Comment by capitainenemo

30 years ago? What took so long for broad adoption? Patents? edit Article doesn't elaborate on why that might be, but it does note: "an alternative that has been given a new lease on life is low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, invented in the early 1960s by Robert Gallager at MIT but largely forgotten since then...Now researchers have implemented LDPC codes so that they actually outperform turbo codes and get even closer to the Shannon limit...Another advantage, perhaps the biggest of all, is that the LDPC patents have expired, so companies can use them without having to pay for intellectual-property rights."