A New Year’s Resolution: Better Data For All - SiBEAM Blog

There is a long tradition, across many cultures, of making New Year’s Resolutions: Babylonians made promises to their gods at the start of each year that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts. The Romans began each year by making promises to the god Janus, for whom the month of January is named [1]. The New Year is an opportunity to try something new, or to make efforts to do something better than before.

2016 saw some important achievements in the evolution of the 5G standard and its underlying technologies, as the industry’s network equipment suppliers teamed with operators to compete for leadership in expected 5G metrics such as data throughput, latency, etc. We applaud these achievements and we are excited about the applications that might be enabled by these technologies. It would be tempting to frame our New Year’s resolutions in terms of what we might do with 5G in 2017.

However, the technology elite runs the risk of missing the lesson that the political elite learned across the world in 2016; we cannot afford to be deaf to the needs of people who are being left behind. The problems that we are seeking to address with 5G are the problems of the world’s digital ‘haves’. The world’s digital ‘have nots’ are still constrained by what can be offered over low-speed mobile services or copper-based broadband. This chart from Akamai’s State of the Internet Report for Q3 2016, measuring percentage of connections exceeding 4 Mbps, helps us to visualize the problem:

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For reference, the 4 Mbps was adopted as the minimum threshold for broadband in the National Broadband Plan published by the FCC in 2010 – and since updated to 25 Mbps! In the regions in red in particular, data demand outstrips the capacity of the infrastructure - in rural and in urban areas alike. This represents forgone opportunity in the economic, cultural and entertainment spheres – opportunity that we take for granted in areas with more developed infrastructure.

For cities, we now have a scalable solution in the form of low-cost, low-power micro base stations and metro Wi-Fi access points, powered by solar panel / battery units and connected into dense networks using millimeter wave links. Lattice, through our SiBEAM technology group, provides key components of the latter. These can be installed on street lights, bus stops and traffic lights, or as Nokia demonstrated recently, dropped onto roof-tops by drones.

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So, if we have the tools at our disposal to address a pressing issue today, maybe our New Year’s Resolution for 2017 should be to put those tools in the hands of those who could most benefit – the digital ‘have nots’ – and work towards making the map less red and more green.

 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_resolution

© Lattice Semiconductor

60 GHz Infrastructure Approaches the Tipping Point - SiBEAM Blog

Very high capacity, robustness to interference, short range (but just long enough!), license-free: these are the characteristics that make the 60 GHz band ideal for wireless networks in dense urban environments. So why has networking in the 60 GHz band not been widely adopted? The telecom industry, although very interested, still has to be convinced that using the 60 GHz band is the way forward. This can be most quickly achieved by the demonstration of the utility of the technology in large-scale deployments by highly motivated disruptors. With recent announcements by key industry innovators, we might have reached a tipping point.

One of the key technical innovations that put 60 GHz wireless networking into the mainstream is beam-steering, which was pioneered by the SiBEAM Technology Group at Lattice Semiconductor. By replacing traditional fixed antenna technology with phased arrays and electronic beam-steering, SiBEAM has demonstrated that the deployment costs (both capital expense and operating expense) can be substantially reduced, to the point where 60 GHz is more cost effective to deploy than fiber.

The same electronic beam-steering technology that allows the dynamic establishment of point-to-point links can also be extended to the creation of mesh networks. Sectored nodes can achieve a full 360 degree coverage and can be positioned almost anywhere. This flexibility allows for easy insertion and removal of nodes from the network – the mesh will simply adjust. A mesh brings advantages in both network redundancy and network capacity (link load balancing) over traditional point-to-point links.

Once deployed, the same mesh network can be used to deliver a number of different services. The technology was originally proposed for Small Cells as there is a good match between 60 GHz node density and LTE Small Cell network density. It turns out that the density is also close to ideal for Wi-Fi hotspots and fixed wireless broadband access.

So where’s the tipping point? Facebook’s recent announcement of the Terragraph technology solution is a very important validation and I expect that it will be a catalyst for the industry in much the same way as Facebook’s contributions to the Open Compute Project have driven change in the data center.

The SiBEAM Technology Group has more experience than anybody in the application of phased array technology and beam-steering to video and data distribution. Today, we are delivering IP data at a rate over 1 Gbps at 300m using our SB6541 60 GHz baseband processor and SiI6342 60 GHz RF transceiver. Our solution will be ready for the coming tipping point in 60 GHz wireless networking. Telecom industry, are you ready?

© Lattice Semiconductor