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Ask Slashdot: Can Any Wireless Tech Challenge Fiber To the Home?
New submitter danielmorrison writes: In Holland, MI (birthplace of Slashdot) we're working toward fiber to the home. A handful of people have asked why not go wireless instead? I know my reasons (speed, privacy, and we have an existing fiber loop) but are any wireless technologies good enough that cities should consider them? If so, what technologies and what cities have had success stories?
No.
Long answer?
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Sorry, but that pesky little Shannon's Law gets in the way. Fibre provides more frequency and better SNR than you'll get in the air, thus more bits. You can't get around physics.
The short answer.
Seriously, no.
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
Not yet
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So many nay-sayers.
Webpass is having success with point-to-point millimeter wave in cities across the US
http://webpass.net/
Fiber is good for 25, 30, or more years and scales very easily.
Wireless is shared infrastructure. You need MANY sectors; everyone on that sector shares the bandwidth.
Most FTTH designs provide much higher bandwidth to the end user on a fundamental level.
Your logic is not flawed. OTA has security, interference, overlap, and penetration issues. The ONLY reason to roll out OTA over Fibre would be cost. Given that the most expensive portion of the ground work (Fibre Loop) has already been laid, you're past the threshold. I read the site linked (which is scarce on detailed information, but good on general) and would totally be in support of this project if I lived in the city. I would probably push it one step further if the City does wish to become an ISP they could corner the market for all services in their area.
Stick with your original plan of Fibre to the home. Once you start to see profits from the initial investment, roll those profits into WAPs, and expand your service to out-of-the-home wireless. Extend that service on step further with WiFi-calling and your city will be the first 2020 capable city in the US.
The only thing (as a techie) I could ask would be that you base the entire framework on IPv6 to save conversion troubles down the road.
Wireless can do as well as fiber, but it's going to cost a LOT more and you'll have trouble scaling it. I run a small rural wireless ISP, and while wireless is cheap and fast to deploy, it's not fiber, and it's never going to be. That said, with a good high point and backhaul, you can start providing speeds up to 40Mbps for less than $5k.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
In rural areas unlikely to expand, there are high-speed wireless technologies that could be plausibly used. In even suburbs? No. Once you reach a certain level of density, you need to set up so many base stations that you might as well just run cable (not necessarily fiber) to every house and be done with it.
Seriously, the power and frequency range needed to do this will have serious warming effects upon water-based tissue.
There's a good reason why wired beats wireless. In wireless your common medium is the air which is common to everyone. Basically it's impossible to transmit without causing interference at some level to someone else in the common area unless you're so far away that wireless is pointless. With a wire, it's now possible to have a dedicated wire strictly for just your communication. In practice this costs too much so it is shared somewhat but it's far better than a common medium for everyone.
Wireless as current deployable technologies stand cannot come anywhere close to fiber. While the future may be long to wireless that future is pending several breakthroughs and new discoveries to make it a truly viable alternative.
Wireless as it stands now can be a good stopgap before fiber can be deployed but as it stands now simply cannot compete.
Yes, but through-air optical lasers have other issues. Fried pigeons aside, they don't do so well in fog or heavy snowstorms.
Ask them how reliable their cell phone connections are and if they would be happy having that level of reliability with their internet connection.
"Can you ping me now?"
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Now how do you get the signal from those thousands of towers back somewhere to give them network access? The most common way is via copper or fiber cabling. Push enough towers out deep into every neighborhood to have minimal contention, good enough signal strength, and 99.9% coverage over the area (including all those old houses with nice thick walls that KILL signal) and you've probably spent as much or more than hiring a trenching/construction/OSP crew for a few months. And you still probably need 10-20% of those copper/fiber connections back to your headend to get to the network. And you have to provide power at several hundred locations instead of a small handful.
