As our world becomes increasingly connected, the demand for bandwidth is outstripping efforts to supply it. Meet the man working on improving signals so they use less bandwidth, keeping our technology revolution from grinding to a halt.
Tom Williams is a Principal Architect of Access Network Technologies at CableLabs. Beginning his career at Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco), he is a veteran in the industry with 37 years of experience as a cable engineer. He is a prolific inventor and author, with 46 patents granted, several patents pending and publications in several journals.
Tom doesn’t sweat the small stuff — he likes to tackle problems at-scale. Since he’s been at CableLabs, he’s worked on testing digital broadcast signals for compatibility with cable plants, evaluating the ability of cable lines to transport high-speed digital signals, PHY-layer issues associated with the delivery of gigabit data over cable networks and advanced networks diagnostics. Currently, his focus is on cyclic prefix elimination.
What is cyclic prefix elimination you ask? In a nutshell, cyclic prefix elimination improves wireless signal efficiency, so more data is sent to a device in less time. A benefit of more data moving through the air faster is that transmissions are finished earlier, resulting in your data doubling on a fraction of your cellular battery power.
Watch the video below to learn more about Tom and how he’s shaping the way we communicate, work and live.
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You can read more about what Tom’s work in his blog posts here and his technical paper “Shannon’s Limits Applied to Cable Networks Above 1 GHZ.” Make sure to check back in on our blog next week. We are publishing two blog posts explaining cyclic prefix elimination, including a technical post and an explainer video.
