Communications revolution?

The company hopes its first product, NeulNET, will 'revolutionise' M2M communications and other wireless applications, such as rural broadband and smart meter communications. Luke D'Arcy, vp of marketing, said: "We see a massive opportunity. It's the first time that high quality spectrum has been made available in an unlicensed way." White space communications takes advantage of the move to digital tv, which has freed spectrum in the range from 470 to 700MHz. D'Arcy claimed this will allow better communications than, for example, can be offered by Wi-Fi. "The lower the frequency, the better the spectrum," he said. "Signals can travel up to 16 times as far for the same power." However, with only an 8MHz bandwidth, communication needs to be tightly controlled to avoid interference on adjacent channels. "That's a challenge in itself," D'Arcy admitted, "but it's complicated by interference from other signals in the spectrum. It's more like 'grey space' and interference can travel a long way." With white space, different channels are available in different areas. When set up, a NeulNET basestation will communicate its location to the Neul management database. This will the basestation which channels in the area are free and which are best to use. The system uses frequency and time division multiplexing to split the available bandwidth. "While the output power is similar to that of a mobile phone," D'Arcy contended, "a typical location will have access to a bandwidth of 16Mbit/s." For the future, Neul is working on a cost reduced version, as well as an asic for embedded applications. Both are expected to appear next year.