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Using IR Lasers Instead of Fiber

Posted by michael on from the can't-resist-a-laser-story dept.

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."

3 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. What about latency? by codexus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't think having many repeaters would be that good for latency. For gamers and more generally interactive communications a low ping is more important than huge bandwidth.

    --
    True warriors use the Klingon Google
  2. Is this better? by boopus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How is this better than a high gain antenna using radio waves? Radio waves can be focused with antennas and don't have such problems going through clouds and pidgeons that light does. If you focus the radio waves you shouldn't have problems running out of spectrum should you? For years you've been able to do wireless radio links line of sight, what advantage does using a "frickin' laser beam" give you?

  3. READ THE ARTICLE, PLEASE by Artifice_Eternity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The "repeaters" in this case can be placed indoors, in front of a window. One of the reasons for developing this system was to bypass the trouble and expense of rooftop transmitters.

    And note that even in my summary I mentioned redundancy -- multiple IR beams are designed to compensate for bad atmospheric conditions -- and each hop in the network is a short distance for the same reason.