Slashdot Mirror
Replacing Fiber With 10 Gigabit/Second Wireless
Chicken_dinner writes "Engineers at Battelle have come up with a way to send data through the air at 10 Gigabits per second using point-to-point millimeter-wave technology. They used standard optical networking equipment and essentially combined two lower bandwidth signals to produce a 10Gb signal from the interference. They say the technology could replace fiber optics around large campuses or companies or even deliver high-bandwidth streaming within the home."
This sounds good, but it's definitely going to be a limited usage technology. Putting in backhauls to a remote telco might be a real option. The biggest concerns are:
1. this seems to be line of sight only, so no broadcasting HDTV from a closet to the TV
2. point to point means backhaul only, distribution would still be by copper/fiber/wifi
3. mm waves are subject to attenuation by atmospherics, so "rain fade" might be a stumbling block
4. line of sight limits maximum distance between receiver/transmitters due to earth curvature
All in all it's a great leap to get higher bit density over wireless, but this is clearly a commercial-level component...us peons won't get to use it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
what would be considred consumer grade wireless equipment can't hold a stick to true enterprice level equipment.
you talk about your wifi dropping out - hey i have the same thing with my WRT54G... but all of the aironet equipment i use never has issues.. but hey my 54g was 50$ compared to 800$
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Depends on the physical size of the signal and the redundancy. Obviously if you're relying on a single link that's physically roughly the size of the bird or smaller, the signal will be disrupted as long as the bird is in the beam (plus, probably, a short recovery time). It's as sure an outage as a backhoe taking out your fiber, although shorter-lived.
The researchers seem to have a pretty good idea of exactly where it's useful -- they don't really mention replacing backbones or end-user links, but using it places like college campuses, where setting up redundant links between buildings would be quite reasonable, but uptime isn't as critical as it is for a backbone.