Tech to Double Wi-Fi speed, Team led by Indian-origin Researcher

The team, led by Associate Professor Harish Krishnaswamy, developed the technology that needs only one antenna.

New York: Researchers, led by an Indian-origin engineer in US, have developed a novel technology that can double Wi-Fi speeds with a single antenna, a breakthrough that could revolutionise the field of telecommunications.
This is the first time researchers from Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science have integrated a non-reciprocal circulator and a full-duplex radio on a nanoscale silicon chip.
The team, led by Associate Professor Harish Krishnaswamy, developed the technology that needs only one antenna, thus enabling an even smaller overall system.
"This technology could revolutionise the field of telecommunications," said Krishnaswamy, director of the Columbia High-Speed and Mm-wave IC (CoSMIC) Lab.
"Our circulator is the first to be put on a silicon chip, and we get literally orders of magnitude better performance than prior work," said Krishnaswamy.
"Full-duplex communications, where the transmitter and the receiver operate at the same time and at the same frequency, has become a critical research area and now we have shown that WiFi capacity can be doubled on a nanoscale silicon chip with a single antenna. This has enormous implications for devices like smartphones and tablets," he said

Krishnaswamys group has been working on silicon radio chips for full duplex communications for several years and became particularly interested in the role of the circulator, a component that enables full-duplex communications where the transmitter and the receiver share the same antenna.
In order to do this, the circulator has to "break" Lorentz Reciprocity, a fundamental physical characteristic of most electronic structures that requires electromagnetic waves travel in the same manner in forward and reverse directions.
"We wanted to create a simple and efficient way, using conventional materials, to break Lorentz Reciprocity and build a low-cost nanoscale circulator that would fit on a chip," said PhD student Negar Reiskarimian, who developed the circulator.
The traditional way of breaking Lorentz Reciprocity and building radio-frequency circulators has been to use magnetic materials such as ferrites, which lose reciprocity when an external magnetic field is applied.
But these materials are not compatible with silicon chip technology, and ferrite circulators are bulky and expensive.
Krishnaswamy and his team were able to design a highly miniaturised circulator that uses switches to rotate the signal across a set of capacitors to emulate the non-reciprocal "twist" of the signal that is seen in ferrite materials.
Aside from the circulator, they also built a prototype of their full-duplex system - a silicon IC that included both their circulator and an echo-cancelling receiver.
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Source: Deccanchronicle

In-flight Wi-Fi market heats up as satellite services come online

Satellite-based systems can provide coverage across the whole world, including over oceans, where ATG falls short.

 

Hamburg: In-flight Wi-Fi may sound like a great way to keep in touch with friends and family or catch up on work, but services are often so slow, you're better off sticking to the in-flight magazine.
New satellite-based Wi-Fi services promise to change that, prompting a grab for capacity and customers by companies such as Inmarsat Plc, Viasat Inc, Gogo Inc, Panasonic and Global Eagle Entertainment Inc.
Wi-Fi on US domestic routes is already widespread although air-to-ground (ATG) technology can mean service is slow. In Europe, a patchwork of regulatory regimes has hindered the creation of any substantial ATG networks, while satellite-based systems have until now been too expensive for short-haul routes.

Satellite-based systems can provide coverage across the whole world, including over oceans, where ATG falls short. Additional beams are typically overlaid to follow traffic flows, to provide extra broadband capacity for more congested flight areas.
Inmarsat, long a provider of satellite communications to the maritime industry, has spent five years building its Global Express network for aviation. Final ground and flight testing is underway, with three satellites already in service.
"Existing solutions have not met market expectations ... Despite all of the happy talk, the state of play is an inconsistent patchwork," Leo Mondale, president of Inmarsat Aviation, said at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg.

US-based rival Viasat is launching two new high-powered satellites that it says will significantly improve broadband speeds from next year.
According to a 2016 global report by Routehappy, which rates flight amenities, travellers currently have a chance of getting Wi-Fi on more than one-third of available seats worldwide, with around 60 airlines offering the service.
But just 6 percent of the flights with Wi-Fi have connectivity that is comparable to a home broadband service and which allows for data-rich usage such as video streaming.
It's not just passengers who like Wi-Fi on board. It can also be used in the cockpit to identify weather patterns, optimise routes, and for quick identification and reporting of maintenance issues, Carl Esposito, vice president of marketing and product management at Honeywell Aerospace, told Reuters.
Honeywell teams with Inmarsat to provide the hardware for airlines to connect to the Global Express network.
In the cabin, having Wi-Fi connected systems also makes for easier upgrades of in-flight entertainment and can bring in more revenues from entertainment, services and advertising.

