Hot Chip Opens a Wireless World
November 27, 2000 - 0:0
SYDNEY In the Brave New World that computer industry visionaries like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs say is coming our way at warp speed, ordinary people walk around with hand-held gizmos doing the most extraordinary things.
They send this and downloaded that without ever seeming to need to plug in to a power source or hook up with a phone jack.
This notion of endless portability intrigued a couple of Australian electronic engineers working at the MacQuarie University campus in a leafy Sydney suburb.
Neil Weste and David Skellern set to thinking about how you could transmit very high speed signals through the air using radio waves rather than have to connect up to the Internet.
That was ten years ago. Earlier this month, after developing a computer chip that allows the transfer of large amounts of data at high speed through wireless technology, they sold their brain work to American Internet infrastructure giant cisco systems for 567 million Australian dollars (U.S.$295 million).
"I know the money is interesting and great. Our futures are secure and that's comforting," said Skellern, not a little embarrassed at the amazing good fortune of Radiata, the company he set up with Weste just three years ago.
"It's a remarkable windfall. It's fantastic, but it isn't why we did it," said the 49-year-old MacQuarie University professor.
Making a whole heap of cash wasn't the imperative. It was more the urge to move technology that one step forward.
Local area networks are already in operation that get by without wires.
Said Skellern, "LANs are exactly what we've done, but we've done it without wires. We've managed to produce chips that achieve the same sort of transfer rates that you can get on a wired LAN.
We've made a big breakthrough. We've managed to move low cost consumer chip technology up to these sorts of frequencies." The frequencies are really the big breakthrough. Now, radio-based LANs operate in the same frequency as appliances like microwave ovens and tend to get interference from them.
The pair are chuffed they have helped bring forward that Brave New World of endless portability Gates and Jobs spoke about a decade ago.
Said Skellern: "We believe that people will be walking around a house with personal video tablets - just screens with a couple of buttons and a pointer. And you can go anywhere in your house and connect to the Internet, do your Web browsing. And get very high performance." (DPA)
They send this and downloaded that without ever seeming to need to plug in to a power source or hook up with a phone jack.
This notion of endless portability intrigued a couple of Australian electronic engineers working at the MacQuarie University campus in a leafy Sydney suburb.
Neil Weste and David Skellern set to thinking about how you could transmit very high speed signals through the air using radio waves rather than have to connect up to the Internet.
That was ten years ago. Earlier this month, after developing a computer chip that allows the transfer of large amounts of data at high speed through wireless technology, they sold their brain work to American Internet infrastructure giant cisco systems for 567 million Australian dollars (U.S.$295 million).
"I know the money is interesting and great. Our futures are secure and that's comforting," said Skellern, not a little embarrassed at the amazing good fortune of Radiata, the company he set up with Weste just three years ago.
"It's a remarkable windfall. It's fantastic, but it isn't why we did it," said the 49-year-old MacQuarie University professor.
Making a whole heap of cash wasn't the imperative. It was more the urge to move technology that one step forward.
Local area networks are already in operation that get by without wires.
Said Skellern, "LANs are exactly what we've done, but we've done it without wires. We've managed to produce chips that achieve the same sort of transfer rates that you can get on a wired LAN.
We've made a big breakthrough. We've managed to move low cost consumer chip technology up to these sorts of frequencies." The frequencies are really the big breakthrough. Now, radio-based LANs operate in the same frequency as appliances like microwave ovens and tend to get interference from them.
The pair are chuffed they have helped bring forward that Brave New World of endless portability Gates and Jobs spoke about a decade ago.
Said Skellern: "We believe that people will be walking around a house with personal video tablets - just screens with a couple of buttons and a pointer. And you can go anywhere in your house and connect to the Internet, do your Web browsing. And get very high performance." (DPA)