Japanese scientists use ambient microwaves to power IoT sensors
“It’ll definitely work best for outdoor devices close to a base station,” explained Professor William Webb, CEO of Webb Search, in an email to TelecomTV. “But it’s hard to design an application on that basis since typically you don’t know in advance whether a deployment will be near a base station. That makes it tough to see what the commercial application might actually be.”
While densification of mmWave cell sites in high-traffic areas may conceivably create more suitable conditions for this technology, 5G deployments are only just getting underway, so this is not likely to happen any time soon.