Breakthrough of the Day

By Brad

Via Carl Franzen of Talking Points Memo comes word on a potentially huge breakthrough for mobile broadband:

A team lead by Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering Ashutosh Sabharwal has managed to successfully demonstrate their method of increasing wireless network throughput — the rate of successful message delivery — by 70 percent, with mostly existing mobile device and cell tower hardware.

That ultimately means wireless network providers can provide more customers with faster and smoother transmitting of all data-intensive operations — including calls, video streaming and downloading apps - without having to install expensive new cell towers.

According to the researchers’ findings, the key to such a big increase are devices with multiple antennas. It’s all very complicated, and all very cool.