The thing proceeded to go down every time it rained, and no amount of tweaking settings, power, phase, polarity or orientation helped. This is the manufacturer/vendor doing the tweaks, mind you, not clueless me (I wouldn’t dream of touching this arcane technology I knew nothing about).
In the end we ditched the microwave and went with a good old copper link which worked without a hitch regardless of the weather.
So since you are, in your own sarcastic way, asking how I know, this is how: from experience. I don’t know about the technology but I do know about when they promise you it will work in the rain.
Laser comms aren’t going to be useful in Houston. They’ll probably be a game changer for swarms of drones at altitude, anything in space and the sorts of arid, weather-stable places we like to build data centres.
A) Up the power and blast through
B) Use a different suboptimal frequency with much lower bandwidth
Neither seem like actual solutions...
Plus there's the possibility they're well aware of this problem but are going full steam ahead anyway.