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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."

2 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. 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.