When we talk about grid computing, we often talk about bringing computing power to those who need it at a price point they can afford. Nevermind that sharing large data files produced from this computing power still requires wires and often long ones. What if such data sharing could be handled wirelessly? With so much focus on optical networking research, the efforts of the wireless crowd sometimes tend be overlooked. We may be years away from achieving ubiquitous ultra hi-speed, low latency networking using wireless technology, but recent reports make it clear that progress is being made within the mobile telecom/IT industry.

After initial tests in Israel, high speed downlink packet acess (HSDPA), a wireless broadband technology, has just been demonstrated in Japan at the Networld+Interop 2005 in Tokyo. Achieving throughput rates of 14.4 Mbps, which is fast enough for streaming DVD quality video, the demonstration greatly exceeded current commercial-grade wireless capacity. While paltry compared to current wired networks, NASA regularly tests network capabilities, which reveal that

end–to-end file transport from major scientific data repositories to end users laboratories across the shared internet is…typically 50-100 mbps (see the Introduction of the May issue of CTWatch Quarterly)

Technology News Daily has a piece about the Japan demonstration.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 6th, 2005 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Networking, Commercial Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.