OnLive Founder: We've Broken Shannon's Law

Well roll it out then, otherwise shut up

Wonder if it involves multiple smaller towers all interconnected and placed on building roofs or something (network maybe?).

Streaming is going nowhere as long as their are hard caps in place. Who cares if they can delivery 100TBs of data to your house in once second if you go over your monthly bandwidth cap.

no freaking thank you, i will keep my ultra secure DSL, i dont care how fast wireless or cable is, its WAAYYY to unsecure.

the point of those limits, partially to gain money, are also in place because they dont have the copacity to handle that may people simultaneously.

if this works the way that i believe it does, it takes those limits (on networks) and gets rid of them. if they keep low (sub 100gb) caps after this is implemented, we will know that they are only in it for the money.

i have a question "possibly even eliminating wired connections altogether"

anyone here not have a land line at all? i mean for emergancys, like a 911.

the last thing i would ever want is to call 911 from a cellphone if ANY other method is possible, because not every 911 call center can triangulate your position, or lets say you are in an apartment, they cant get the triangle to be accurate enough. lets say you slip, have a slight fall, but you fell onto a glass, and that glass cut your neck to the point you cant really talk, and if you release the pressure, you will die from bleeding out (happed to a relative of mine, they were drunk, but lived). do you want them to find you as fast as possible in that situation, you have to use a land line. you dont cellphone that.

i will ALWAYS have a land line (and 1 trackphone for car emergency use) till they day they dont offer it for that reason.

You can't break a theorem, he's certainly misusing/misinterpreting it.

If it's too good to be true, it usually is....

Right, and if a company has way more bandwidth than its users are using, it can begin to offer unlimited data service again, which would be a huge advantage over its per-MB competitors. Prices went up because supply (of bandwidth) was short of current demand. In this case, simple microeconomic notions can explain most of the recent wireless pricing changes.

heh, you realize that if someone wants to hack you it doesn't matter how "secure" your connection is, it will happen? That is what strong encryption is for when doing anything that requires security. Depending on your "landline" to keep you safe is ignorant.

@alidan I don't have a land line, and I haven't for at least 5 years.
I'll modify part of your paragraph to fit my frame of mind. "The last thing i would ever want is to call 911."
Maybe I am some sort of macho tough guy survivalist. I always like to think that if I am incapable of keeping myself from dieing without the aid of surgery or drugs, then I should be dead. Thinking about a drunkard hurting/killing him/herself sounds like a fine thing that I can accept, and I would be perfectly happy seeing those die due to their own stupidity. I see the world as a process of natural selection.

This part is a little out there. When I am too old to take care of myself, I hope I die. Think of the vast number of people who still live as a pure burden to other people. I am not saying I desire some form of mass exodus, but keeping around a relic of a human being and watching them slowly decay isn't pleasing, wonderful, or natural to any degree. I hope that those who find my corpse leave it where it lay, if something must be done, throw my lifeless body into a hole and be done with it. No clothing, no make up, no insane and disgusting song and dance funeral.

This DIDO technology still has no demo. I watched the guys entire 1 hour speech, of which maybe 15 minutes related to DIDO. It sounds like a mesh network that connects to a small number of backbone nodes with massive bandwidth. The key that makes DIDO so excited is the wireless bandwidth and range.


I am shocked this article makes no mention of the range. Perlman makes claim that his radios have excellent SNR, and through that, they can achieve amazing ranges. They say they have tried 30 miles and found excellent results. Think about 30 miles. I mean, if you had to setup 2 repeaters to have a solid internet connection in the middle of no where, that'd be more than acceptable.
A lot of people like to make contrasts of broadband speeds. US vs south korea. That is fun and all, but the problem is running miles and miles and miles of fiber to and from. Feel free to compare Korea to Some heavily populated area in California. I am betting you'll find the numbers aren't too bad. But if this DIDO technology were to work as it is claimed, the need for 'the last mile' connections simply would cease to be. Basically, imagine if your wireless router was your cable modem and it was capable of pushing a gigabyte a second. Obviously it wouldn't be perfect or whatever, but if it works and it's real, it would destroy monopolies in the ISP area and make you laugh about the cost of what you pay now for your cell phone data plan. "I can't believe how much I was paying at the time, what a rip off that was!"

The announcement is apart of this video, about 40 minutes into it. But you should watch the whole thing because he is a pretty good speaker and because what he is saying is interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QxrQnJCXKo

That's a bit narrow minded. Theorems can and have been broken in the past. Having said that i don't know enough about this particular theorem to really comment. Just that, if it's something new, don't discredit it the first time over.

