Quote:
Originally Posted by boredandtattooed
i guess a better questions to ask is:
what do you think our limit will be?
or, will we ever even reach a limit?
or maybe, will our next step(5G/X.G) be our last step then???
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I'm no expert in wireless communications, but I doubt there will be a hard and fast limit to the amount of data we can transmit. We'll find ways to squeeze more bandwidth into the same amount of spectrum. Or find ways to pack more information into the same amount of bandwidth. Or enable use of entirely new areas of spectrum (sound waves? light pulses? magnetic fields?).
One idea that immediately comes to mind is to develop collaborative compression algorithms that work across multiple devices. When millions of devices are all asking for data streams consisting of only two alternating states (0 and 1), you'll end up with a lot of repeated transmissions - some of significant length. If a tower could tell 100 devices to tune to channel n for your next 1000 bits of data, for example, that could save some bandwidth. This would require much more collaboration between towers and devices to work.
Another solution would be to figure out how to direct radio waves in a narrow beam, with an adaptive antenna that always "points" at the nearest tower. The tower could have a few hundred of these antennae, each creating a virtual cable between the tower and one device.
Some quantum mechanics phenomena allow for instantaneous communication of information between two points with no transmission of energy in between - obviously this would be very beneficial if we could learn how to do it on a large enough scale.
And those are just my ideas after five minutes of thought. I'm sure someone will always come up with some way to keep our demands for data satisfied.
(P.S. satellites will never work because of high latencies. It's kind of amazing to think that we live in a world where things happen so fast, the cosmic ceiling of the speed of light - enough to circle the earth seven times in one second - is a serious problem.
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