'Comms breakthrough' firm seeks £30m

A company claiming to have made phenomenal improvements in communications technology is seeking to raise $30m with a float on the Alternative Investment Market.

Florida-based XG Technology's xMax system was greeted with interest and not a little scepticism when it was announced last year, not least because it seems too good to be true.

The system is said to have been developed by XG's chief technology officer, Joseph Bobier, who claims its "synergistic mix of modulation and encoding techniques" can deliver data using "hundredths" of the power required by conventional signals.

This is done by getting a single cycle of the carrier signal to represent " one or more bits of information" in a wired or wireless link, Bobier says in a paper on the XG website which raises rather more questions than it answers.

He contrasts his system with a 1.9GHz carrier delivering 14.4Kbits/sec using a simple modulation technique such as frequency shift keying (FSK), when 131,944 cycles are used to carry a single bit.

The system also produces dramatic increases in range, Bobier claims. It could increase the range of DSL connections from about 3.5 miles to about 13.5 miles, and boost the data rate at this distance to several Mbits/sec. The speed of DSL links notoriously drops with distance and this claimed range would bring broadband to many more people.

Used on a wireless link, the xMax system plucks out its data stream even though the signal is 'hundreds of thousands of times' weaker than the ever-present radio noise and undetectable by standard methods, Bobier says.

His paper adds cryptically: "You will ask how it is possible to receive undetectable information, and that my friend is the secret sauce as they say (sic)."

Earlier this year XG announced an xMax Voice-over-IP system that it says will allow an existing base station to increase its range while reducing its transmit power. It said dual-mode xMax/Wifi VoIP phones will be available by the end of the year.

Clearly a reduction in transmit power of the order claimed by XG would have a big effect on the battery drain of any mobile connected device.