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Focus
Wireless: What Works?
2/3/2006
The new ‘millimeter wave’ wireless technology may be outside your comfort zone, but it’s out there and working well for some of your competitors.
Dartmouth's Millimeter wave installation:
'hiding' in Baker Tower.
Thinking beyond Wi-Fi (and no, this is not another hype of WiMAX), an emerging option you should know about is very high frequency (71-76 GHz, 81-86 GHz, and 91-95 GHz), very high capacity licensed wireless. The technology is known as millimeter wave or E-band, and the FCC also refers to it as “virtual fiber.”
At these recently-made-available frequencies, the overall bandwidth capacity is much greater than traditional radio frequency communications, even microwave. (Note for techies: The real difference is that licensees may use up to 5GHz of frequency for both transmit and receive, equating to 10GHz total.) These focused, line-of-sight, Gigabit/second signals can be set up in point-to-point configurations for distances up to a mile. Sounds great, no?
So, What’s the Catch?
If you’re a skeptic, like I am, you’ll have noted several potential caveats in the above description, namely “licensed,” “emerging,” “line of sight,” “point to point” and “up to a mile.”
‘Licensed’ tells us that one must obtain a permit from the FCC in order to use this type of system. (I can hear the groans at this realization.) What may surprise you, though—especially if you’ve ever struggled with these types of permits in the past—is that the process for obtaining the permits for these frequencies has been moved online and is now greatly streamlined: Now a license can be secured within days, not months.
The dreaded ‘emerging.’ From the customer’s standpoint, this can mean buying into proprietary systems. Often, it means that there are few vendors of the technology, thus limiting competition and ultimately equating to high prices. These are real risks you will need to decide to take or not; if you use this technology for selective purposes, however, the risks may be moot.
‘Line of sight’ is probably the most significant barrier to the use of millimeter wave technology, in that there must be no physical barriers between the sites you plan to connect. Trees, for instance, can be a significant barrier. You truly need to be able to stand at point A and clearly see point B (and yes, it’s legitimate to use binoculars or a telescope).
‘Point to point.’ Unlike most implementations of Wi-Fi, E-band wireless d'esn’t blanket an area around the antenna, but rather, shoots a highly directional, “pencil-beam” connection to another antenna/receiver. That means this technology is best suited to direct building-to-building connections, also known as point to point. The real advantage of focusing the beam is that the traffic-carrying capacity increases by an enormous amount: E-band can carry up to 2.7 Gigabits/second of information (this is the claim; your mileage may vary). This is a previously unheard-of capacity for wireless technology. Only Free Space Optics (which is light-based rather than radio-frequency-based—and therefore also technically wireless) comes close. We’ll cover that soon.
‘Up to a mile.’ The distance limitation is a matter of physics. Radio frequency signals can travel only so far before they are absorbed by the atmosphere. (In the wireless world, this phenomenon is known as “attenuation.”) Every type of wireless signaling is subject to this law of physics. Still, around a mile is sufficient for most campuses.
Even after all of the possible “gotchas,” this technology truly has something to offer—namely, it can be an excellent substitute for a relatively short run of fiber when a fiber installation would be extremely tricky, time-consuming, or costly; or, it can act as a backup to an existing fiber link; or, it can serve as an upgrade to an existing point-to-point wireless link that has too little bandwidth for current and future needs. In short, d'esn’t your campus have a need for this?
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