‘DIDO’ Tech From QuickTime Creator Could Revolutionise Wireless Broadband

By Danny Allen on August 1, 2011 at 10:45 am

That’s a big statement, but Steve Perlman has the chops: he lead dev of QuickTime at Apple in the ’80s, co-founded WebTV in the ’90s, and more recently launched the OnLive game streaming service. Now his company has published a white paper for a new wireless tech claiming to flip current Wi-Fi, 3G and LTE limitations by getting faster (not slower) with more users. It supposedly allows users to access the full spectrum bandwidth and has been tested at speeds up to 100Mbps. Is the NBN in trouble?

Malcolm Turnbull reckons so (surprise!), telling the Australian that it could challenge the government’s wisdom on fibre. But the reality is that the tech, which also claims sub-millisecond latency from kilometres away, is at least 10 years off before it even comes close to commercialisation and the current copper network would still pose a bottle neck. Oh, and DIDO (which stands for Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output) is still largely an unproven concept.

As Stan Beer at ITWire put it, the tech “claims to offer all the advantages of wireless Internet connectivity without the disadvantages of latency and bandwidth limitations caused by the pesky laws of physics that NBN devotees love to cite.”

Still, colour me interested — definitely one to watch. [DIDO white paper via ITWire]

Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output (DIDO) wireless technology is a breakthrough approach that allows each wireless user to use the full data rate1 of shared spectrum simultaneously with all other users, by eliminating interference between users sharing the same spectrum. With conventional wireless technologies the data rate available per user drops as more users share the same spectrum to avoid interference, but with DIDO, the data rate per user remains steady at the full data rate of the spectrum as more users are added.

As a result, DIDO profoundly increases the data capacity of wireless spectrum, while increasing reliability and reducing the cost and complexity of wireless devices. DIDO deployment is far less expensive than conventional commercial wireless deployment, despite having vastly higher capacity and performance, and is able to use consumer Internet infrastructure and indoor access points.

The potential of DIDO is to have unlimited number of simultaneous users, all streaming high-definition video, utilizing the same spectrum that a single user would use with conventional wireless technology, with no degradation in performance, no dead zones, no interference between users, and no reduction in data rate as more users are added.

DIDO works indoor/outdoor for urban/suburban applications at distances of several miles, and for rural applications, DIDO works at distances up to 250 miles. Urban/suburban latency is sub-millisecond.

This paper describes how DIDO is dramatically different than conventional wireless technology, how DIDO works, what we have running so far, and the mind-blowing applications DIDO makes possible.
We believe that DIDO wireless will completely transform the world of communications and far more.