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As always, we try to keep you up to date on the latest trends and issues that face us please keep in mind, I don't want to waste your time. Articles will contain generally less than 250 words. Please have a look and give me your feedback. If you want to see the Newsletter archives, there are more than 5-years available on our Newsletter page. Have a look and by all means, forward to a friend. Thanks. Questions? Send me an email!

5g is Coming

With the limited airwaves available for cellular service, mobile phones are running out of bandwidth. You will notice it in dropped calls, black-out areas and poor cellular quality. 4g (4th generation) has been serving us well until everyone began watching Netflix and YouTube on their cellular devices. Watching HD video eats up about 3gb of data per hour. We need to take advantage of more airwaves which is a major leap in technology.

An Exabyte is 1018  or one billion gigabytes. Video devices can have a multiplier effect on traffic. With the growth of video viewing on smartphones and tablets, traffic from these devices is growing as a percentage of total Internet traffic. Tablets will account for 15 percent of total global Internet traffic by 2020, up from 9 percent in 2015. Smartphones will account for 37 percent of total global Internet traffic by 2020, up from 11 percent in 2015. The graph shows the growth in data usage for all devices.

The FCC has approved the next generation of wireless services (5g), but it will take billions of dollars and a few more years before we see 5g devices.  What 5g will provide is a greater spectrum of airwaves. 3g uses 1.8 to 2.5ghz, 4g uses 2 to 8ghz. 5g will use between 3 and 300 ghz. All this to support greater bandwitdth.

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Li-Fi: The Wi-Fi of Tomorrow

I began researching light communication while watching the series MARS and wondering why we hadn't perfected communication using high speed light waves rather than low speed radio waves. What I found was pretty exciting! Li-Fi will replace Wi-Fi in the not too distant future.

Li-Fi uses the frequencies of light waves, which are up to 10,000 times more plentiful than radio frequencies and do not compete with Wi-Fi. Li-Fi uses light instead of radio waves, which is safer than Wi-Fi. On a single LED with full color (RGB) we could communicate at speeds up to 9 Gbps compared to 54 Mbps.  Li-Fi was developed as a solution to the growing radio spectrum congestion problems. Apple is set to include a Li-Fi capability in future versions of the iPhone, meaning it can access high-speed data using lighting.

Standard LED light bulbs are controlled by a driver that turns the LED on and off, or dims and brightens it. With Li-Fi enabled LED light bulbs, the driver is used to transmit encoded data by controlling the LED light. An optical sensor is used to receive the data, which is then decoded. This is conceptually similar to Morse code – but at rates of many millions of times a second, which is imperceptible to the human eye. A Li-Fi receiver has optics, and is fast enough to ‘see’ the light dimming and brightening, smart enough to decode the Li-Fi data, and then deliver it to the attached device such as a laptop computer. Devices can include both a transmitter and receiver to enjoy two-way communications. Your laptop, phone or kitchen full of 'smart' appliances will communicate information using available LED lighting in the room. Wi-Fi not required.

Super Bowl 360˚ Replay

If (LOL!) you watched the Super Bowl LI, you may have noticed a few replays using Intel’s 360 replay. It prompted me to find out a bit more about the technology. It seemed unrealistic to me that we could achieve a smooth replay of a particular play from every angle possible. Right?  It isn’t easy!  It took 38 super motion and 4k and 8k cameras circling the entire stadium. Five miles of fiber optic cables connecting them to a control room where a half-dozen producers will work on specific plays for the 360 degree replay. As important was the huge bank of Intel computers handling staggering amounts of data (one terabyte for a 15 to 30 second clip ) computer software triangulates and interpolates the overlapping visual information to recreate a three-dimensional image. 

It’s called Volumetric capture and it is the future of virtual reality. What does it take?  Oh just some new cameras, new lenses, and new techniques for combining moving image with graphics and capture from all angles. Synchronously combining the images of so many cameras uses a sampling of spatial and frequency light fields which are connected in almost a kaleidoscope array.