It’s the first time in history that a robot marries two human beings. The wedding took place last week here in Tokyo.
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Category: Technology
Nowadays users don’t care anymore about the name of the technology that allows them to communicate. After the smartphone boom lived during the last years, what users want now is more bandwidth, they don’t care if it’s WiFi 802.11, 3G or HSDPA, the important thing is to be able to view high quality videos and photos without having to wait for seconds until they load.
The 3GPP group has been working for years on a series of standards to define the next generation of mobile communications, known as 4G. Up until now Japan had ignored international standards and had played their own game defining its own, supposedly better, telecommunications standards. During the 3G introduction days, Japanese companies didn’t have the patience to wait for everybody to agree on standards, and they quickly launched their own networks.
For example, Docomo launched what is considered the first commercial 3G network in history in May 2001, they called it FOMA and was based in W-CDMA, a communications protocol that with time was accepted by the international community but that was never used outside of Japan. Docomo still uses FOMA nowadays, the maintaining cost of the network based on its own technology during the years has been very high. After the experience, once again it seemed that Docomo was going to commit the same mistake developing its own technology, it would have been called Super3G. Two years ago, during the research and development of Super3G, Docomo achieved download rates of up to 350Mbps and upload rates of up to 75Mbps. Everything seemed like, once again, Docomo was going to leap ahead of the competition and the rest of the world by using their own technology.
However, eventually after many years of research, Docomo announced that they were abandoning the Super 3G technology and they would opt to follow the international project LTE. Most likely they decided that this time it was better to wait until the international community agreed on a standard than launching their own technology and then have to maintain it on their own.
NEC, Fujitsu and Panasonic have their first LTE cell phones almost ready and Docomo will be able to offer them service starting next October. In China, United States and some other European countries service will be available at the end of this year as well.
Docomo expects to be able to give LTE service with 32Mbps download rates at the end of this year and then increase the rates until more than 100Mbps during the next years. Mobile devices manufacturers are getting ready for the revolution that is awaiting; bandwidth will not be the limiting factor anymore, and to take advantage of the new possibilities we will need faster processors, more memory, better cameras and screens with higher resolutions. For example, Sharp is working on a smartphone with a 21 megapixel built-in camera, they are expecting that sending 20 megabytes photos with your cell phone in the near future won’t be a problem.
Smartphones like the iPhone or the Blackberry have changed our way to access the net, our way to communicate and interact; how we use our cell phone has radically changed in the last years, voice communication is not as important now as some years ago, now the important thing is to be able to exchange data at high speeds. To be able to get the best out of the new generation of mobile devices we need a new infrastructure; Japan’s big bet is LTE, the same bet as most of the largest operators in the world.
The ubiquity of telecommunication networks is going to be even more homogeneous during this new generation of protocols than during the 3G era. However, the transition is going to be long and difficult, the biggest winners will be the users.
Article originally published in the Spanish newspaper El País.
Other articles published in El País:
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Almost reaching grid parity
This post is based on this Tech On article, and as a secondary source I’ve also used this article in theoildrum.com. On the first article they talk about how we will reach grid parity earlier than thought, which means that the cost of generating solar power will be equal or less than the cost of using power from the current electric power grid. According to the latest predictions, grid parity, which was calculated to occur sometime around the year 2022, is going to happen 10 years earlier! And according to Fuji Keizai, Japan will be the first country to reach grid parity in 2012.
It seems like one of the main reasons has been the plummeting of silicon prices thanks to the crisis (it meant a halt in global manufacturing, but now the demand fall has caused silicon to start being cheaper). On this graph you can see how all of a sudden a year ago the manufacturing cost per watt started to plummet:
Besides, a few years ago, the manufacturing cost of thin-film cells was more than double the manufacturing cost of multicrystalline silicon cells. Right now, the best manufacturing techniques in the industry have allowed to cut manufacturing costs of thin-film cells in more than 30%. If we top that with the fact that a lot less silicon is needed to produce this thin-film cells in comparison to multicrystalline silicon cells, the battle between these two types of cell is on. And producers are trying to focus on manufacturing only one of the two types to try and reduce costs to the maximum.
Most producers of solar cells in the world are seeing the opportunity and, at the same time, are spending a lot of money building new manufacturing plants and reducing production costs. For example, Sharp has opened two new plants in Nara and Osaka, and they are already setting up another plant to manufacture thin-film solar cells (the ones with less silicon and whose cost has plummeted) in Italy together with Enel and STMicroelectronics (source). When I wrote this article, some Japanese producers were market leaders in solar cell production, but in the last year, the American company First Solar and the Chinese company Suntech Power have beaten Sharp, and Kyocera has lost several positions in the ranking of biggest producers.
The current production capacity of these ten companies will allow to install solar panels able to produce 85GW… that is 14 times more than the production capacity there was in 2008!
If we analyze the installed capacity by country, instead of production capacity of solar cells, Spain is the number one country in annual growth percentage of its solar installations:
- Spain, 73.3%
- Germany, 65.3%
- United Kingdom, 36.9%
- Indonesia, 35.4%
- Japan, 31.5%
Efficiency by type of cell achieved by different companies and institutions through time.
Although grid parity will be reached a lot sooner than expected, calculations haven’t taken into account the cost of storing energy in batteries (the problem of solar energy are cloudy days and nights). If we take into account the installation cost of batteries and other factors, the “real” grid parity will be pushed back a few years, as we see in these two last graphs that show predictions of “different grid parities” for Japan. The vertical axis shows the cost in Yen/kWh and the horizontal axis, the years.
