Alphabet wants to deliver Internet access via laser beams
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
There's a lot of competition for the non-visible spectrum at useful levels. It's only natural we'd start to move up. Also, as your wavelength gets smaller it gets cheaper to start compressing signals in ways that don't interfere over the same physical area.
The bandwidth of individual connections is only half the equation, and largely irrelevant imho. What matters for the network is the lack of interference. Laser connections can spider across a city without real risk of contaminating one signal with another. So even if the point-to-point bandwidth is the same, the total potential bandwidth of the installed network will be much higher.
EDIT: maybe a missing detail is that “AirFiber” and similar products are point to point comm devices. So each pair of AirFiber units is a 1.2+ gbps link, same as a laser set up. You may be confusing with an alternate PtMP radio setup.
This is about public ear. We all want to hear about some magic tech saving our internet’s ass. It’s not going to happen.
The solve is in the change of business models of ISPs, not in the tech that brings it to doorsteps.
We have the tech, we need a shift in how these companies make money.
There’s a point when a hard wired fiber line just makes sense and it’s all postering to put out press releases about some bs laser solution that supposed to somehow be better than RF but less difficult/expensive than just running a wire.
Even near visible laser communication systems can operate at harmless power levels for miles, can be aligned by hand in many cases (you provide a "collection" dish to reflect the light in) and they're dirt cheap.
I actually built one as a project in my required EE classes for my CS degree back in 2002 using a pair of (rather expensive and overpowered) helium neon lasers. In 2002 and with these lasers the speed we had build was quite slow because of the switching time for the lasers, but the point was to build the hardware so we were good.
Given the absurdly low cost of these systems w/ modern components and their phenomenally low power budget, I'm not surprised.
> If you're like me and immediately asked "how can a line-of-sight laser system work when it rains?" The answer is "it doesn't." Atmospheric disturbances like rain, snow, fog, dust, and heat can all interfere with the light beam, and they have been the major limiting factor in this communication method.
It was doing 6mbit with better latencies than cable, back when cable was < 6mbit in my area. I have no idea what similar bandwidth microwave systems can push these days, but it worked fine in rain and fog.
Implying that google's 20Gbit system isn't eye-safe?
Well, I was thinking that combined with whatever navigation is going on as well. As a layperson, waves don't seem predictable to me.
Also no idea in India but in the US a lot of times although their are existing power poles internet providers can't necessarily get permission to string their fiber on them. Same problem can happen with existing in ground pipes. And any trenching or installing new poles becomes very expense.
An alternative way to imagine networking an area is running fiber into the area then having a mesh network assemble itself building to building in town/city whatever. This has the added advantage of greatly reducing the power costs of the overall network for local communications.
The other issue is "long fat pipes." TCP is better tuned for it on machines now than it used to be but when you go over a long distance, the latency can decrease the usable bandwidth significantly. Of course, this seems to be more focused on last mile rather than back-haul. There are very few applications where a several nanosecond latency decrease matters.
Anyway, they seem to have a solution to that, but they won't disclose it. So it's anyone's guess, but it seems to have been taken into consideration.
(Edit: Looked it up; 2.4GHz is more readily absorbed by plants than 5.8GHz. Still, attenuation due to moisture seems to be a problem for microwave frequencies generally.)
Disclaimer: I work for Google but have no knowledge of this program. I'm reading about it for the first time just like you all.
But India is big on cellular. There's cell coverage almost everywhere, especially in states like Andhra Pradesh. You can get pretty decent speeds via 4G.