Price pressure
Competition from new satellite-based services has put more established aviation connectivity providers under pressure.
Shares in Gogo, which provides in-flight Wi-Fi in North America using ATG technology, fell in February after American Airlines threatened to end its contract via a lawsuit, saying that the Viasat service was superior.
Gogo is working on its own satellite-based service, known as 2Ku, and in February signed a deal with satellite operator SES to provide extra capacity.
Gogo has put forward a 2Ku proposal for 200 aircraft for AA, although no decisions have been made yet, Gogo president Michael Small said in an statement to Reuters.
Rival Panasonic is also looking at commissioning entire satellite payloads as it seeks more capacity for its existing global network, David Bruner, vice president of global communications services at Panasonic Avionics, told Reuters.
Bruner said the aviation connectivity market had become hyper-competitive in terms of pricing and that there were too many players fighting over too few planes.
Inmarsat, which has signed up Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines to its network, highlighted price pressure in the industry when it reported results last month.
"There probably needs to be some consolidation," Bruner said, adding there was space for three or four providers and that each would need to serve about 1,500 aircraft to break even on satellite-based services.
Panasonic has signed up 3,000 aircraft, with 1,100 in service, he said. Gogo's 2Ku has commitments for over 850 aircraft and expects to have 75 installed this year, while Inmarsat has over 300 for Global Express and says more are to come.
Bruner said the AA and Gogo row showed that older systems in place in North America were ripe for replacement and that there would be a real fight for contracts.
"I think it will be a really crazy next 24 months. We'll win some and we'll lose some, but it will be interesting," he said.

Source:- deccanchronicle

In India, Wi-Fi powered by taxis

Programs from Facebook and Google could make the crazy idea of getting internet access via a hot air balloon or lasers shot from a drone a reality, but how about going online via a network of Wi-Fi-connected taxis in your city. That latter option could become a possibility in the future thanks to a new program from Ola, the India-based ride on-demand service that is valued at $5 billion and fiercely rivaling Uber.
Ola today announced a new Wi-Fi feature for its high-end cars that will enable customers to automatically connect to a Wi-Fi network when they get into a vehicle — no hassle with registration, codes or hotspot connections. Ola’s “Auto-Connect Wi-Fi” requires one initial log-in, after which a user automatically rejoins the Wi-Fi network in any Ola Prime vehicle.
Ola and Uber both began offering in-car Wi-Fi last year, but both required a fresh log-in each time. The feature could soon become standard for high-end on-demand rides in India, where network connectivity isn’t always reliable, so automatic log-ins could become a convenient time saver.
“Ola Wi-Fi addresses the need for consumers to be connected to the internet while on the go, without the hassles of having to use unique credentials every single time. With over 40 minutes spent on an average cab ride in Indian cities, an auto-connect Wi-Fi experience can make every Ola, the ‘third place’ for consumers, beyond their home and workplace,” Raghuvesh Sarup, head of categories and chief marketing officer at Ola, said in a statement.

The feature is initially available with Ola Prime, the company’s UberBLACK-esque high-end category, and is limited to three cities at first. Sarup told TechCrunch that the company is “making plans” to expand the automatic Wi-Fi service to other cities and all other Ola vehicle types, including even its Tuktuk service, in a phased manner, but there’s no immediate timeframe for when that will happen. It isn’t also clear if the service, which is free with Prime, would be charged separately when added to lower end Ola cars like Tuktuks.
Ola is working with multiple providers — it declined to name names — to power the network. Each vehicle contains a Wi-Fi device which emits a network signal with a limited range. But, there’s a grand idea lurking. Further down the line, the company could extend the range in each vehicle and thus create a mesh-style Wi-Fi network that, if there are enough cards on the road, could provide a solid connection for anyone in a particular area. In other words: Ola’s cars could literally be beacons that power a metropolitan Wi-Fi network.
“We are trying to solve one use case first,” Ankit Bhati, Ola CTO and co-founder, said in an interview. “Potentially [we] can use the nodes [to create a network.] We definitely want to get to a future where that is possible. One step at a time, but the potential is huge.”
Ola’s news is line with recent measures that the Indian government is undertaking to improve connectivity in the country, which is already the world’s second largest internet market and counts over 140 million monthly active Facebook users. Google and the government launched a program to bring Wi-Fi coverage to India’s rail network in January, and there may be parallels here.
Ola didn’t work directly with the government on its Wi-Fi service, but it is open to doing so in the future Anand Subramanian, Ola’s head of communications, told us.
If Ola can create Wi-Fi networks in the future, and it is a huge ask, it wouldn’t represent the first time that its reach has extended beyond merely transportation services. The company’s payment service — payment wallets are mandatory for all on-demand services in India — was spun out into a standalone app that can be used to pay for items on a range of other services beyond Ola.