As cool as graphene sounds, I'm always sceptical of articles that contain things like this:
Your Internet connection will be 1 million times faster
Researchers at Georgia Tech created an antenna that can transfer an entire terabit of data in one second. That's 1,000 gigabits (a single gigabit is a billion bits). For comparison's sake, the average U.S. broadband Internet speed is 10 megabits per second. This wireless graphene test was approximately a million times faster than that.
Complete crap. This is clearly just pseudo-copied from somewhere else without any understanding on the author's side.
Pulling it apart:
Researchers at Georgia Tech created an antenna that can transfer an entire terabit of data in one second.
Rubbish. They've drawn up blueprints, not created it, and the terabit is a theoretical limit from about a metre away (source:
Georgia Tech Researchers Show That Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads | MIT Technology Review) - they're a long way off from being able to actually make something like this.
Bear in mind some very clever folk have
actually created a full wireless link (not just the antenna, which arguably isn't even the hardest bottleneck in creating a link at that speed) - that ran at 2.5Tb/s a couple of years ago now at a 1m distance, (
Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second | ExtremeTech) - so 1Tb/s isn't exactly the top end of research tech any more either.
For comparison's sake, the average U.S. broadband Internet speed is 10 megabits per second.
Comparison's sake? Rubbish. Sure, let's compare the theoretical maximum speed of a theoretical antenna to an average home broadband connection that's, err, usually delivered to the house via a cable? It's completely unrelated.
It's akin to saying "look, someone's just drawn up plans for a water pump that can pump a million times faster than my fuel pump does, this means I could use it as a fuel pump and my car would go a million times faster!"
This wireless graphene test
What the heck is wireless graphene?! Makes no sense.
I'm all for research into promising areas, of which graphene is one, but it annoys me when so many so called tech journalists with no grasp of the actual technology just plaster random crap on the internet (that they probably got from reading more crap on the internet posted by people like them.) It's worse in some places than others, but you see it all the time - it's like a bad game of Chinese whispers, and it bugs me like nothing else!