TWEETHER Project Promises 10Gbps MmW 92-95GHz Based Wireless Broadband

Mark.JUK writes A new project called TWEETHER, which is funded by Europe's Horizon 2020 programme, has been set up at Lancaster University (England) with the goal of harnessing the millimetre wave (mmW) radio spectrum (specifically 92-95GHz) in order to deploy a new Point to Multipoint wireless broadband technology that could deliver peak capacity of up to 10Gbps (Gigabits per second). The technology will take three years to develop and is expected to help support future 5G based Mobile Broadband networks.

Comments

Cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can use my cell data plan for 0.8 seconds at full speed before hitting the monthly cap.

Physics doesn't work like that.

[Rob from RPI]

The higher the frequency, the less penetration of solid objects you have.

At -that- frequency, it'll work well for extremely short range, indoor, communications. But as soon as you put something even slightly solid, or damp, in the way, the signal will get blocked.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[jandrese]

I think this is for tower to tower type communication. I do have to wonder about rain fade on a 95Ghz signal though.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Hadlock]

Apparently 95 ghz is the frequency they use to burn the skin in heat rays, it's energy is fully absorbed by the first 1/64" of skin. From Wikipedia "employs a microwave beam at 95 GHz; a two-second burst of the 95 GHz focused beam heats the skin to a temperature of 130 ÂF (54 ÂC) at a depth of 1/64th of an inch (0.4 mm) and is claimed to cause skin pain without lasting damage."
 
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_burn
 
So yeah, penetration would be poor at best, unless between towers, or from LEO/MEO SpaceX built satellites to rooftop antennas.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Rob from RPI]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally, newer mm-wave projects are shooting for very high array gain. They may still not work well in the rain.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[zlives]

we can conduct a survey of the birds later to see if they feel any pain while flying through !

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

You just have to pump enough energy into the transmission that no objects blocking the signal remain solid.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can just imagine the homeless people camped out underneath the beam path with butterfly nets, catching the perfectly roasted sparrows as they plummet to earth.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Coren22]

From Wikipedia:

Compared to lower bands, radio waves in this band have high atmospheric attenuation; they are absorbed by the gases in the atmosphere. Therefore they have a short range and can only be used for terrestrial communication over about a kilometer.

and

While this absorption limits potential communications range, it also allows for smaller frequency reuse distances than lower frequencies. The small wavelength allows modest size antennas to have a small beam width, further increasing frequency reuse potential.

It sounds like the absorption will be a feature, not a bug. This will allow many more antennas in a city like situation. It won't be any good in rural areas, but I don't think it is meant for that.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Hadlock]

Depends on the insulating effect of feathers! Birds have much higher heat tolerances than humans, 130F isn't too extreme for avians. Particularly if the feathers act to absorb and dissipate 95 ghz.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[MattskEE]

In addition to penetrating solids the range is challenging (or expensive anyway) just because of limited transmit power levels. Power is important because that gives you your range, your cell phone and home wireless router transmit up to about 1 watt. A 1 watt output solid-state power amplifier at this frequency would cost $5-10k, or at least that was the case about a year ago. This project seems to propose using travelling wave vacuum tube technology which provides lots of drive power (50-100 watts) but at a high price (over $100-250k).

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Kjella]

It sounds like the absorption will be a feature, not a bug. This will allow many more antennas in a city like situation. It won't be any good in rural areas, but I don't think it is meant for that.

I really don't see it, in the city any point-to-point beam is going to be a lot slower, unreliable and probably more costly than just running a fiber. Wireless for consumers is a different story, people expect their cell phones and tablets and wifi laptops and whatnot to run at higher and higher speeds but this will be useless for that since it can't penetrate buildings.

