Find out how we can help you and your business. Get in touch using the form below and our experts will get in contact soon! Enter a valid email address, for example jane. A Country value must be provided. Organisation must be filled in.
Please provide a subject for the enquriy. We'll need to know what you want to contact us about so we can give you an answer. Technology and space Information Technology Bringing WiFi to the world We invented and patented wireless local area network WLAN in the s — a technology that has given us the freedom to work wirelessly in our homes and offices.
Contact Share. The challenge A world weighed down by wires Back in the s, there were no smartphones, tablets or other wireless devices. Do business with us to help your organisation thrive We partner with small and large companies, government and industry in Australia and around the world. Contact us now to start doing business. Show Info. Contact us Find out how we can help you and your business. The decision was upheld in further court action.
The litigation continued for years, and involved large companies including Hewlett Packard, Sony, Lenovo and Acer. Scary warnings about the effects of electromagnetic radiation are rife on the internet, and even some parts of the media. Some articles that warm of the dangers look convincing. However, there are some notable names on the not-dangerous side. The World Health Organisation says something similar.
Those sources are not saying the technology is totally safe; they just say there is no evidence of dangers. In Australia, Wi-Fi devices are required to be within a frequency range set by the Australian government. Sign out. By Jason Thomas. There are even Wi-Fi connected toasters and sex toys. What is Wi-Fi? The term Wi-Fi is commonly thought to mean wireless fidelity. CSIRO — which stands for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation — is Australia's national science agency, which lays claim to being one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.
As the history described below demonstrates, it is hard to imagine a less apt term to describe the success achieved by the CSIRO in securing a return on its significant investments in research and development in radio frequency RF technology.
It is therefore very easy to underestimate the significant technical problems which needed to be overcome in order to achieve this modern miracle! They feature wireless connections to one or more transceivers i. The remote devices communicate with the network access points by way of radio wave transmissions.
The Multipath Problem A major technical problem encountered in the early days of WLAN development was that of of multiple, echoed signals traveling from transmitters to receivers. Echoes are caused by transmitted radio waves bouncing off walls and objects within a room or building.
When the multipath problem is present, a single signal sent from a transmitter will be received multiple times by the receiver over a short period of time. To make matters worse, because of the short timescales involved considering that radio waves travel at the speed of light this problem becomes more pronounced when higher-frequency signals are used. But it is necessary to use high-frequency signals in order to achieve broadband connection speeds.
One way to address the multipath problem is to delay the transmission of subsequent signals sufficiently to avoid the masking effect. Put very simply, their solution was to transmit different portions of a series of signals containing the data over a number of different frequency channels. By transmitting data in a particular way on many different frequencies, the system would ensure that none of the signals in the series or their echoes would interfere with other signals transmitted on different channels.
And because the bandwidth of each frequency channel would be low, it would be largely unaffected by the multipath problem. Yet the WLAN system could achieve a high overall transmission rate aggregated over the many individual frequency channels. The US patent in question is no. And the invention described and claimed in this patent is so elegant, so effective, and so fundamental to achieving efficient wireless data transmission that no more-practical solution has since been developed. It genuinely underlies many of the wireless communications technologies we take for granted today.
That work involved complex mathematics known as 'fast Fourier transforms' as well as detailed knowledge about radio waves and their behaviour in different environments. But before the advent of cheap personal computing, such things were largely the province of mathematicians and scientists involved in such esoteric activities as probing the distant reaches of the universe with radio telescopes.
This led to the invention which was described in patent applications filed in and Wi-LAN licensed this technology to Philips and subsequently initiated legal action against Radiata for patent infringement.
Microsoft also became involved in these manoeuvres. It therefore commenced efforts to persuade other wireless chip manufacturers to pay royalties for their use of the technology, to no avail. CSIRO then made the brave, and somewhat uncharacteristic, decision to resort to litigation, presumably on the basis that its only other option was to give up and simply allow all of the infringing manufacturers to do as they pleased for free.
And no doubt that is precisely what many of those manufacturers — including some of the biggest names in the business — expected of this comparatively little-known government-funded research organisation from the land down-under.
0コメント