Telecommunications

Accessing the Internet while away from the home or office has never been easier. When there’s no Wi-Fi available users can jump on 3G broadband to get their online fix. And that’s the way it has generally been, with the two main mobile communications technologies acting as complementary services. But with the advent of Wi-Fi based municipal wireless networks some experts say there is a strong possibility that Wi-Fi will compete with the 3G cell phone network in city areas and perhaps even become a substitute. Read More

Chinese telecommunications manufacturer Huawei has been showing its E398 modem at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and garnering a lot of interest. The E398 is the world’s first triple-mode LTE modem compatible with all three major network standards: LTE, UMTS, and GSM.
The triple-mode modem will enable high speed LTE access while seamlessly switching to other standards (UMTS or GSM) when LTE is not available. Read More

Scientists at the University of Adelaide, Australia, have put the squeeze on light. By discovering that light within optical fibers can be squeezed into much tighter spaces than was previously believed possible, the researchers at the University's Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) have claimed a breakthrough that could change the world's thinking on light’s capabilities, especially when it comes to its use in telecommunications, such as fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), computing and other light sources. Read More

Breakthroughs are coming thick and fast – or should that be thin and fast – in the field of nanoscale lasers. It wasn’t even a month ago that we reported on the development of a laser emitting 'metal-semiconductor-metal sandwich', made up of a semiconductor as thin as 80 nanometers laying between 20-nanometer dielectric layers. But now researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have reached a new milestone in laser physics by creating the world's smallest semiconductor laser, capable of generating visible light in a space smaller than a single protein molecule. Read More

Devastating wildfires are burning around the Mediterranean this summer and down south, Australia is still recovering from its worst wildfire season in history in which more than 150 lives and 1800 homes were lost on ‘Black Saturday’. Telecommunications are paramount to helping save lives and direct fire-fighting efforts in wildfires but unfortunately, infrastructure such as mobile and fixed line phones and Internet services are often early casualties in fire ravaged areas. The country’s major telco, Telstra, has launched a portable solution to this issue with the unveiling of a AUD$200,000 Mobile Exchange on Wheels (MEOW) which can be quickly deployed to provide temporary fixed-line communications including broadband. Read More

Juniper Networks has announced what it says is the industry's first 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE) router interface card, which will be offered as part of Juniper's T1600 core router. The 100 GbE card is designed to address what the company calls the “new generation of scale” coming to core networks. Telecommunications providers, cloud-infrastructure companies, and other organizations rolling out large-scale virtualization face ever increasing demands on their networks. The 100 GE interface will provide an order of magnitude increase over most current interfaces. Read More

The next generation of Super Broadband DSL is just around the corner. Swedish Telecommunications giant Ericsson has demonstrated 500-Mbits/s transmission rates over copper cabling by using new crosstalk cancellation or "vectorized" VDSL2 based modems. The data rate is over 20 times faster than the fastest ADSL2 services currently on offer in most countries. With products using the technology likely to be available by the end of the year, this will open up the possibility of broadband services such as video-on-demand over IPTV networks. Read More

The vision of Agent 86 mumbling into his shoe is one of the most endearing images from the slapstick 60s spy series Get Smart, but an Australian scientist who has built a working version of the shoe phone using 21st century technology sees serious applications for this kind of device in the medical field. Read More

Australia’s Telstra was tooting its horn last night at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with news its Telstra Next G network was declared the world’s fastest national mobile broadband network by the Guinness World Records with speeds of 21Mbps. Read More