"Perlman said he's already patented the DIDO tech"

Do I smell another patent lawsuit in the near future? Really, I'm getting sick of patents. This tech might be good, but if it's only for OnLive, then it's worthless. The latency on OnLive is just far too high to be to enjoy it (personally).

Maybe they'll license it for an affordable price... I could get behind that.

There is no way he would have made such a statement if it wasn't true. It'd be horribly damaging to OnLive and any of his other ventures. The fact that they hired someone to disprove this tech speaks volumes.

Forget you negative Nancys, I'm looking forward to this technological advancement.

Thank God in the UK we have truely unlimited usage, really cheap.
I pay Sky $7.50 for 20meg and the line must be melting with the amount I download.
Sucks to be you.

you're on fiber optics, i assume?

Grats on your discovery of multicasting sir.

Nope, still on garden variety ADSL2, but my local exchange is upgrading to fibre at the end of the year. Then I can expect my speed to approximately treble up to 60-ish meg.

I love it

Patent 7418053 is for DIDO. The trick is that the base and the client tell each other about the channel fingerprint, and encode/decode the per-channel content with individual DSP's rather than a common DSP bonded for all channels like with MIMO applications. Application 2008/0019341 is an interesting application of self-chaining wall-wart jacks to cloud-ify a given physical site.

Has anyone asked about the potential health issues of this new technology yet ?

Interesting new tech, I wonder if it will be implemented in 5G or even 6G.

In Uni I was taught Shannon's theorem not law. Big difference there! Bad journalism by Tom's there.

While I'm not going to call shenanigans right now, I'm certainly remaining skeptical until he has his work published and peer reviewed / demoed. I'm guessing that he is just working around the theorem, not breaking it per se.

I don't know anyone under the age of 40 that has a land line. Sure, sometimes my cell phone doesn't get a signal, but unless those times are in my house (never) then there is no need for a land line. How often does your cell phone have no battery (for me, less than once a year) AND your power is out in your house? I wouldn't have a land line in my house even if it was free. Its not worth the space a phone would take up. Cell phones even give priority to emergency calls if their towers are overload, though I've never heard of a tower being overloaded where I live.

So in short, if you live in an area with an intermittent signal, then a land line is probably a good idea, even without needing to make emergency calls. Otherwise don't bother.

@m3 I'm not gonna get to much into that.. But it's not natural selection.. And I seriously doubt you would actually refuse surgery if it meant saving your life or your kids which I doubt you have. Now as far as being old I do agree with you there.. I don't want to live any longer if it means somebody else has to take care of me.


As far as the tech, believe it when I see it.. And if it does manage to come out probably be around 50-60 lol.

A theorem is only a theorem until it is dis-proven.

Nope. Well technically I do have phone service with my cable company, but only because it was cheaper to get the "triple play" than just getting Internet and TV. I don't even own a phone to plug into it though. But for 911 the cable's phone service isn't the best anyway as it doesn't even function when the power is out. Don't have to worry about that with a cell phone. Plus if you're at home, chances are your cell phone is connected with Wi-Fi, and that can offer another method for 911 to track your location (unless, of course the power is out).
When reading your justifcation for keeping a land line just for 911, I had to wonder... how many calls do you place to 911? If like most people, almost never, that's going to rack up to a really expensive 911 call when you factor in the expense of your land line over time... just to make that one call.

Lol, when that one call can mean life or death it's not hard to figure out why one would want to pay for it...

Sorry but I dont think I am going to pay $40 a month just in case I slip and fall on a piece of glass that happens to cut my throat in the exact way to make it impossible to talk. You silly mother fucker

Theories are broken, theorems are already mathematically proven.

I'm not saying this stuff can't be done, all I'm saying is that he is probably using the theorem in a fallacious way (i.e. applying the theorem assuming certain required pre-conditions are satisfied, when in fact they are not. It's a common mistake when using theorems.).

You remember about 10 years ago when customers were forced to stop using analog cell phones? That wasn't just so your provided could better use that bandwidth, all digital cell phones know exactly where they are as long as they are on. By the time you hit send, we know where you are, how long you've been there, and which direction (if any) you are moving.

Cellular phones cannot have their lines cut from the side of your house/under the ground/on the telephone pole. Cellular phones don't require a constant electrical connection to work properly, so they will work if the power is out. If your house is on fire, don't forget to call 911 on your land line before escaping. The list of pro's outweighs by far the imaginary list of con's, unless your a tinfoil hat kinda person.