I link, Airgo I am

Greg Raleigh didn’t do much to earn his way into this year’s circle of top innovators. He merely turned the fundamentals of radio science on their heads.

In 1996, the founder and CEO of Airgo Networks invented MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). This technology  forms the basis of high-speed 802.11n wireless networks.

MIMO leverages a natural phenomenon most radio scientists have spent the last century trying to avoid — multipath distortion. When radio signals reflect off nearby surfaces, they interfere with one another; that’s why your cell phone signal or FM reception fades while you drive by certain places. As a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, Raleigh realized he could use multipath to actually enhance the speed and range of wireless signals.

“Since Marconi built his first radio prototype in 1896, the brightest minds in radio science viewed multipath as a problem,” Raleigh notes. “Exactly 100 years later I published a paper that proved that not only could you exploit multipath to multiply speed and coverage, but that in fact you need multipath in order to do it.”

The 802.11n standard — expected to be approved by the IEEE later this year — will double the speed of current Wi-Fi networks while increasing their range by as much as 10 times. Although early applications will enable video streaming for the home, superfast wireless has implications for business as well.

Raleigh, who spent 14 years as an engineer before attending graduate school, says his real-world experience helped lead to his breakthrough. “The hard part isn’t solving problems, it’s deciding what problems are interesting to solve and then setting them up in a way so that the answer is valuable to society,” he says. Even then, the real sweat comes when you try to turn theoretical concepts into practical products.

“One person in the technology field can do very little by himself,” Raleigh says. “Even a small collection of very bright people can only do so much. It’s not enough to have an ‘aha!’ idea; you need the ability to organize a company and recruit 120 engineers in a dozen different fields and get them to work together to bring a product to the marketplace. That’s 97 percent of the work.”