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?

Comments

Short answer?

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Short answer?

[Firethorn]

Not just that. I could give fiber speed to ONE user in an area by wireless. To 10% of the population, much less 'everybody'? Not happening.

BTW, 'Shannon's Law' got a snerk from me. Another acronym crossover from two different fields.

Data Transmission: Shannon–Hartley theorem
Firearms: Shannon's Law, which forbids firing guns into the air in Arizona. You're living in the wrong area if ballistic lead is interfering with your wireless signal on a routine basis. ;)

Re:Short answer?

[i.r.id10t]

I get online via a RFC1149 compliant system, and first phase dove season starts Sept 26 here in Florida. I'm expecting a lot of packet loss. Of course, the packets that do make it through will be traveling extra fast...

I run a WISP. No.

[hawkeyeMI]

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.

Wireless or not, still need a fat pipe...

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Here's a question for you to think about

[Sycraft-fu]

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.