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Australian Researchers Push Near-Broadband IP Over VHF
Curmudgeon Rick writes "A research group at the Australian National University is getting symmetrical 250K bps at 20km, using "empty" 7MHz-wide broadcast TV allocations in the 45MHz band. Story here, project homepage here. Aim is to put some bandwidth out beyond the reach of the wires, where users are few and far between."
Does Telestra know this? Surely they'll want to put a stop to any competitors of theirs.
I think that the market is UNDER estimated for this than anything. with 20-40k coverage, it is fantastic for rural coverage. And for a country where the majority of the population are active online, this means for rural areas that are spread out over large areas, it is feasible. The expense to cable an area with 10,000 people over a 20km radius is very prohibitive. However, the market for internet of 10,000 people, where network expansion means grabbing a bit more spectrum and setting up another station, is relatively small. I think this is fantastic for our rural areas here in Australia, because FAR too many cannot even support decent dialup. Who makes long distance calls for a 56k connection? Or worse, an unstable one?
Look in 1xRTT ie the current 3g offerings by Verizon Wireless and Sprint we use 1.25Mhz of bandwidth and we can push 155kbps.. I even think our EVDO pushes that envelope further.. so I'd think you could do more on 7Mhz of frequency
6 Mbps is just over half of 10 Mbps. Am I missing something?
Hands in my pocket
As for mesh networking, yes it would be a better solution however there may be nothing (no towns/houses just rocks and dust) inbetween one end of the link and the other to create that mesh, so its not really a useable solution. Having repeater stations is possible but not cost effective.
User coordination does sound like a problem if it is only 250kb/s shared its still very slow. But its much better than some current outback services where it takes hours to load a single image because the telephone lines can't handle any decent speeds.
>I use/test/setup equipment that goes 50km at 0.5W of power.
That means nothing unless you specify the frequency and mode of transmission. A half watt morse code transmitter on HF will go much further than that. A half watt walkie talkie on VHF won't go very far if you are at the bottom of a valley.