So why don't you just backhaul everything using multi-hop wireless? With a proper design, you're going to have one radio for subscriber use, and one for backhaul. So that's 2X the amount of equipment on every pole/tower. Then if you're over a large enough area that you can't do all the remote towers back to the main one, you're taking up bandwidth from every downstream tower coming back in addition to the upstream towers.
T1->T2->T3->T4->HE
The amount of backhaul bandwidth you're going to need for T4->HE is the sum of all the bandwidth needed for T1, T2, T3, AND T4.
The idea has been thought of many times. Economics are the biggest reason it fails, not the technology. To get sufficient density, it costs a lot more than just running wires.
Wireless communications may become more interesting in the future thanks to this pioneering research: http://www.nature.com/articles...
See also the theoretical paper: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab... (http://arxiv.org/pdf/math-ph/0703059.pdf)
It's not clear what the implications are for signal loss or if this is more of an illusion akin to beam steering.
Challenge ftth for what, under what requirements? If the measure is market share, cable beats fiber-to-the-home. Quick deployment? Cable internet service can be activated today.
In the city I recently moved from, fixed wireless was an option that made sense for some people. Fixed wireless means there is a stationary antenna on hour house, similar to satellite, but it points at a local tower rather than a satellite, so latency isn't bad. I used a similar setup in another city, where I pointed a cantenna at the provider's tower two miles away.
One thing that can make sense is combining this with mobile broadband. You run fiber only along major electrical and telephone right-of-ways, with APs every so often. That costs a lot less than fiber to each individual home. Mobile users will get usable speeds because signal levels won't be great,
directional WiFi antennas attached to houses can get high speed. APs can be upgraded as better and faster standards are introduced.
"Ning and his colleagues argue that Li-Fi using white lasers could be 10 to 100 times faster than LED-based Li-Fi."
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/31/9082443/engineers-create-worlds-first-white-laser-beam
(Current LED speed is 224 Gbps)
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/lifi-internet-breakthrough-224gbps-connection-broadcast-led-bulb-1488204
MonkeyBrains is a San Francisco ISP that provides high-speed microwave links. AFAICT they get great reviews from their users, with excellent QoS. They cover half of the city.
https://www.monkeybrains.net/wireless.html
Unfortunately for me they don't serve my neighborhood. I'm eagerly awaiting the day I can purchase service from either Sonic.net's fiber-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) DSL, or MonkeyBrains. Currently I'm stuck with Comcast.
In Holland, MI (birthplace of Slashdot) we're working toward fiber to the home. A handful of people have asked why not go wireless instead?
Because fiber will almost certainly be faster, probably more secure and likely more reliable and less prone to interference. That said, fiber to the home is not and will not be available to most of the country any time soon so it's a hypothetical question anyway. I'm not aware of any near term likely wireless technology that would outperform fiber. Furthermore once the fiber is laid it's relatively future proof for some time to come. Wireless not so much.
I know my reasons (speed, privacy, and we have an existing fiber loop) but are any wireless technologies good enough that cities should consider them?
The answer currently is no. That may change someday but not anytime soon. Wireless has its place but it's not the solution you are looking for here.
When I briefly worked at Cisco's wireless division a few years ago, I learned that their ideal customer was a hospital. Medical devices on a wireless network requires a higher level of reliability and uptime than the typical corporate or home environment. If Cisco gets wireless right for the hospital environment, they get it right for everyone else.
Although hospitals are willing replace their wireless access points (APs) with newer models every X years, they're reluctant to upgrade the closet switches that connects the APs into the network. The more bandwidth is pushed through the APs, the more bandwidth capacity is needed for the switch. Higher bandwidth switches are much more expensive. That was the problem for the new 1Gb APs in 2013. You can connect 32 1GB APs to a switch, but the fiber link for the average switch maxes out at 10Gb. If bandwidth is constrained in the closet, the benefits to upgrading to high-speed APs will be limited. A big problem for the marketing department to figure out.
If you think a hospital scenario is bad, trying getting local government to pony up a fat pipe for everyone in the neighborhood to have high-speed wireless.
