A Way to Remake Broadband
This article is for subscribers only.
To say Southern California startup MagnaCom wants to shake up mobile and wire-line communications would be an understatement. The company is proposing that cellular, Wi-Fi, fiber, and wire-line broadband networks do away with one of their fundamental technological underpinnings—an age-old modulation scheme called QAM.
QAM stands for quadrature amplitude modulation, and it’s a means to manipulate signals so they carry information over communications links, whether it’s an episode of Sesame Street coming out of your cable box or a Twitter update popping up on your smartphone.