Near my cabin in Norway they're planning a fiber rollout now, population density of county is about 35 people/km^2 (92/square mile) or a little higher than the US average. The planned build-out cost is $4500/house, of which they want $1000 up front and the rest over the lifetime of the fiber. While it hasn't been made explicit in the subscription cost you can estimate that the fiber will last 30 years = 360 months = $10/month. The rest of the monthly fee is paying for maintenance, data traffic, support and other overhead. That's a pretty rural community in a high-cost country and I actually expected it to be higher.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[sexconker]

Then you have to invent a new material to make the transmitter out of.
Then you have to increase the power in case someone uses that material to block your signal.
Then you have to invent a new material to make the transmitter out of.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[JasonGoatcher]

I think this is for tower to tower type communication. I do have to wonder about rain fade on a 95Ghz signal though.

As computers improve, the computational requirements for base stations will become cheaper and cheaper, so we might end up havings thousands and thousands of repeater stations spread throughout a town or along a road.

But I'm just guessing.

Re: Physics doesn't work like that.

[Dishwasha]

Temperature thresholds are also highly dependent on whether the birds are of European or African descent.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[toejam13]

The higher the frequency, the less penetration of solid objects you have.

At -that- frequency, it'll work well for extremely short range, indoor, communications. But as soon as you put something even slightly solid, or damp, in the way, the signal will get blocked.

Yup. At this frequency, walls and vegetation are essentially opaque to RF. This will be useful for in-room or sub-kilometer line-of-sight deployments. Great for Phoenix (little rain, few tall trees), horrible for Seattle (damp, heavily forested).

One good thing about hitting 25 GHz or higher is that indoor APs and outdoor APs don't fight with each other the way that they do at 2.4 or 5.8 GHz (lower co-channel interference). So you can have a PTMP or mesh network running in dense areas like New York City. But with the range limitations, it'll need to be a dense network in order to get any sort of coverage. Your hop count is likely to skyrocket if you're using a mesh. High speed, horrible latency.

Re: Physics doesn't work like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, no shit, what happens when it rains? Boost transmit power to nuke-em levels?

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[TFlan91]

Then I should be able to flip this and say that, if and when I am able to reduce my "body frequency" I can walk through walls

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[hattig]

Yeah, but the process of reducing "body frequency" is rather terminal - however ghosts can indeed walk through walls. Interacting with physical matter is a problem though - poltergeists must be able to change their frequency on demand.

Re: Physics doesn't work like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Up to a point. A beam of 20 MeV corresponds to a wavelength in femto to picometers and has a lot of punch thatis only attenuated by inches of lead. With a wl broadband linear accelerator you can a) get a permanent tan b) treat cancer and c) get cancer AND surf the web while you're being zapped.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[bemymonkey]

Hell, even 5GHz WiFi doesn't have enough penetration for full coverage of a three-room appartment (albeit in Germany - no US style cardboard walls here). If my router wasn't dual-band I'd be screwed every time I need to take a dump :p

90+GHz is going to be pretty much limited to Line-of-Sight unless they have some pretty awesome tricks up their sleeves.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Coren22]

It is point to multipoint. So it will be a connection to your cell phone, or someone's internet access.

Taking the average population density of the US vs other countries is counter intuitive, much of the central US is farmland, mountains or deserts, most of the population is on the coasts, so the density of the cities is much higher than that figure would imply. A better figure would be comparing specific city's population densities, which you would be amazed at with New York, but would find LA or Dallas to be very low.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

The higher the frequency, the less penetration of solid objects you have.

No wonder X-rays won't go through shit.

Re:Physics doesn't work like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. In a mobile telephony situation, the carrier has a frequency band it can use. This is split up into channels where each mobile phone that is communicating is using one of those channels (or at least a slice from it). This means that any particular tower can only handle so many customers at once. Not only that, but the Channels must be split up among all the adjacent towers as well, or you will get interference. So in an urban situation where you have lots of customers talking at once, you want the signal to be shorter ranged so that you have fewer people talking per tower If you notice in a high population area, you will see more, shorter towers, and in a rural area, you will see really tall towers that cover a larger area. Having more nodes also lets you use reuse more channels more often in the same set of miles, so that you can get more customers talking.