You need to quantify what you consider "good enough" in order to answer that.
First, in strict terms of bandwidth, no, today's best wireless just can't compete with today's best fiber. But how about tomorrow? No, tomorrow's best wireless still won't beat tomorrow's best fiber; but, with wireless, when 7G hits the scene everyone goes out and buys a new $50 modem and trucks don't need to physically roll to every end point on the network to upgrade their tubes.
Second, in more relaxed terms of bandwidth, when do we reach "enough" so that even revolutionary improvements don't really matter any more? Do I really need the ability to download a full 4k movie in under six seconds? I don't mean that as a "640k should be enough for anyone" argument, but at a point in time, yes, 640k did count as "enough" for most purposes, even though at that same point in time we had supercomputers with a whopping 16MB of main RAM.
Finally, and most importantly (I touched this in my first point), you asked specifically about "to the home". The biggest challenge in getting bits to the vast majority of homes has nothing to do with the throughput of the medium, but whether we can get it to the home in the first place. In the nearest city to me, I could get 1GB connections for a few hundred a month; living half an hour away, I don't even have the slowest of DSL available at any price. Whether or not fiber counts as "better" in that context doesn't mean a damned thing to me, because I won't ever see it.
When you ask about "good enough", keep in mind that the connection that meets all you needs, the connection that you can get, beats the much, much better one that you can't get.
I typed that wrong. I meant to say it can be combined with mobile wireless. A phone will get a weak signal from an AP on a telephone pole some distance away. A stationary, directional antenna mounted on a roof and pointed at the pole will get much better signal and speed.
Also I realized there is some justified dislike of certain cable operators here, so I should be clear:
I'm not actually saying that coax cable is "better" than fiber.
I'm saying that more information about the requirements is needed. _IF_ one of the requirements was "must be operable next week", THEN cable might well be the best option because it's probably already available. I all depends on the requirements- costs, time frame, geographic area, population density, types of construction common in the area, new development or historic neighborhood, quality of service required, etc.
It all depends on how much bandwidth and how much of a data allowance each customer wants/needs.
If they expect to suck down a dedicated 100 Mbps pipe per household 24/7, then no, wireless anything won't do that, even if you expand outside the scope of WiFi to other tech like 4G.
If, on the other hand, either their desired bandwidth, desired data allowance, or both, are sufficiently low, or the population density is sufficiently sparse, or any combination of these factors that turns out to be "enough", then you could substitute some kind of wireless technology for FTTP, whether it be LTE, WiFi, or something more pedestrian, like HSDPA/HSUPA.
You could also go with high-freq (5 GHz and up) directional microwave from an office or a tower to specific receivers. If you don't want to install a receiver on each house (very expensive), you can shoot a beam to a street-corner box and then run copper or fiber to the premises. Saves you having to dig up the streets from the source to the street corner, at least. Fiber to the node. Kind of a hybrid. Sucks when it rains, though; sufficiently dense rain will diffract and/or block high freq microwave signals and make it useless.
Do those same techniques work on frequencies through all different mediums, or do they only work in the air? (this is a rhetorical question by the way).
Whatever you can get in the air, you can get more in a cable or fibre. Sorry, that is just how it is going to be. Find the fastest wireless technology on the market, and then compare it to what you can get over a copper or fibre. Do it at any given point in history, and you see that it is always behind.
There's a reason for that, and I gave the reason.
At my home currently, there are 6 wireless providers that offer various crappy speeds. There are zero fiber providers. There are 3 copper providers that offer decent speeds.
Therefore in a wireless vs fiber challenge at my home, wireless wins hands down, but copper is better than either.
Only if wireless providers don't put caps
Ever heard of interferences? Anything can cause issue in the wireless spectrum of things. I really don't want my connection to suddenly drop because that one guy 3 blocks down the road decided to cook something in the microwave.
