Saturday, June 27, 2009

Cooper's Law

While leading this smart-antenna company, where he is now the chairman, Mr Cooper coined Cooper’s law, which notes that spectral efficiency—the amount of information that can be crammed into a given slice of radio spectrum—has doubled every 30 months since Guglielmo Marconi patented the wireless telegraph in 1897. Modern devices have a spectral efficiency more than one trillion times greater than Marconi’s original device did 112 years ago (it broadcast in Morse code over a very wide frequency range). Smart antennas, Mr Cooper believes, will help to ensure that this progress continues, and his law continues to hold.
Not quite at Moore's Law doubling time of 24 months, but quite impressive and given the importance of mobile phones and technology at this point in history probably more important.

via The Economist

1 comment:

Jeff Andrews said...

This statement of Cooper's Law is not correct. The spectral efficiency has not increased nearly that much. It is rather the amount of throughput available over the usable wireless spectrum, normalized by area. In fact, most of this gain has been driven by increased spatial reuse (i.e. denser base stations).

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