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DARPA Begins Work On 100Gbps Wireless Tech With 120-mile Range
MrSeb writes "DARPA has begun development of a wireless communications link that is capable of 100 gigabits per second over a range of 200 kilometers (124mi). Officially dubbed '100 Gb/s RF Backbone' (or 100G for short), the program will provide the U.S. military with networks that are around 50 times faster than its current wireless links. In essence, DARPA wants to give deployed soldiers the same kind of connectivity as a high-bandwidth, low-latency fiber-optic network. In the case of Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. might have a high-speed fiber link to Turkey — but the remaining 1,000 miles to Afghanistan most likely consists of low-bandwidth, high-latency links. It's difficult (and potentially insecure) to control UAVs or send/receive intelligence over these networks, and so the U.S. military instead builds its own wireless network using Common Data Link. CDL maxes out at around 250Mbps, so 100Gbps would be quite a speed boost. DARPA clearly states that the 100G program is for US military use — but it's hard to ignore the repercussions it might have on commercial networks, too. 100Gbps wireless backhaul links between cell towers, rather than costly and cumbersome fiber links, would make it much easier and cheaper to roll out additional mobile coverage. Likewise, 100Gbps wireless links might be the ideal way to provide backhaul links to rural communities that are still stuck with dial-up internet access. Who knows, we might even one day have 100Gbps wireless links to our ISP."
It should be doable, providing two conditions are allowed:
1. The equipment may be ridiculously expensive (No problem: Around half the US government's budget goes to defence).
2. It'll need to be such high (analog) bandwidth, it'll not comply with any spectrum or power regulations, anywhere (No problem: If you're invading a country, you don't need to be overly concerned with obeying local laws, and even occupiers get some leeway).
With this kind of bandwidth, fleets of tele-operated ground vehicles will become reality. Today there isn't enough bandwidth today to send back video, location, and other sensor info to intelligently navigate more than a vehicle or two. This will save many lives. Bravo DARPA!
I don't know why I'm responding since you're AC and won't see it, but if someone else is wondering the same thing, you can hear an FM radio broadcast for a couple hundred miles in some conditions. That radio station has a 50,000 watt transmitter, but the power drops off inversely. By the time it reaches your property it's only milliwatts.
Free Martian Whores!
I am guessing that this only works because a huge amount of radio spectrum bandwidth is allocated per user. There probably is no actual method of scaling this up for general-purpose usage. The last line of the OP seems beyond speculative.
How? Is it airborne or something? You are not going to get any straight line reception at that range due to curvature of the earth, even in the plains.
And if you manage high-bandwidth 125-mi range, the next step is obvious - a constellation of LEO (200-500mi altitude) satellites serving as a nearly-untouchable* backbone for the theater-WAN.
*ok not for peer-level opponents, but I'm pretty certain that a peer-level conflict
a) will not be based on UAVs for long (my biggest concern about UAV-dependence of our forces), and
b) will be over one way or another pretty fast if it's not going to turn SO nasty that any conventional force tech will be nearly irrelevant anyway (the not-so-comforting corollary that would invalidate my concerns above)
-Styopa
As a tool of our military, wouldn't this be rife for jamming by our enemies? Or is jamming avoidance part of the technology?
Remember, Verizon will charge you $10/GB over 2GB...they will roll this out yesterday.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
There, fixed that for ya.
Crimey
This is so much pie-in-the-sky bullshit I can't even believe it. I hear about this kind of thing year after year, and it never happens.
This is DARPA, a company for whom "aim at the sky" is more of a directive rather than a metaphor. Some of there other work includes flying tanks, passive radar systems, stealth ships, onion routing, and wide area interconnected computer networks. Most of it doesn't work, of course... but when it does, we get something no one else would have bothered developing.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
1. The equipment may be ridiculously expensive (No problem: Around half the US government's budget goes to defence).
Dude, 30 years ago the idea of a hard drive with a "gigabyte" of capacity was something ridiculously expensive, taking up football-field sized buildings, and everyone thought it'd be a really dumb idea anyway; Tape would be better for storage. Now I can get 64GB of storage to fit on my index finger and it's only a fingernail's thickness. The argument of "it'll be ridiculously expensive" dies over a long enough time span.