In what, an open room?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see this going past a wall or two without some serious power behind it.

Re:In what, an open room?

[JasonGoatcher]

I don't see this going past a wall or two without some serious power behind it.

That's what WiFi based lightbulbs are for. Not sure how popular they actually are atm.

Watch that capitalisation

[Anonymous Coward]

"MmW" would mean... Mega-metre-Watt. Yes, metric, bitches. There's a method to the madness, and getting it wrong can be disastrous like mistaking " for ' can yield disaster. No, you don't get to complain that it's too hard, for it isn't.

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[ArcadeMan]

I read that as Mega-milli-Watt.

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[grcumb]

I read that as Mega-milli-Watt.

Or... Watt, as it's commonly known.

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[leftover]

millimeter wave

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[rossdee]

milli is one thousandth, so Mega milli is a Kilo

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[Anonymous Coward]

Heavy stuff.

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[ihtoit]

or the difference between a perfect mission profile and a rocket exploding on the pad, instantly immolating everything in a half mile radius.

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[grcumb]

milli is one thousandth, so Mega milli is a Kilo

ARRRGGGHHHHH!!!

Here I went and ignored the First Rule of Slashdot: Coffee, then comment.

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[JasonGoatcher]

millimeter wave

That's what the Queen of England does when she's in a parade.

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[Anonymous Coward]

..you mean 804.672m radius of course.

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[Jesus_666]

No, with the big M in there it's a megameter wave. I'm not sure whether 300 Hz is a good frequency for a new broadband standard, although penetration would be excellent. Antennas might be a bit big, though.

Re:Watch that capitalisation

[ihtoit]

touché.

Whoever capitalized the M in the title

[Anonymous Coward]

needs to hand in their science card and go home.

TWT based

[rfengr]

The TW in TWEETHER is for a Travelling Wave Tube, which is about the only way to get decent power at mmWave, thus these nodes are not going to be cheap. Why not just use the Ka band backhaul, where you can get soild state PAs, and push it to 4096 QAM, or perhaps the new angular momentum diversity. Is all the bandwidth really eaten up at Ka band, even given the narrow beamwidths?

Re:TWT based

[MattskEE]

Solid state GaAs is slowly catching up to TWTAs at this frequency. They're not common but it is possible to buy a 30 watt solid state amplifier, probably for the same price you can get a TWTA that has a little bit more power. GaN still has lots of problems at this frequency but it's improving and will likely be competitive with tubes within 5-10 years.

But yes it seems like it would be much easier to do this at Ka band where solid state amps are now a better value than tubes for communication applications.

Re:TWT based

[rfengr]

Is it possible to get tens of watts at W-band without spatial power combing or other hairy stuff? I'm doing some GaN load pull right now, but it's no where near W-band.

Re:TWT based

[MattskEE]

To get tens of watts from solid state in W-band yes you need either spatial or corporate (or both) combining of individual chips. So the amp ends up being of similar size to a mm-wave TWT but you don't need an expensive and large HV power supply or water cooling. Chip level output powers in GaAs I think have been done up to about 500mW, and 1-2W in GaN.

GaN for mm-wave still has some yield and reliability problems (pick at least one depending on supplier), and performance is not yet up to the ideal levels. But that's the same thing that GaN went through at lower frequencies, and mm-wave GaN is improving.

Disrupt to ISP's Gorilla Broadband??

[theshowmecanuck]

Could something like this could completely hose all the ISP's if open sourced and if it works well? Here's the concept: People like the dd wrt folks could customize router firmware to act as repeaters and whoever wants can set up relay stations with home type routers, weatherproofed and sitting on a pole outside if need be, creating a de facto municipal wireless broadband network without needing ISP's. I guess some question are: how to hook it up to the regular Internet's backbone, address space, etc. Could a Gorilla Internet be created with something like this?

