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Using Visible Light for Data Transfer
James Evans writes "Wired has an article about a New Zealand company which has developed a technology to transmit data at speeds up to 400Mbps up to 4km. They are working to have it more resistant to changes in weather, as well as increasing the distance. It has a number of advantages, including lack of federal regulation of the spectrum, as it is of course, visible light."
In related terrestrial networking news, waytoomuchcoffee writes "Science Blog reports that the backbone for the World's Fastest Network is up and running. It's a fiber optic 40 gigabit per second connection between Chicago and LA. Teragrid is a project by the National Science Foundation designed to link up supercomputer centers."
Sounds like a cool technology clean, high performant, low infrastructure, does not slice limbs off or create two headed babies. This should make it a very attractive sell to commerce and to the public
I would have some security concerns though since it makes it a lot easier for those of malicious intent to intercept the signal as its basically being broadcast in the open. The technology would seem to lend itself naturally to strong encryption though.
I think they could be onto something big here.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Of course this can be regulated: "Transmission of information across property lines by technical means must follow the following regulations: bla bla." Just like with WiFi you could simply avoid premature outcry by having strict rules but lax enforcement (as long as no big business gets hurt).
It sounds like a VERY nice system for short-range, non-critical communictaions, but personally, I can't think of any points I would want to communicate to where I have line-of-sight...
They give an example in the article. Where you need to communicate across a public road. (N.B. in New Zealand "motorway" means any surfaced road.)
Indeed any case where you need to communicate between several buildings fairly close together. Digging a cable trench is very expensive.
If I could get an inexpensive device that could communicate for about 10 miles, I would certainly get several.
They estimate that it can do up to 11km. With a single repeater 16km sounds plausable.
I just read about this the other day in the book "Dealers of Lightning" (page 140). While they were developing the laser printer in the 70's, some of the researchers had to move to a different building 1KM away. They had line of sight between the two locations, so they rigged up a system of lasers and photodetectors to bridge their network between the two buildings.
The beam went over a public highway, and after one woman went into a ditch after it startled her one foggy morning, they coarsened the beam to make it invisible.