Japanese researchers uses ‘T-rays’ to wirelessly transfer data at 3Gbps

We spoke a while back about the world’s first 802.11ac router, which offered speeds of upto 1.3Gbps. That by itself was pretty impressive but now researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have taken things to a completely different level. They’ve managed to transfer data at a speed of 3Gbps, which is much faster than the wireless transfer mediums used today and also wired connections used widely over the world. A news covered by the BBC talks about the use of the T-ray band, that lies between microwave and infrared regions of the spectrum. The technology makes use of a range between 300GHz and some 3THz to transfer data. Most wireless technologies operate in the lower frequency spectrum and the demand means it’s expensive and is very crowded due to the number of standards and also operators that use these frequency ranges.

The future is 3Gbps, can theoretically extend to 100Gbps

Things aren’t as simple however, considering that terahertz waves are used in research and they are similar to X-rays, but they are also considered to be less harmful than X-rays in general. The technology as of now is too complicated and inefficient when it comes to power requirements, so don’t expect to see the technology in everyday notebooks and phones anytime in the near future. Recent developments in wireless transfer technologies have managed to reach 1.5Gbps speeds while operating at a frequency of 300GHz, so it may be possible to achieve some faster speeds in the future after all.

There are some other limitations as well - the T-rays technology will only work in short distances of around 10m as of now, but with slight compromise on speeds, the technology should be able to extend the distances between the two units by quite a bit. The implications and applications of the technology are numerous. 3Gbps for example was the speed of SATA drives a while back, which is still a lot and something very few drives manage to transfer. Being able to transfer large amounts of data in this manner could mean that you may not need to connect a hard drive to your PC to transfer, but simply do it wirelessly with little or no drop in transfer speeds.

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