Thread: You gotta love the CSIRO

Not content with inventing the WiFi standard the boffins at the CSIRO now want to use the soon to be defunct analogue TV antennas to give rural households 100mb/s internet.

CSIRO uses old TV channels for wireless internet - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The technology is called Ngara, which is an Aboriginal word meaning listen, hear and think.

CSIRO's Dr Ian Oppermann says Ngara works by using old analog TV channels to make a fast connection to the internet.

The CSIRO hopes to eventually combine four analog TV channels and provide a wireless connection speed of 100 megabits per second.

But for the moment it is staying at 12 megabits per second.

Dr Oppermann says that is faster than it sounds, because up to six customers can log on at the same time and get the top speed.

"The person sitting in rural areas can actually become the content generator as opposed to just the content consumer," he said.

"So, whilst it might be email, Facebook and movies [that] download faster, what we're really trying to do is enable people who live in remote and rural areas to generate content, so they contribute to the services economy in the same way that someone sitting in an urban environment [does]," he said.

He says the connection will be so fast that people in remote areas of the country will be able to use the internet to have face-to-face meetings with people in the city.

Novel idea.

I owe my current job to those guys.
We're taking CSIRO developed technology to the world.