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Alright guys, it’s getting real. We’ve been sitting back for a while getting excited about data transfer speeds in the lab and early trials of Li-Fi, but engineers in Germany have reportedly just gone and achieved blisteringly fast wireless speeds of 6 Gbps over a distance of 37 kilometres – in a real-world setting.
In other words, they nailed speeds fast enough to download the entire contents of a DVD in 10 seconds. Or six high-def episode of Game of Thrones instantly, all without a cable in sight, which sounds pretty good to us. If verified, the accomplishment will beat the previous wireless transfer world record by a factor of 10.
To be clear, the team hasn’t published their results in a peer-reviewed journal just yet, so we need to take the announcement with a skeptical pinch of salt for now. But if it all checks out, it’s pretty exciting stuff.
Although we’ve achieved faster speeds than this before – you might remember that last year researchers transferred data wirelessly at a rate of 1 Tbps – the research usually happens in a lab, or using technology that would require us to change the way we connect to the internet, like Li-Fi.
The new German achievement, on the other hand, was made by simply blasting a radio signal between a 45-storey tower in central Cologne to the Space Observation Radar in Wachtberg, almost 37 km (23 miles) away. The research was run by an international collaboration of researchers called ACCESS (Advanced E Band Satellite Link Studies).
To achieve such blistering speeds, the researchers used electromagnetic waves called millimetre waves to send their data in the 71-76 GHz radio frequency band, which is usually reserved for terrestrial and satellite broadcasting – so it’s a whole lot less congested than lower frequency bands.