In 2015, the FCC auctioned off some new space on the wavelength spectrum for use by wireless carriers. It wasn’t a ton of space, but enough to lessen the traffic load a bit. The total price the auction went up to? $45 billion, split by the major carriers like AT&T and Verizon.

But what the researchers at NYU Tandon have discovered is that there’s a whole, enormous bandwidth way higher up the spectrum, in the millimeter wavelength area, which might be usable after all.

“In the past it’s been believed that the signals wouldn’t propagate far at those frequencies,” Dr. Sundeep Rangan, an associate professor at Tandon who’s working on the 5G project said in an interview. “But now that we’ve made new measurements, a lot of them being made by [Ted] Rappaport here, these bands could sustain distances even outdoors with obstructions. That attracted a lot of interest.”

Read the full article: Technical.ly Brooklyn