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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."
While there's certainly a engineering difference between a prototype and a consumer-ready model, most of the problems you mention probably won't apply to this. It's point-to-point (so, line-of-sight) communications, so it will require an unobstructed path. However, proper transmitters and receivers for line-of-sight communications won't have nearly the sort of interference problems you experience with something like a Bluetooth. Line-of-sight communications also means you can use quite efficient antennae, so should get quite good range.
All of my experience with wireless devices is in consumer based products, I don't know a whole lot about point-to-point/line-of-sight wireless transmission -- I just assumed (don't hurt me!) that they were very similar.
Based on your comment it sounds like this type of implementation would be more reliable than the wireless I am familiar with; I'm interested enough to do some reading on point-to-point wireless transmission in general and in other specific applications.
Thanks for the info!
Don't be so sure. There are lots of villages in the UK where most houses have line of sight to, for example, the top of the local church tower, or a nearby hill. If you can put one endpoint on top of this and then just aim a pringles can (or equivalent) at it from each house then it's likely to be a lot cheaper than digging up the street. The same is true of university buildings - all of the ones on my campus have line of site to at least one other building, you could connect them all together without having to dig up the ground (again) or, more importantly, work out where all of the existing wires go.
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No, this is millimetre wave. It's NOT microwave. Millimetre wave is kind of a weird area that's not really radio as we know it, but isn't quite optical either. It's not used much because it's a real pain to generate a modulated signal in that region.
From the article it sounds like what these guys did is used two HIGHER frequency off the shelf laser beams and mixed them (optically). The interference between the two produces a millimetre wave signal. That IS cool, when you think about it, and it means that a big, neglected region of the spectrum can now be utilized cheaply.
Also, since it's high frequency point to point you don't get bombarded by significant amounts of radiation unless you stand directly between the transmitter and receiver. For high power, long distance applications both of those would tend to be on towers or high roofs.
Canada has long used a system of microwave towers to carry telecommunications across the country. The radio system was much cheaper than laying (and maintaining) thousands of kilometres of cable.
I had lots of dropouts with my WRT54G also, until I switched *away* from the shit Linksys firmware to Tomato (currently running 1.07). It's been rock-solid ever since.
Just my two cents.. ;)
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