Video: Experts Weigh In On ‘Weightless’ – Part II

Earlier this month, TechWeekEurope editor Peter Judge chaired a roundtable dedicated to ‘Weightless’ – a new communication standard developed specifically for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication networks, often referred to as ‘the Internet of things’.

In exploration of the topic, he was aided by three experts: professor William Webb, CTO of Neul, Gary Atkinson, director of Emerging Technologies at ARM and Matthew Bailey, VP of marketing and product development at Argon Design. All three also hold various positions in the Weightless SIG (Special Interest Group) – an organisation that coordinates and enables all the activities needed to deliver the new standard.

Below you can watch the second in a four part video series, looking at the development of technology that could transform our daily life.

You can find the first part of the video series here.

How fast does it go?

White space broadband relies on portions of spectrum designated for television broadcasting but not engaged in a particular location, due to the pattern of TV transmitters.

Neul has used the concept of white space to design a chip to transfer data between devices and sensors. Codenamed “Iceni”, the tiny piece of silicon has a range of over 10 kilometres, can work from a single battery for over 10 years, and is capable of tuning across the entire UHF TV spectrum (470 – 790MHz).

The video below reveals just how much bandwidth Weightless is capable of, explains the differences between M2M and human communication, and discusses whether SIM cards were a mistake of technological evolution.

According to Atkinson, even though speeds of Weightless don’t compare to 4G or copper cable connections, the technology is more than capable of linking thousands of devices to a base station.

If you want to hear a more thorough introduction to Weightless, watch the first video produced by the Weightless SIG.

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