It'll need to be such high (analog) bandwidth, it'll not comply with any spectrum or power regulations, anywhere.
Ding! We have a winner. Though, not for the exact reason you're thinking. It could in fact work, and even within certain power requirements. But it'll never get regulatory approval, and it has nothing to do with technical requirements, but the fact that (at least if we're talking about the United States) the people in charge are paid large amounts of money to maintain the status quo. Remember that price fixing scandal for digital TV when the FCC fucked up the transition so badly Congress had to intercede... three times? Yeah... what ever happened to them? Oh right... the FCC made billions, the corporations made billions... the taxpayers lost many billions, and... oh right: They were fined, uhh.. less than a penny on the dollar against their profits.
Every attempt to give the general public access to high speed digital communications for cheap has been blown out of the water faster than you can say "Republican in a bathroom stall at an airport."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"Defence" is perfectly acceptable.
Looks like someone needs to educate this dumbshit about the difference between discretionary spending (of which defense definitely IS) and non-discretionary (as in you will break a law if you don't make that payment).
And you will forgive a foreigner for not fully understanding the intricacies at which the US government spends/wastes money. We do it better than anyone else in the world, naturally. Those socialist europeans don't waste money nearly as well as we do, and they are a bunch of socialists for gods sake!
Seriously, if you are going to start on a bend about spending, at least have the guts to admit that the real problem with socialism in the USA is that we are just fucking terrible at it. We don't know what to do, when, or how much of it, and yet there are countries out there with spending well under control, better public services by a long shot, and we just sit back muttering about how our system is the best.
Anyway, does anyone have any idea on what kind of tech they are planning to use?
Couple of Linksys routers with some sooper special version of dd-wrt.
One half, one third... either way, that's a really big pile of money.
they also need to focus on beaming energy around, esp. that distance. By being able to beam energy around, they make it possible to provide remote support to forward lines esp. with tanks, FOBs, and even ships at sea.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is actually a DARPA help wanted ad. And from description of the project sounds like a good job opportunity for some slashdoters.
here is the ad:
http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/12/14.aspx
and here is the proposers' day conference:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=e21984e31d49c3780966a53983daa4f6&tab=core&tabmode=list&=
It's difficult (and potentially insecure) to control UAVs or send/receive intelligence over these networks,
With this new development I'm sure terrorists with $100 worth of radioshack gear will love taking control of our drones at ludicrous speeds. Since the US are too fucking dumb to turn on authentication on their drone links
it's not the authentication that's the problem ... it's that they're choosing to use telnet and/or the r-tools for it.
The problem that was already addressed is the curving of earth, because it can be overcome with height. Let's sustain that increasing the altitude of your dishes will allow greater distance without the sphere's shape interfering, you still have all of the factors associated with those heights: weather, cost of getting there, service, general maintenance.
Maintenance: How easy is it to remove ice? Snow? What about the cost of maintaining the tower?
Service: What do you do when you can't communicate with the unit, and you've ruled out everything except the cable between the unit and it's nearest point of contact?
Cost: This is a broader issue than maintenance, because it allows for not owning the tower/building. Tower space is premium, building roof-tops are premium, labor to install, service, or repair is EXTRA premium. Not only do you need guys willing to climb 200+ feet, but they need to be technically capable. http://www.midweststeeplejacks.com/ charges no less than $250/hr.
Weather: Why don't you see point-to-point connections on towers that are 200ft up on towers? Because the bandwidth requires very high frequencies, and those frequencies are very susceptible to any movement caused by wind. I've seen a gentle breeze (on the ground) turn a wireless link from -45 dbi to -60. Let's not forget rain and snow.
The only good ways to mount an antenna or dish at a height, and ensure reliability, are with a very large antenna (think something with 3 or 4 legs and covering at least 400 feet^2), or a building.
Since you'll be checking back ;)
An FM broadcast antenna is indeed directional, in the vertical plane. It flattens out the signal from a sphere so that most of the power is on a level plane. That's how an antenna creates gain. On the other axis it is most often omnidirectional. That 50KW is ERP (Effective Radiated Power), the transmitter is likely only putting out about 10KW.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
"Who knows, we might even one day have 100Gbps wireless links to our ISP." And be throttled to less than dial-up like every wireless isp out there. Mine sure does.