Yes, it can be made to work, but a pipe is always better
Need more capacity, add more fibers
Once the spectrum is saturated, it's full
Yeah, clever coding and compression can help, but it's still a finite spectrum
In spite of all the bad press *freespace* wireless isn't as terrible as you think. See http://www.corridorsystems.com... and in particular slide 16. The problem is that we live in a world with anything but freespace paths (truly laser light line-of-sight). The difference can be a factor of a million to 1 (60 dB)in throughput over common paths. Your cell phone could talk to another one 2000 miles away if you had free space but sometimes you can't get to a tower 2 miles away. Thus, this really is a problem Shannon's equation can apply to. Wireless for 3g,4g,5g only works when the paths are *really* short - like a few tens of meters. See the rest of the paper.
Uncapped 4G is pretty nifty. However... I had an uncapped 4G hotspot from one vendor, and it worked pretty great. Then Sprint bought them, and capped it. Then I had uncapped 4G from Clear. Sprint has bought them, and they start capping it, too, as of November 1st. I expect anyone who offers this service can expect to be purchased by Sprint (hey, built in exit strategy for your new startup!) so they can cap it, and charge metered rates for the inevitable overage (particularly now that Windows 10 does peer-to-peer sharing of Windows images and updates, and eats tons of upstream in the process).
If the city implements the infrastructure, then it's possible for it to be competitive, assuming the fiber bandwidth is either intentionally constrained, or effectively constrained by number of links into a single upstream at the head end (same thing that tends to make cable slow at "get up in the morning before work" and "people just got home from school/work" times.
However, consider this. When the internet was just getting going, 320 video was enough, normally downloaded overnight/day to watch later.
Then 320 became 480, moved to 640, 720, and 1080.
Today, we're starting on '2k' and '4k' screens. From interlaced 30hz to progressive 120Hz, 3D, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Its easy to answer that, in terms of Gbps/Km/$ that fiber occupies a very special niche and that given certain assumptions it's very hard to beat. Other posters have already made that point, and it's a good one. However there's also the point that what actually "wins" in the long run probably needs to break some of those assumptions that fiber requires. So in the long run it's unlikely that most links go to fiber. Wireless today serves a lot more people than fiber does, and that balance is likely to shift more in favor of wireless over time. Fiber's achilles heel is that you have to run a fiber to every individual location where you want access, and digging trenches is really slow, expensive, and complex. The thus connected devices also need to have physical link attached to them. There are some places where it makes sense to do that, and over time that list of places will grow, but it will always be a small subset of all the places that people want to have access. In the meantime wireless will continue to improve by leaps and bounds because the interface to the overwhelming majority of leaf devices is wireless and it's going to stay that way. Fiber is a niche technology serving a small subset of all connected devices - and it's going to stay that way. The reasons for that are both technological and financial.
The theoretical data carrying capacity of an optical fiber is ridiculously high, but largely inaccessible to near future technologies. The nonlinearity of direct modulated lasers, when combined with the signaling rate make modulation schemes beyond NRZ prohibitive in the near term. Getting to higher data rates per fiber requires increasing the high frequency corner (very expensive) or going to multiple colors (even more expensive). And for building to building distribution you still have to dig that trench (really, really, really expensive). Nothing on the roadmap today is going to change any of these variables in the next 20 years. In principle things can be done about this, but nobody is spending significant amounts of money on those technologies. Wireless, OTOH, is seeing a lot of investment.
