By Peter Weiss
As telecommunications designers add electronic mail and Internet access to cellular phones, they find it’s like connecting a fire hose to a straw. Each phone user’s tiny slice of the airwaves is too narrow to handle the full deluge of available data.
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Now, scientists at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., have found a way to boost the data-carrying capacity of each radio frequency as much as sixfold. They outline their scheme in the Jan. 18 Nature.