“Communications equipment” is not one technology but the hardware stack that makes a link work: waveform generation and modulation, power amplifiers and their linearisation, filters that keep bands apart, antenna arrays and the phase shifters that steer them, receivers that convert radio energy back to bits, and, at the network end, the interface cards that move packets between machines. Each block has its own figure of merit, and the whole system is limited by whichever block is worst.
A second cluster targets the propagation environment and the receiver rather than the transceiver: reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) that reshape channels instead of amplifying signals, Rydberg atomic receivers that use quantum-state transitions in place of a conventional RF front end, free-space optical links, and programmable network interface cards that execute pre-registered programs at line rate on the memory side.
The parameters that decide outcomes recur across all of it. Tuning range and insertion area or energy per phase shifter, because a 1,000-element array multiplies both. The ratio of RF chains to radiating elements, which sets how much of the array you can actually observe and calibrate. Pilot and channel-state-information overhead, which grows with element count and is the binding constraint on passive surfaces. Tolerance to hardware impairments, since promising waveforms degrade under real transceivers: affine frequency division multiplexing suffers more bit-error-rate degradation than the comparison waveform under identical receiver in-phase and quadrature imbalance. And calibration cost, measured in over-the-air measurement time and codebook condition number.
Evidence base
Open questions
Assessment drafted 2026-08-31 from up to 18 KB sources using the technology-scorecard framework; scores are a draft read pending review.
Recent mentions
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Can the magnonic phase shifter's sub-0.02 mm² footprint and MEMS actuation survive replication across hundreds or thousands of array elements, and what is its insertion loss and switching speed relative to semiconductor phase shifters? The sources report phase range and tuning bandwidth but not these figures 2026 06 15 microscaled tunable magnonic rf phase shifters.
Does the reciprocity result for a finite RIS with a particular unit cell design generalise to other unit cell designs and larger apertures, or is it design-specific? 2026 06 15 implications of the reciprocity theorem for reconfigurable i
Can pilot and channel-estimation overhead for passive surfaces be reduced enough to work without a ray-tracing digital twin prior, which itself requires an accurate environment model that may not exist in deployment? 2026 06 15 dual transformer aided hierarchical deep reinforcement learn 2026 06 16 sparse channel estimation for sim based mmwave near field co
How much of AFDM's diversity and pilot-overhead advantage survives realistic direct-conversion transceiver impairments, given it degrades more than the comparison waveform under identical receiver IQ imbalance? 2026 06 16 performance analysis of afdm under in phase and quadrature i