
Given the effect of rain of satellite broadcasts in the 10-20 GHz range, what does rain or even fog do to these 70 GHz transmissions? They aren't too useful as a replacement for fiber if they only work 90% of the time!
A team of German scientists has managed to establish a 6Gbps wireless link over a distance of 37 kilometers using newly developed antennas and receivers. The Advanced E Band Satellite Link Studies team established a connection between a base station and the town of Wachtberg using hardware with monolithically integrated …
But I think I figured it out from the later comments. Such a high frequency traveling via a point to point link over such a short distance would maintain a tight beam between two parabolic antenna. Thus most of that 1 watt of power reaches the other end. Compared to satellite broadcasts, where DBS is output with maybe 250 watts or so but is often spread across an entire continent, so the power level that reaches the subscriber is crazy low, something like a trillionth of a trillionth of a watt. Obviously that's going to be affected by interference to a far greater degree.
Right, so realistically that means 2.4Mb/s for 250 connections, and 0.24Mb/s for 2500 connections.
Because really, 250 connections ? Over 37km ? Did they calibrate that for the desert ?
A 37km radius is going to cover tens of thousands of connections. They'll need more than one of those for all that.
But never mind - the important bit is that connectivity is on an inexorable march forward. If only privacy could be on such a path.
Yes, but you are ignoring contention here.
It's a pisser when you hit it, but broadly we aren't needing to all use our max capacity at once.
Plus, when you can throw up a 6Gbps connection in the air, you don't have to think any more about "*a* link to my village".
It's more we can shove a pole in the ground and get 6Gbps from anywhere we can see with fibre in the ground and aggregate it.
IMHO meshing and caching are going to be the next leap - we're all consuming huge amounts of data, but once you've cached the top 1000 items on youtube, top 500 on netflix and all the rest..
@goldcd,
"Yes, but you are ignoring contention here.
It's a pisser when you hit it, but broadly we aren't needing to all use our max capacity at once.
Plus, when you can throw up a 6Gbps connection in the air, you don't have to think any more about "*a* link to my village"."
Indeed, 6Gbps is 6Gbps. Never look a bandwidth gift-horse in the mouth!
"IMHO meshing and caching are going to be the next leap - we're all consuming huge amounts of data, but once you've cached the top 1000 items on youtube, top 500 on netflix and all the rest.."
Mesh is really, really hard. It's OK in static deployments where a network can learn the disposition of its nodes and adapt accordingly, possibly aided by adding extra nodes here and there where the mesh is thin. But its difficult to get serious bandwidth out of it. Mesh-on-the-move has always been nigh on impossible for all but trivial bandwidths.
On the move - I absolutely agree with you.
But, most consumption is on static network.
Example I always think of is my wife watching Eastenders on iPlayer. Sure virgin can cache it in whatever data-centre I end up in - but I'm pretty sure there are half-a-dozen copies already on the Tivos of people connected to that big green box at the bottom of my road.
It's not required. At 70GHz with parabolic antennas about 30cm across (as seems to be the case) their beams will be extremely narrow, provided the antenna shape is accurate. It looks like they've machined them from solid billet, so I expect they're "perfect". Practically all of that 1W will be heading towards the receive antenna, provided both are pointed exactly at each other.
Your "crummy" (pardon the phrase) Nighthawk has got three rubbish whip antennas, and can do about as much beam forming as I can when I fart; it mostly goes absolutely everywhere.
So your nearly-omnidirectional 1W dissipates to undetectability over a much shorter range than their highly focused 1W.
The WiFi distance records are all set using parabolic antennas. In fact you can buy specialised WiFi antenna for creating longer outdoor links that have much better directionality than your average router, such as this.
Last month they switched off the 2.5GHz MMDS in Ireland. So loads of rural roofs with "free" 20dBi to 24dBi mesh dishes just like the one in the link. The older ones use a dipole and N -connector, so are fine for 2.4GHz. Newer ones need the LNA which replaced the stalk on old ones replaced.
Perfect for using a SAN array then.......in the next town over.
Also with tight beam forming you could have a few of these side by side if you lined them up right I suppose that, and you'd need to make sure they were shielded from the wind as I could imagine gusty winds causing issues.