Re:Disrupt to ISP's Gorilla Broadband??

[rfengr]

Could something like this could completely hose all the ISP's if open sourced and if it works well? Here's the concept: People like the dd wrt folks could customize router firmware to act as repeaters and whoever wants can set up relay stations with home type routers, weatherproofed and sitting on a pole outside if need be, creating a de facto municipal wireless broadband network without needing ISP's. I guess some question are: how to hook it up to the regular Internet's backbone, address space, etc. Could a Gorilla Internet be created with something like this?

Not really, as the beamwidth on these antennas is 1 degree. You would need multiple antennas aimed at multiple neighbors. This seems strictly point-to-point back-haul.

Re:Disrupt to ISP's Gorilla Broadband??

[ubercam]

I know some gorillas can stand up, but I don't think they're going to start using the internet any time soon, at least not soon enough that we have to start planning a municipal network for them.

Just in tiime ...

[jamesl]

... to displace all the wired high speed rural internet that the US tax payers will be installing.

Re:Just in tiime ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This does very little for rural internet, the use cases for this are actually fairly limited, the range is too short to be used for reasonably priced last mile. Cost is likely to be quite high as well. In most cases it will be more cost effective in the long term to run fiber to any tower that needs this. Something like this will be used for rapid deployment to a new tower until it can get the fiber installation active.

The county I live in recently was wanting to deploy LTE wireless everywhere since the local telco/cable companies don't feel like providing anything beyond 10mbps internet and in most places 1.5mbps (DSL) or nothing (cable). After having the consultants come in and do their thing it basically came down to running fiber to every house was cheaper after the 10 year mark than the LTE deployment would be. Beyond that the fiber network was 10Gbps to start with where as the LTE network started at 30mbps with software upgrade to allow the first speed increase and hardware upgrade required for the next speed increase.

so what's wrong with 30mm tech we've got now?

[ihtoit]

You know, stuff we've had for years, that you can knock up a homemade antenna in about five minutes and have something that can kick a few milliwatts up and over 100km?

I think this is just a solution looking for a problem.

TWEET HER

[nullchar]

Which HER am I supposed to TWEET?

Wireless Conversation Starter and Bossiness Prize

[Deliveranc3]

Exec Sum: Wifi VOIP provider wants more wifi discussion, offers prize to OSS OS devs Android

General Interest: 802.11i and 802.11s? Sliced Bread? Too power intensive? Conspiracy theories?

Technocrats: We want x frequencies and why, what comes after i/s, why switching is bad compared to standard cell, why power consumption is bad compared to standard cell, why we don't get two radios/frequency changing radios etc. Who knows, (I love slashdot).

Legal Beagles/ idealists who avoided this discussion because wifi is passe/insecure: Sharing Wifi, why not? QOS emergency servies, email, voip?Hilarious anecdotes about public resource abuse from the right (that guy in the library!)

CONTEST!!!! WTB new OSS OS for Chinese model phone, send me a message for Quality of Phone Standard(6 Inch Dual Core) VS Ultra Hotness (Oooo baby!)... then compile OS with 1-2 features I'd like to see (security/rom flexibility + volume button song change [Just LOVE that feature])... plus a look at what's cooking in the scene get $$$.... well $$ + .5$.

Cheers Slashdot, these are the glory days of Wifi when everyone thinks it's solved and the real solution can happen!

Nice atmospheric window, but rainfade KILLS

[Muad'Dave]

I always post to the wrong duplicate article! ~sarcasm

From my other post:

According to line 'A' on this graph, the atmospheric absorption at 95-100 GHz is fairly low, but this graph shows that rainfade is an absolute killer. Light rain contributes 1 dB/km, which amounts to losing 20.6% of your signal per km. After 10km, you're under 1% of your original signal.

Somewhere between medium and heavy rain you cross the 10 dB/km line - you lose 90% of your signal per km. That ventures into 'unusable' territory very quickly.