Academe, smaller brands join in race to faster Internet

While governments, as well as giant tech and telco brands, collaborate with each other to pave the road for the possible commercialisation of 5G network by 2020, entities outside this circle also race to improve the existing network speeds 3G and 4G, which both remain slow and every so often inefficient.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, for instance, have collaborated to develop a methodology of making Web page load faster by 34 percent. The new method, called “Polaris,” logs all the dependencies and interdependencies to help the network reach its destination (the web URL) faster than its normal rate.

The scientist behind the project said it’s nothing different from listing a destination or having a travel itinerary. In normal browsing, the network gathers and evaluates several data (objects) such as HTML files, photos, JavaScript and so on. Loading varies when the network gets confused when determining which of this object it would read first.

“As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up. Our approach minimises the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page’s load-time," said Ravi Netravali, co-researcher at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in a press release published on the university's official news site.

Polaris, fortunately, is written on JavaScript, which makes it compatible to any website.

Researchers at the University of San Diego, on the other hand, think that lasers could finally solve the great Internet speeds quandary. They said that by replacing electrical wires with lasers and glass fibres, transferring data from a network to a computer device would be faster.

In a report published by Phys.org, the researchers believe that since it is plausible to put various colours of light inside a wire through laser technology, transferring data from it could also be possible.

"As we are trying to fit more and more data on wires that we send from place to place, we are running up against the limit of what electricity can do," said co-researcher Janelle Shane, an alumna of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. However, she admitted that this nascent discovery’s possible commercialisation remains in the offing, as they still have to find a way to build a super-small and thin laser that fits in the smallest existing computer chip on the market. To wit, it means building one that is hundredfold thinner than an average human hair's diameter.

Outside the academia, tech brands relatively smaller than the like of Google and Apple also offer innovative solutions to alleviate the global problem on dismal Internet speeds.

Eero, a San Francisco-based “router-alternative” provider, promises to improve WiFi download speed by 1000 percent in any enclosed area such as offices or classrooms. A download speed of 8 Megabits, according to the Telegraph, can be improved up to 90 Mbps via Eero’s app-controlled device.

San Diego-based 5B Ar z International (OTCQB: BARZ) has a lot more clout to its name as it can improve a mobile device signal anywhere, even in open areas or in a moving vehicle. The company gained immense reputation in India after it convinces two giant telco companies in the US — one being Vodafone — that it could help alleviate the country’s massive call drop problem. Its plug-and-play device gained praises from revered electrical engineers in the US for its unique adherence to radio frequency technology. It is the only network extender device in the world that doesn’t utilise cable and antennas, making it extremely user-friendly.

"We are RF-based. So we are in fact, using radio frequency to enhance a signal. But we’re doing it differently than the previous RF-based solutions, is that we’re combining the send and receive antennas into the single-box form factor," said CEO Daniel Bland. He also revealed that after its success in India, it is now prepared to expand to Southeast Asia, which will be followed by South America, Europe, and North America.

In the UK, the University of Surrey is currently working with telecom giants and brands in the aim of enhancing Internet speeds by 100 times. It is presently one the biggest undertakings led by an academic institution on revealing the still-undiscovered aspects of 5G technology. A third of its funding come from the UK government, while the remaining fraction come from giant telco and tech brands across the globe.

Professor Rahim Tafazolli, head of the university's 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC), suggested to IOL that 5G is not as simple as coming up with a faster network after 4G as someone thought it to be, as it is a gigantic niche where giant players and markets compete with each other. Like in the case of 4G utilisation several years back, countries took pride in successfully becoming one of the first utilisers of the newest technology, as it was essential in attracting investors, especially from the tech sector.

Moreover, whether it’s the academe, the telcos, or the phone brands that gets its first, what’s certainly more essential is that going beyond the still-unreliable 4G is progressing. At the end of the day it isn’t really a race to being the first one to utilise 5G; it’s all about delivering the most efficient, effectual, and commerce-ready network technology.