Until I can get internet options faster than 50Mbps in my area I don't understand why we're trying to get higher and higher upper limits on speed
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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WiFi is getting so good but i kinda dont want it to. I like wiring up the computers in my house but now its like WiFi is good enough it doesnt provide any advantages.
Paper: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10584545
40GHz bandwidth LOL
I genuinely want to understand why is that funny? Is it unachievable for consumer electronics or..?
Well it's a couple of things.
First off, a wireless transmission speed of 120Gbps sounds really impressive but remember from the Shannon-Hartley theorem that the maximum channel capacity is just a function of bandwidth and SNR. This means that you can get an arbitrarily high transmission speed by increasing bandwidth to an obscene amount and/or by increasing SNR (by transmitting at an obscenely high transmission power).
In the paper they say that the transmit power was 15 dBm which is a normal transmit power for WiFi, so it's the 40GHz bandwidth that's doing the heavy lifting in allowing that data rate.
The second thing is that WiFi 6 (for example) uses 1.2 GHz of bandwidth in the 6GHz range, divided into seven non-overlapping 160MHz channels. WiFi 5 uses about nine 80MHz channels in the 5GHz range, and so on. So if you want to use the technology demonstrated in the paper for WiFi (as the headline of the article is suggesting) then you'd need a bunch of 40GHz channels in the higher ~200-300 GHz range which would be in the very high microwave range, bordering on far infra-red!
If you want to imagine how useful that would be, just think about how useful your infra-red TV remote is. You would only be able to do line-of-sight point-to-point links at that frequency.
IR point-to-point links already exist, and the silicon they invented for this paper is impressive, but the hype around it being a possible future WiFi standard doesn't really hold up to basic inspection.
The triangle of compromise
~~Speed~~ Power
Bandwidth
Range
You cant have all 3. Just like manufacturing
Speed and bandwidth are the same thing. Power is the other side of that triangle.
But that ignores encoding, and other tricks like signal shaping, frequency multiplexing, and all kinds of fun stuff. Wireless data transmission is complicated. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation
Speed and bandwidth correlate but aren't the same. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can pass through a medium and speed is the transmission rate. If you have a gig connection and one device, you can get close to gig speeds. If you have the same gig connection with 1000 devices saturating the medium, you aren't likely to get gig speeds.
Sorry ment power, bandwidth, range
To be fair most wifi is used within homes or businesses these days so I would simply sacrifice range — as long as the minimum range is reasonable
yeah but this wifi you can only use in one room ..
I would use this for streaming games from a wired PC to a device that’s wireless. Not having to run a wire is magical.
i imagine a use-case for vr headsets
Exactly.
I also imagine access points in every room.
Can't wait.
Well as long as you never turn around and put your body between the headset and it's wireless peer.
Note that 802.11ay to get 20-40gb (approx 2GB to 3GB/s) is a thing, and it's ignored because going over 45 ghz is just impractical. This experiment would have to go even higher than that.
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and cant be standing between the device and router...
also don’t need 15 GBps (120gbps) for every day use, so some of that bandwidth can be sacrificed for better range. ultra high speed hdmi is 48gbps.
Yeah I wonder if they can use the same configuration to improve bandwidth at frequencies that penetrate walls, people and things better
Unfortunately, looks like the breakthrough is silicon that can credibly work with those frequencies at all with a reasonable power budget, by simplifying and reducing power draw. Maybe it could somehow reduce energy usage of wifi, but they seemed to be all in on being over 100ghz... So the tech won't be increasing the throughput of anything more practical.
Wireless 4k 120hz streaming from my PC to TV would be pretty sweet. I can run a cable if i really wanted... but this would be easier. It's still more than that, but getting that would be sweet.
I'd shell out for a multi router array that would give me these insane speeds if my ISP would offer me those speeds. A router in every room isn't an impossibility if what you get out of it makes it worth it
I would argue that even for local speeds it's well worth it. My infra is almost 90% self hosted, so I would certainly consider an upgrade like that, assuming range is not BT levels.
It's definitely a niche product. Most people don't even need gig speeds.
They hint at their goals by mentioning fiber in a datacenter, where they are now getting to 400/800gb speeds, so in the ballpark of this demo, but this would be a shared medium instead of a switched network, so it's DOA there as well.
I don't think this is a product yet .. more like a technical solution for building a power efficient modulation at high frequency. Gigabit speeds are great but the band they are sitting in is mostly useless unless you have line of sight.
The issue will be less about "range" and more about being able to go through a wall. Higher frequency makes for shorter radio waves that are closer together. The more this is done, the less it can go through solid objects and still be decipherable.
It's like a sound wave. That big low frequency bass sound can shake your walls while playing from in your neighbors house. You can't make out or hear a single word being sung, though. Frequency is too high to make it through to you.
This tech can be nicely used for wireless VR and maybe a couple other things that need to move data at super low latency at a local level, but beyond that, it will be kind of useless for anything over the next decade.
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And what are we downloading? Is the cloud dead? Why do i need 15gbps on my phone? Is it made for consoles and their relentless 120gb patches?
The distribution of all human knowledge, untampered.
In the US we’ll do anything but build fiber with the billions we tossed at the telecom industry.
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For home use, all I can think of is wireless video. 15 GB/s is faster than the fastest DisplayPort or HDMI versions. It could handle any resolution and refresh rate currently in use without any compression. That would be useful for VR headsets since they need low latency.
Yeah - that covers about 1/100000 users
I'm pretty sure anyone using an HDMI cable could appreciate having no cables except power.
On the flip side, if you still need a power cable anyway, it's usually way cheaper to bundle the media (and optionally control/network) signals into the same cable than using wireless. (Sidenote: Honestly it's kinda weird to me that we haven't seen hardly any of this in consumer spaces. The newer USB-C revisions could easily supply power, display, audio, and network to the average TV over one cable.)
Now, with true wireless power (I'm thinking of this video in particular), that proposition can change dramatically.
VR headset streaming video from PC without cables.
One example I've read, was to remotely drive autonomous vehicles, and feed back all data collected from cameras and sensors. I'm not a fan of it being used this way, but it would mostly serve that kind of purpose.
Big data needs that, so it can spy you better.
For phones / portables, assuming it doesn't draw more power, it would mean shorter download times, which means less battery usage.
"Assuming it doesn't draw more power" has got to be the problem here, right? I don't know much about wireless technology but from a purely physical stabdpoint, faster signals means higher frequencies, which means higher energies, which means more draw from the battery. Yes, shorter active time means less draw, but it's like that swiss cheese joke:
Swiss cheese has holes.
More cheese = more holes
More holes = less cheese
Therefore,
More cheese = less cheese.
Everything, no, to move data quicker, no
Laptops have all but taken over from desktops for everything but AAA gaming. New houses are still built with zero Ethernet because "the internet is Wi-Fi right?"
People are using their laptops to edit video off of a NAS, MacBooks can run 100 GB LLMs. Heck even non-AAA games are many gigabytes.
More bandwidth available for users means more people can do more things on the internet and at a higher quality.
If cell phone speeds are high enough, then we should be able to transition from wired internet which is not available to a lot of people to only using cell networks.
It's also not going to be 15gbps per device.
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