Technology

Well it's a couple of things.

First off, a wireless transmission speed of 120Gbps sounds really impressive but remember from the Shannon-Hartley theorem that the maximum channel capacity is just a function of bandwidth and SNR. This means that you can get an arbitrarily high transmission speed by increasing bandwidth to an obscene amount and/or by increasing SNR (by transmitting at an obscenely high transmission power).

In the paper they say that the transmit power was 15 dBm which is a normal transmit power for WiFi, so it's the 40GHz bandwidth that's doing the heavy lifting in allowing that data rate.

The second thing is that WiFi 6 (for example) uses 1.2 GHz of bandwidth in the 6GHz range, divided into seven non-overlapping 160MHz channels. WiFi 5 uses about nine 80MHz channels in the 5GHz range, and so on. So if you want to use the technology demonstrated in the paper for WiFi (as the headline of the article is suggesting) then you'd need a bunch of 40GHz channels in the higher ~200-300 GHz range which would be in the very high microwave range, bordering on far infra-red!

If you want to imagine how useful that would be, just think about how useful your infra-red TV remote is. You would only be able to do line-of-sight point-to-point links at that frequency.

IR point-to-point links already exist, and the silicon they invented for this paper is impressive, but the hype around it being a possible future WiFi standard doesn't really hold up to basic inspection.

Speed and bandwidth correlate but aren't the same. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can pass through a medium and speed is the transmission rate. If you have a gig connection and one device, you can get close to gig speeds. If you have the same gig connection with 1000 devices saturating the medium, you aren't likely to get gig speeds.

Sorry ment power, bandwidth, range

The issue will be less about "range" and more about being able to go through a wall. Higher frequency makes for shorter radio waves that are closer together. The more this is done, the less it can go through solid objects and still be decipherable.

It's like a sound wave. That big low frequency bass sound can shake your walls while playing from in your neighbors house. You can't make out or hear a single word being sung, though. Frequency is too high to make it through to you.

This tech can be nicely used for wireless VR and maybe a couple other things that need to move data at super low latency at a local level, but beyond that, it will be kind of useless for anything over the next decade.

yeah but this wifi you can only use in one room ..

yeah, I was thinking of the manufacturing triangle, Speed, Cost, Quality, when I was thinking up of what it would be for wifi lol

Putting fiber in the ground is expensive. I work for an ISP, and we estimate fiber overbuild costs at $15/ft. So a mile of underground fiber costs about $79,200.

Yeah - that covers about 1/100000 users

"Assuming it doesn't draw more power" has got to be the problem here, right? I don't know much about wireless technology but from a purely physical stabdpoint, faster signals means higher frequencies, which means higher energies, which means more draw from the battery. Yes, shorter active time means less draw, but it's like that swiss cheese joke:

Swiss cheese has holes.

More cheese = more holes

More holes = less cheese

Therefore,

More cheese = less cheese.