Frequency-Hopping Radio Wastes Less Spectrum

With a rising tide of smart-phone data threatening to drown the airwaves, a White House advisory panel is poised to suggest that wireless carriers and research labs ramp up efforts to use computing to far more efficiently tap spectrum. This will require, among other things, so-called "cognitive" radios, which sense unused radio bands and can intelligently switch heavy data loads between different frequencies without any interruption.

A New Jersey startup has come out with the fastest cognitive radio yet. It works on the widest possible range of spectrum, and is part of a crop of improved technologies that are crucial to bringing the technology to market and avert network overload. The gadget in question, called CogRadio, and made by Radio Technology Systems of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, can switch at fast-enough rates to be imperceptible for, say, a video viewer; as well as in sufficient quantities that any research done on it, or software written for it, will be applicable in future real-world commercial devices.