Difference Engine: Unplugging the cables
Posted on August 22, 2013
Apr 22nd 2013, 7:50 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES
THE tangled web of wires beneath computer desks could soon be a thing of the past. The same goes for the jumble of cables that feeds audio equipment and TV sets. The boxes of electronics around the home and office will still need to be plugged into power sockets. But the means for delivering signals to and from them are about to go wireless in a big way. And not just any old wireless: the new-fangled radio connections operate in the unlicensed 60 Gigahertz band, where bandwidth is abundant and capable of providing data rates that rival those of fiber-optics.
It is not just an obsession with neatness and convenience that is causing cables to give way to radio waves. When it comes to shoveling truly humungous quantities of data from one device to another, hard-wired connections, surprisingly, can run out of capacity long before airwaves.
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