Mobile communications
Mobile phones, laptop computers and other electronic wizardry is keeping people in touch and productive while staying on the move. Across the globe, these gadgets have become part of everyday life.
Yet amid all the publicity and hype surrounding the latest advances in mobile communications, the fact remains that roughly half of the world’s population has never made a telephone call. Many countries simply cannot afford the developed world’s mobile systems, yet it is often these people who would benefit most from any form of communication because they live in remote rural areas.
In hot, humid countries, reliable fixed networks are hard to keep in good working order. Radio offers a simple solution, and it is possible to design radio systems that are readily maintained at reasonable cost.
Meeting these present-day challenges while helping to plan and deliver future generations of communication systems is the business of the Communications Group at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science. ECS has been contributing to the revolution in mobile communications from the outset, and many recent developments, including, for example, wireless video telephony, and the recently standardized high-speed wireless Internet data services, were fuelled by the results of the Communications Group.
The group also enjoys good contacts within NEWCOM, a European network that links a large number of leading research groups all addressing the strategic objective ‘Mobile and wireless systems beyond 3G’.