High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a new mobile telephony protocol that provides a smooth evolutionary path for UMTS networks to higher data rates and higher capacities, in the same way as EDGE does in the GSM world. Sometimes referred to as a … [Read more...]

Although broadband has been available for some time, access for most people is still limited. At the end of 2002, it was estimated that only 46 million subscribers worldwide had broadband access, with only 17% of households in the USA being … [Read more...]

In the early 2000s, the momentum gained by IEEE 802.11b in the wake of the surge in home networking so as to allow the sharing of broadband Internet connections saw the technology migrate from the home to outdoors. The WLAN configuration was … [Read more...]

2001 was a tough year for the proposed 802.11g standard, with endless disagreements amongst the IEEE members over how it should be implemented and a real threat that it might be abandoned altogether. Towards the end of the year a compromise was … [Read more...]

The 802.11b group within IEEE was driven largely by Lucent Technologies and Intersil Corp., and was designed to operate in the 2.4GHz ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) band. The key contribution of the 802.11b addition to the … [Read more...]

Galileo comprises a constellation of 30 satellites divided between three circular orbits at an altitude of around 24,000 km to cover the Earth's entire surface. They will be supported by a worldwide network of ground stations. At present, … [Read more...]

The Global Positioning System (GPS), is a constellation of 24 satellites - three of which are backup satellites - which orbit the Earth twice a day at an altitude of about 12,000 miles. Twenty-four hours a day, these satellites continuously broadcast high-frequency radio signals containing position … [Read more...]

HiperLAN2 is one of a number of new generation standards supporting both asynchronous data and time critical services (e.g. packetised voice and video) that are bounded by specific time delays to achieve an acceptable Quality of Service (QoS) … [Read more...]

While 802.11a operates in the 2.4GHz ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) band, the 802.11a standard was designed to operate in the more recently allocated 5GHz UNII (Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure) band. Furthermore, … [Read more...]

Named after a tenth-century Danish king, Bluetooth is a specification for a small form-factor, low-cost radio solution providing links between mobile computers, mobile phones and other portable handheld devices, and connectivity to the … [Read more...]