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."

Comments

point to point

[Anonymous Coward]

so KFC then when a bird flies through the beam

Re:point to point

[Curtman]

sweet now i can have my chicken and porn in ten seconds or less

Believe it or not, there is already franchise opportunities available in this market.

Call me when it's reliable

[MobileMrX]

There are a lot of wireless technologies in use today that simply aren't reliable enough to be permanent replacements for their wired counterparts.

My wireless home network gets frazzled when the microwave runs and cant go 30ft through walls without significant signal loss. Wireless keyboards and mice and bluetooth can never transmit as far as spec, and god forbid someone else use the same model in a 90 foot radius.

I can't get my computer 20 feet away to pick up a wireless keyboard signal, but a wireless keyboard signal 50 ft away screws with mine?

Cell phones which are older and probably have had more money than wireless networking thrown at them still use coverage and dropped calls as major advertising points.

For now, my wired ethernet is faster and never has a problem, my wired keyboard and mouse always work (and dont need batteries), and a land line never drops a call. I am sure this wireless technology is great and useful, but using it as a replacement for fiber is probably a mistake.

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[blueg3]

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.

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[bigjarom]

...someone else use the same model in a 90 foot radius

This made me laugh. I had to stop using a wireless mouse at school because I got so much 'noise' from the other 20 or 30 wireless mouses in the same classroom.

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[MobileMrX]

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!

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[DeadManCoding]

Yes, interference from other devices suck. Yes, range on a lot of those wireless devices also sucks. But you also need to look at this from the reverse angle.

I run a wireless network at home that goes through 4 walls before it hits my girlfriend's computer, and no problems there. Small house, yes, but it still works. I also have a wireless keyboard and mouse. Replacing batteries does suck, but when you're only replacing them once a month, it's really not that bad. Your experience with wireless has been dismal, but mine hasn't. And thanks to that experience, I'll continue using those devices.

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[MobileMrX]

Don't get me wrong, I still use a lot of wireless devices and they are a great tool! I use it at home for my network and I can browse easily and usually play online games without trouble. I still, and this is the key part here, don't replace my ethernet line to my web server or anything else I'd like to use with some sort of reliability.

That's what they are talking about here (replacing what would have been a fiber network with wireless), which I was at first against. However, according to a reply to my original post, the type of wireless implementation they are going to use is vastly different than my omni-directional consumer wireless devices. So until I have read and reasearched further, my position has changed from "skeptical" to "neutral"

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[MobileMrX]

My hope is that it would become a mutant bird with special powers (but only use them for good).

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[Amouth]

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$

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[blueg3]

They're very different beasts.

Unfortunately, as point-to-point or line-of-sight sort of implies, they're also completely useless in most consumer applications. Both transmitter and receiver have to point directly at one another. So it doesn't work like cellular, 802.11, BlueTooth, etc.

In fact, it'll probably never make it to consumer devices. We have a tough enough time with satellite television, which is sort of a sloppy line-of-sight transmission.

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[blueg3]

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.

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[blueg3]

I wouldn't consider university deployment to be consumer-grade.

There are some situations, like what you mentioned, where a consumer-level device might be useful. (However, currently it's line-of-sight on both ends using low-frequency lasers. That would require one transceiver for each connected house on top of that church tower!)

Re:Call me when it's reliable

[michrech]

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.. ;)

Limited use; maybe good for backhauls

[Overzeetop]

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.

Its about time....

[bobs666]

Its about time.... 10 MegaBits would do.
There are a lot of homes that the Broadband
suppliers will not touch, the 12 people on
my street are only a few 10/th of a mile from
a main back bone... But There is noting but
dial up here...

So who is going to supply cheap hardware and
backbone connections.. that should put the big
Broadband suppliers out of business.

Re:Its about time....

[ethan0]

I spent a minute try'n to figure out
what meter this; if rhyming was your scheme
perhaps a parody you'd done a song
or some much-reforwarded meme.

but, alas, at last occurred to me
despite the sim'lar lengths of every line
the layout had no deep and thoughtful cause;
you randomly hit 'return' from time to time.

Why?

[kramer2718]

Why replace fiber?

Besides reducing the glycemic effect of meals and contributing to colon health, there is evidence that fiber may benefit us in other ways. It seems to help lower cholesterol and triglycerides, and also may help to prevent ulcers, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Can wireless really do all of that?

Re:an idea someone else has probably already had

[Kijori]

Could you create a protocol that always operated at maximum bandwidth and which filled that extra bandwidth with bogus or random data to make intercepting and extracting useful information cost prohibative (money, resources, computation limits, etc)?

Yes, a proof of concept is online at http://youtube.com. Originally they used /dev/random, but that is a useful resource. Using Britney Spears clips with user comments enabled allows for truly useless noise.

Re:Don't quite understand TFA...

[Nezer]

Are the lasers that they are using in the microwave range?

I certainly hope not! I put aluminium foil in my microwave range once and that wasn't a pretty sight. I can't imagine the damage caused when lasers and microwave ranges meet.

Who needs the LHC? Toss in some non-dairy creamer and I could easily see a black hole forming. under the above scenario.

Enterprice

[rsborg]

Nice freudian slip... but totally true. Adding the word Enterprise to your product, you can charge like 1000% more. That's the Enterprice.

Re:What's new about it?

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:an idea someone else has probably already had

[Pollardito]

leave YouTube alone!

Re:point to point, or from a lack of fiber in the

[davidsyes]

backbone, try Meta-muse-ul to restore regularity between bottlenecks and freely-flowing packets...