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Europe Is Testing 12.5 Gbps Wireless
Lorien_the_first_one brings word that in Europe, a breakthrough for post-4G communications has been announced. A public-private consortium known as IPHOBAC has been developing new communications technology that is near commercialization now. Quoting: "With much of the mobile world yet to migrate to 3G mobile communications, let alone 4G, European researchers are already working on a new technology able to deliver data wirelessly up to 12.5Gb/s. The technology — known as 'millimeter-wave' or microwave photonics — has commercial applications not just in telecommunications (access and in-house networks) but also in instrumentation, radar, security, radio astronomy and other fields."
Im already using it. Its awesome.
We don't bother with every individual step in between and we get to the same place as the stair-climbers eventually too.
Meanwhile, Japanese are upset because they're getting throttled to 900 Gb upload a month. Awful slow elevator, that. Notice how this was 8 months ago.
Most of us bathe in kilowatts of infra red radiation at shorter wavelengths (and higher photon energy) than microwaves. I don't see how photons of lower energy could be causing us problems.
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Your analogy would make more sense if America were making big leaps every few years in communication tech. However, just looking at the internet alone, so many people are still left with dial-up and will be there indefinitely while others here have Verizon Fios, the other side of the residential spectrum. Now, the old argument is population density one, but I feel that is a dead horse in many ways, with communities in Europe (Sweden) with comparable or lower density getting top notch speeds. Hell, just look at the gauge of wire for electricity that get to the super high % amount of population except the most, most remote, and also being able to provide telephone service for those same people too - and then tell me laying fiber optic is too expensive.
The only time I saw Verizon move in my area to provide better service the last 10 years (Fios) was when comcast started offering voip phone service (they already have a strong cable internet following). Suddenly Verizon felt threatened. But otherwise they stayed slothful, providing as little service as possible while extracting the greatest price. They only moved when they felt threatened (how Verizon shat itself and went to court when Philadelphia proposed ubiquitous wireless internet). It seems that way with many of the monopolies. Hell, even regular old cellular service is abysmal in this country once you go past the population centers of the east and west coast. Nevermind cellular data service.
Which is too bad. So much of the internet is really hampered by the traditional view of it being on the desktop. In a stationary place. The notebook boom coupled with WiFi spots moved to alleviate that but it really isn't on the go yet. The iPhone was probably the first mainstream product but service is still very expensive and no matter what you choose, pretty slow. Just as the internet was the killer app of the last 20 years, changing how we live; cheap, relatively speedy, ubiquitous wireless internet would probably be the next killer app the next 20 years.
You're talking crap.
Whilst IR photons have a higher energy than microwaves, so do visible light photons.
On the other hand, opacity and absorbtion of various human tissues, is a complex relationship with wavelength.
4G is a mobile solution where the signal is radiated every direction and cells get blanketed by signals that are useful to mobile devices. Millimeter wave is a point-to-point technology that requires a clear line of sight and should be compared to free space optic laser solutions. You so much as block the beam with a tree branch and it doesn't work. Can we try to get some quality reporting on slashdot? We have plenty of experts in this community and headlines like these need to get slapped down. We don't need another clueless USA bashing headline.
The comparison with 3G/4G systems is misleading, as these terms denote wide-area cellular telephone networks. Our cellular links are mobile, work over long ranges, and do not require a line-of-sight path from transmitter to receiver. 60 GHz wireless links, by comparison, typically require highly directive antennas, ie. the transmitter radiates energy directly at the receiver in a narrow beam. This makes it more suitable for fixed point link, rather than mobile, at this stage of development. Also, 60 GHz wireless signals are highly attenuated as they pass through solid objects, hence the need for a line-of-sight path. So, while its true mm-wave communications offers unparalleled wireless data rates, the comparison with cellular networks is not necessarily a good one.
Actually, resonant processes are the ones that depend absolutely upon the photon energy, and the energy of a microwave photon is too low to do anything interesting. Microwaves can do work by a nonresonant, thermal process, but that's it.
A resonant process is one in which the photon has the right energy to trigger a particular transition. Ionising radiation (UV, x-rays, etc.) works by a resonant process, and depends on the quantum of radiation having enough energy to eject an electron from the molecule. As you go down in energy from there, you have enough energy per photon to resonantly electronically excite molecules (visual light, used in the eyes to detect light) or vibrationally excite (IR), or down at the bottom, to rotationally (microwave), and then translationally excite molecules.
Correspondingly, it gets harder and harder to cause any chemistry with those photons. It's trivial to break up a molecule by shifting its electrons around or ejecting them altogether, or to a lesser extent it's possible to chop something up by exciting a particular molecular stretching vibration such that the bond(s) dissociate(s). However it's a serious challenge to cleave a bond with a rotational excitation alone.
So, how could a microwave do any chemistry, and thus damage, to your tissues? It's a simple thermal process. When you rotationally excite a molecule, in the gas phase, the molecule, or part of it, changes its rotational motion in some way. There are couplings between rotational and vibrational motions, and upwards to electronic excitations. In the solution or solid phase, there are also couplings to the translational motion of the molecules, meaning that ultimately the energy from the microwave can end up speeding up the molecule's motion, which is plain old heating.
So the energy you dump in with the microwaves becomes "thermalised", spreading over the whole range of states evenly, with a pretty huge chunk of it going into heating up the material. That heat lets you do old-fashioned collision-activated chemistry. What the anti-EM movement don't want you to think about is that this thermal process is entirely dependent on your exposure. It's like standing next to a furnace. A foot away, you're toast. Six feet away, you're warm. One hundred feet away, you don't know it exists.
In summary, it is not possible for radio to cause you thermal damage because the exposure is simply too low. No non-thermal, resonant process for damage has been shown to exist, and trivial physical chemistry makes it clear that one probably never will be found.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Horse shit. Did Europe have internet twenty years before the United States did? This seems to be what you are suggesting. Fact is, the US has fallen behind because our "business leaders" are to busy having huge circle jerks, trying to figure out how to use modern technology to rip off the consumer. Witness the number of lawsuits filed to prevent towns and counties from implementing internet service in areas that no corporation was interested in supplying service anyway. Yes, look at how far behind we are today. And, think about how far behind we'll be in another ten years. Then, write you congressman to make things happen, and stop whining out your excuses for substandard performance on America's part.
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