- -= Napalm means serious BBQ =-
An FM broadcast antenna is indeed directional, in the vertical plane. It flattens out the signal from a sphere so that most of the power is on a level plane. That's how an antenna creates gain. On the other axis it is most often omnidirectional. That 50KW is ERP (Effective Radiated Power), the transmitter is likely only putting out about 10KW.
Close but not quite. EIRP is where you start; with an idealized transmitter that radiates power equally in every direction. ERP is calculated based on the energy of the antenna's main lobe, which for an FM transmitter typically looks like a small circle and a long oval connected at the antenna. The difference in power between the EIRP model and signal strength in the main lobe of the antenna is the antenna's gain, which is where your ERP calculation comes from. A transmitter with an antenna having 6dB of gain means it can transmit at 10KW and have an equivalent signal strength (in the main lobe) to an ideal antenna radiating in all directions at 40KW.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You can buy 60GHz units that are from the 1Gbps to 2Gbps transfer rates, depending on lots of different factors. There may be faster licensed units then that, but I'm guessing the price would be insane. A 100x increase in bandwidth doesn't sound impossible if you have the free air space and are willing to spend the power.
And 100Gbps is 1000 times more then 100Mbps
100M x 10 = 1G x 100.
GIT:
I was trying to keep it simple. It's also been a few decades since I've exercised the rights and responsibilities of my old first class ticket.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Where are my flying tanks!?
There is a problem with 60GHz though - range. It's the O2 absorption frequency, so max is 1-2Km...
However there are other frequencies in that area of the spectrum which I know are being investigated/used...
2. It'll need to be such high (analog) bandwidth, it'll not comply with any spectrum or power regulations, anywhere
There may be a twisted solution to the spectrum problem, at least.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
they plan on buying lots and lots of pringles cans.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
As someone who is currently working on a DARPA program (and having worked on another one in the past), there is a term that is commonly bandied around in academic circles... "DARPA hard". DARPA does not fund incremental research that improves something by 2X. They are always on the lookout for funding truly groundbreaking and innovative concepts and their call for proposals always have ridiculous aims. It isn't very often that a team is able to satisfy all the deliverables for a DARPA program, but even in the programs that "fail", tons of useful research comes about, that act as a basis for future innovations. DARPA helps spur innovation in areas that it deems useful and beneficial to the US army and it most often succeeds at doing that. For example, the self driving cars that Google and Stanford have been working on, came about from 2 back to back DARPA challenges for self driving vehicles (I believe the first was in a desert and the 2nd followup program was for city driving).
I was wondering that myself, so I googled darpa flying tank. This is what I found.
I think these guys are taking Avatar way too seriously.
"30 years ago the idea of a hard drive with a "gigabyte" of capacity was something ridiculously expensive, ...Now I can get 64GB of storage to fit on my index finger and it's only a fingernail's thickness. The argument of "it'll be ridiculously expensive" dies over a long enough time span."
Radio technology is not much older and much more developed than hard drive technology. There is no indication whatsoever that some near future technological advancement will make high power, high frequency technology an order of magnitude cheaper than it is now.
Also the military doesn't want it at some arbitrary time in the future after a "long enough time span" has passed, they want it soon.
Only in theory :)
About as close as you'll get is a dipole but then you still end up with more of a doughnut.
Just about any antenna can be modeled as a dipole. For example, an AM broadcast antenna (AKA a vertical) is just a dipole where the tower is one side and the earth is the other. Actually on an AM tower there is a lot of copper strap laid out radially underground from the base of the tower and the whole tower is electrically insulated from the ground. Same thing with a mobile antenna on a car, the stick is one side and the car body the other.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Sorry, that first link should have been: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna but you knew that.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
This is similar to an idea I cover in a blog post about future cities and how those cities may be connected.
https://gautiertalksideas.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/economic-revitalization-of-an-advanced-civilization
This technology brought to you by DARPA.
The people who scoff at the word impossible.
Enahncing your world one crazy impossible bullshit idea at a time.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Seriously.
Mod up.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.