Low-cost high-speed wireless web access as pervasive as the mobile phone network could soon be a reality... with the aid of talking lampposts. That's the claim of a UK company called Last Mile Communications, which is being taken seriously enough for its patented technology to be included in two rival tenders for a government scheme to upgrade the data network that lines Britain's arterial roads. This uses 63GHz radio links with frequencies an order of magnitude higher than Wifi or cellphones and a correspondingly higher data rate: between 40Mbits and 400Mbits/sec, peaking around a thousand times faster than 3G phones. More to the point, the system will have far more capacity than is needed for services envisaged by the Highways Agency, which plans to sell on the extra capacity.
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