The theoretical bandwidth of a point to point directed RF link constrained to several GHz of spectrum is quite a bit smaller than what fiber offers, but still vastly in excess of what we use today and it's full potential is much more accessible to near future technologies. If we were really up against the limits of RF capacity today then, yeah, fiber would be a good bet. But we're not - wireless speeds and network capacities can and will grow by orders of magnitude before we start to bump up against the theoretical limitations. It's cost effective, from a network architecture standpoint, to get in-home wireless links that are much faster than the available ISP speeds almost everywhere today, though the business models of cell companies are not yet aligned with that service model. LTE can get up to 1Gbps for fixed links and routinely hits 100Mbps for mobile links and 5G is likely to be 100x faster on both fronts. Increasing capacity in those networks is a capital expenditure decision, it is not being limited in any meaningful way by physics. Wireless companies in the U.S. are trying hard to keep their (extremely) high margin business, so their capital outlays are not aligned with providing lots of cheap bits. But providers in other parts of the world show that the economics of being a wireless pipe service are not actually all that bad.
Fiber does and will continue to own long haul, back haul, core networks, data centers, and a lot of fixed point services. And it will grow. But wireless is going to grow much faster both in terms of capability and in terms of device connections.
this is not a sig
Even if it were technically feasible, all of the wireless vendors want to charge for data, which is a non-starter in that market.
It's worth noting that current trends in wifi technology are moving in a direction which overcomes Shannon's law. The theorem assumes a shared communications channel.
Wrong. Current trends are based on more subtle understandings of Shannon's limit, in multiple channels rather than a singel channel, where transmissions in some channels have more complex interactions into the other channels. The limit is not *overcome* in any theoretic sense.
We're still a long way from this being able to beat out a direct fiber connection. But with phased array antennas (basically what MIMO does except using a lot more transceivers for much finer angular resolution) acting like a "lens" to "focus" radio waves, it's not outlandish to think that in the future all wireless communications could effectively be point-to-point with little to no interference from other wireless sources. Even though everyone is transmitting at the same frequencies, the highly directional nature of the transmissions would mean Shannon's law almost never comes into play, and you get to use all that bandwidth as if you were the only one transmitting on it.
This is wildly optimistic and just wrong. For starters, it's wrong in the "frictionless surface", "perfect mirror", sense, where in practice a beamsteering null does not mean that zero RF energy is directed in the undesired direction.
It's also wrong in an ideal world, as the number and placement of antennas dictates the geometries over which beams can be steered, including the minimum spacing between a beam of desired energy and a null of undesired radiation. (Same logic appears on Rx...) More antennas is more cost, but also has fundamental need for more bandwidth dedicated to training the BF/MIMO weights.
True, in a sense. However, often the wired improvement came first, and is now being applied to wireless, and note that I used the word 'fiber' as opposed to 'wired'. Not all radio techniques apply to optical fiber. Now coax cable, that's where it probably applies.
I don't read AC A human right
WiFi is by no means the only wireless communication technology. There are plenty of candidates (with pretty decent bandwidth even) designed to work over long distances.
pCell (http://www.artemis.com/pcell) is the only tech I know of that might come close. Dish Networks is a big backer, so we might just to get to see it in action soon. Unfortunately the FCC has been giving Dish the runaround with regard to spectrum, so someone with influence might be rigging the game against them :(
There was hope once, many years ago, called UWB (Ultra wideband). Someone managed to kill that off with politics too though :(
http://bluflux.com/what-happen...)
Fundamentally what Shannon developed can be summarized by the following formula:
This is the kind of question that only gets asked by stupid people.
with proper routing and caching, so could 3g... look at what Cuba did with thumb drives.
First: 1080p is NOT included as per wikipedia.
Second: I'm not talking about NTSC, but internet video from the bad, bad old days.
Third: Again, we're moving away from NTSC standards, even movie standards. Higher frame rates are possible.
In short: computer video was lousier than your imaginings in the early days. The improvement is ongoing. 120Hz would indeed be 'the future'.
I don't read AC A human right
Where I live, the coverage map says we got fiber. I can say from experience, that 802.11a/b/g/n, you can pick whatever letter you want, is much faster than the delusions the politicians and cable company are reveling in.
...wireless signal thru a lead vacuum filled pipe with an antenna on both ends.
We can't live without wireless for mobile devices, but fixed installations should be done on fiber.
