On Monday, July 8, 2002, at 11:08 , Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Benjamin wrote:
>
>> And they would be able to buy bandwidth cheaply from a new WiFi
>> provider
>> operating a 100Mbit/s wireless backbone in the 5GHz band offering
>> amongst other services, corporate VPN.
>
> We're certainly not going to see this happening in the next couple of
> years, and there's a substantial chance that we'll never see it. 5 GHz
> just does not have the range to be useful for applications outside of
> a room. Even within a room, if it's not a small one, you need multiple
> access points.
Well, Motorola is already selling it. It's called Canopy ...
http://www.motorola.com/canopy/index.html
This one is only 10Mbit/s, but I seem to remember that WiFi-2 was spec'd
for 5GHz and they were talking about "well above 50Mbit/s" which should
be sufficient to serve a bunch of PHS base stations. Anyway, you do this
from roof top to roof top, not so problematic for a DDI Pockets style
PHS network. There could be some line of sight issues with an Astel or
NTT style PHS network, yes, but nothing that couldn't be overcome.
> Add to your basic problems with using 5 GHz the fact that it's also
> unlicensed spectrum, and I think you've got a recipe for disappointment
> if you try to do anything substantial with it.
Well, I went to an interview in Kobe, about 18 months ago. I can't
remember the name of the company, it was a US-Japanese JV with the
Boston group being the US backers. Anyway, their business was based on
providing corporate customers with IP with SLAs and all the rest of it,
all based on WLL, 5GHz and I think they were even using the Motorola
gear.
> I could see building a
> lot of high-speed point-to-point links with lasers, but that's certainly
> much more trouble than laying fibre. (Though I don't know how the costs
> would compare.)
Lasers, very messy to install, costs a lot. In Japan I wouldn't want to
use it because the chance is that you will have to realign every single
laser after every average earthquake like -what- magnitude 3.5 ? Well, I
am just guessing, but I heard horror stories from network admins who had
experiences with laser links. It kinda put me off.
regards
benjamin
Received on Mon Jul 8 06:46:09 2002