers and UHF and VHF frequencies that will be left when analogue television is switched off. The whole idea is that there is no comms gear in that space as it has been used for TV and we can reuse the broadcast infrastructure.”

Zelinksy said that in this way, anywhere that a current analogue television signal could be received users would also be able to access wireless broadband.

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), which transmits and receives multiple data streams using multiple antennas, and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which uses a modulation scheme that is found in wireless LAN standards like 802.11g, are used in the new CSIRO technology.

Zelinksy said that the OFDM-MIMO technology could, when combine, make it far more efficient than current wireless and would prove invaluable in allowing the National Broadband Network to reach the other 10 percent of the population that would not be able to get fixed-line broadband.

He said “With normal wireless technologies you would need 36 base stations to cover what we can do with one, so you reduce your capital costs. We believe [the broadcast range] could cover 100 square kilometers and at rates of between 12 and 50 megabits per second, but it could scale up to the full 100Mbps (equal to the proposed speed of the fibre NBN).”

The fact that wireless technology would still lag behind the speeds offered by fibre for some time to come, and it would be susceptible to interference was something Zelinksy agreed with, but he said that there were rapid improvements with this technology.

He said “Wireless is always slower than wired, but wireless is always progressing – we have shown you can do wireless backhaul at six gig. As time goes on the six gig will become 12 gig and so on. Invariably as you are not going through glass fibre, a sealed medium, there will always be some interference so it will be less reliable.”