... for stability, reliability, security and bandwidth ... until we get into frequent-earthquake season, that is. Then all bets are off ... until sunspot/flare season ...
There are airborne optical alternatives that can beat the * out of fiber - provided the weather is clear.
Fibre provides more frequency and better SNR than you'll get in the air, thus more bits
But a single fiber provides ONE PATH. Optics can provide MANY paths.
Imagine ten thousand fibers. Now imagine the ends poking out of a billboard in a 100x100 array - behind a 100x100 array of collimating lenses that beams the light toward your house. At your house imagine a telescope imaging that billboard onto a slide containing another 100x100 array of fiber ends. (Of course the fibers work both ways0 The air path may be of lower quality than physical fibers, but it's hard to beat a four orders of magnitude more paths. You'd need to run an actual bundle of hundreds or thousands of fibers from the billboard site to your house to beat it.
:
Now go back to the billboard and insert another 100x100 array of fibers through it - slightly offset so the same set of lenses but beams toward your next-door neighbor's house. (We'll assume the array is spaced out sufficiently that an optical telescope can resolve the two houses.) Repeat for ALL the houses served.
Not practical as described, of course. But it shows the principle: Wireless paths can multiplex spatially and reuse the bandwidth a hysterical number of times.
(Of course a real system using spatial multiplexing could be expected to use various wave-mechanical hacks rather than actual resolved paths - just as MIMO does down at radio frequencies.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It may help to start by comparing a wired connection to wireless first. The cable that comes to your home uses much the same frequencies that are used all the time over the air, but cable company can use the same frequencies that are used outside the cable inside the cable but lets them use the whole spectrum or at least most of it because you will always have a certain amount of leakage. Even in a new cable system, you will have lose connections that leak RF, the cable company knows this and the put special frequencies not used outside the cables in the cables that can be easily detected when they leak and drive vans around mapping when they spot that frequency. then they can check for lose connections that might be leaking other frequencies also.
So what you need to understand is that each run of cable has a whole spectrum of frequencies allowed inside that can be shielded from outside interference, and therefore will always be better than a wireless connection in almost all ways when the cable is not having an issue anyway.
The cable company can also divide the cables going to different areas/nodes to reuse the same frequencies for things like VOD so a frequency on one node can be used over again on every node for a different customers VOD stream for instance. This is something wireless can not really do since it would run in to interference in the airways.
Now lets get to fiber, Fiber has a big advantage over copper cable in that you do not have to worry about electro magnetic interference at all, no issues with grounding or lose connections allow your frequencies out or other frequencies in to the system. It is easier to diagnose issue on the fiber using sensors that pick up back scatter reflections on the fibers. and currently they can support 400mbits per light frequency on the equipment that some providers use, with 80 frequencies per optical DWDM device, and I am sure they are already doing 1 terabit per frequency on newer lap systems etc with also more than 80 frequencies in use.
The fact that you do not have to worry about electrical interference is a big deal, you either have the light levels you need or you don't and no interference to worry bout, you do not have to worry about electric spikes from storms or anything like that being carried over the fiber and it is also much easier to run equipment that would detect anyone messing with the fiber or trying to TAP it.
So wireless might be nice and getting better all the time, it may be enough bandwidth today for some people, but will not be better than a direct connected wire or fiber.
It's called 4G (or whatever G) and it's often already available where the cost of deploying fiber or even copper would be too high for the user density and economic means of the users (i.e. the mountains of Nepal, the plains of Africa, etc.).
It's not faster but it's better than what they would have without it (nothing).
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
No, because Fiber does not interfere with electronic systems in the area. Such as the human nervous system!
The next big source of pollution that is banned will be RF-EMI, so no Wi-fi or cellular allowed.
(Damned polluters!)
The short answer is 'no.'
Besides, 'fiber' is wireless, just with really really long waveguides. You can get laser point-to-point communications, known as freespace optics. Without the handy waveguide, they're not good for much.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.