Replacing Fiber With 10 Gigabit/Second Wireless 107
Chicken_dinner writes "Engineers at Battelle have come up with a way to send data through the air at 10 Gigabits per second using point-to-point millimeter-wave technology. They used standard optical networking equipment and essentially combined two lower bandwidth signals to produce a 10Gb signal from the interference. They say the technology could replace fiber optics around large campuses or companies or even deliver high-bandwidth streaming within the home."
Limited use; maybe good for backhauls (Score:5, Informative)
This sounds good, but it's definitely going to be a limited usage technology. Putting in backhauls to a remote telco might be a real option. The biggest concerns are:
1. this seems to be line of sight only, so no broadcasting HDTV from a closet to the TV
2. point to point means backhaul only, distribution would still be by copper/fiber/wifi
3. mm waves are subject to attenuation by atmospherics, so "rain fade" might be a stumbling block
4. line of sight limits maximum distance between receiver/transmitters due to earth curvature
All in all it's a great leap to get higher bit density over wireless, but this is clearly a commercial-level component...us peons won't get to use it.
Re:Call me when it's reliable (Score:5, Informative)
what would be considred consumer grade wireless equipment can't hold a stick to true enterprice level equipment.
you talk about your wifi dropping out - hey i have the same thing with my WRT54G... but all of the aironet equipment i use never has issues.. but hey my 54g was 50$ compared to 800$
Re:Call me when it's reliable (Score:3, Informative)
Depends on the physical size of the signal and the redundancy. Obviously if you're relying on a single link that's physically roughly the size of the bird or smaller, the signal will be disrupted as long as the bird is in the beam (plus, probably, a short recovery time). It's as sure an outage as a backhoe taking out your fiber, although shorter-lived.
The researchers seem to have a pretty good idea of exactly where it's useful -- they don't really mention replacing backbones or end-user links, but using it places like college campuses, where setting up redundant links between buildings would be quite reasonable, but uptime isn't as critical as it is for a backbone.