Using IR Lasers Instead of Fiber

Artifice_Eternity writes: "Can't deal with the trouble, time or expense of digging up the street to get fiberoptic cable to your building in the big city? There's another way...infrared line-of-sight infrared lasers between your building and another one nearby. Repeaters and redundancy can keep the chain going reliably for miles, with gigabit data transmission rates."

Comments

Weather

[CAIMLAS]

What about cloudy days, storms, or even ice on the windows (provided the instrument is housed)? Would these things effect bandwidth? BOFH answer #556454: You can't get your files off the server right now because the cloud cover is too thick.

infrared?

[khuber]

"infrared line-of-sight infrared lasers" All products are approved by our Department of Redundancy Department. -Kevin

Plywood Fade :-)

[billstewart]

A number of years ago, a friend of mine was at University of Colorado. They had two computer centers which were connected by an infrared laser which was pointed out the window of one building to the other building. It had minor data loss during snowstorms, but was pretty reliable. One day the window broke, and a repair person came by and put a piece of plywood over the window until they could get a piece of glass big enough to repair it properly. He didn't understand why all the computer people started yelling at him.... after all, *he* couldn't see the invisible light beam going through the broken window :-)