When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime.
In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.
What they mention in the article is up to 20Gbps, but they'd have to be pretty dang cheap to out compete just buying 10 of the existing options.
But I think you would need 20 of them, 10 on each end? Plus extra install, networking equipment, etc. Which would make Taara significantly better.
There's also obvious applications to places where weather is more predictable. There's plenty of areas and small towns in the Great Basin region that have basically no internet. This would be a quick and easy way to set those places up with internet with more reliability than something like starlink
Yes, both of those are inferior to wired infrastructure but they clearly have their usecases. If you were to start a mining project that lasts a few months or even a few years but is expected to eventually be finished and packed up, Taara seems like exactly what you need.
It can also outcompete Starlink because it won't require us to constantly replace decaying satellites. Also means less space debris pollution which is increasingly becoming a huge concern
Normally, the lack of (near) line-of-sight is one of the biggest limiting to those sorts of deployments, but that would also have to be solved for any place being served with FSO.
Assuming this thing doesn't utterly fail in rain at a moderate distance, this would be something you use to feed a POP which then redistributes service to end users by some totally other technology (5/6 GHz band PTMP radio system, GPON, XGSPON, G.fast on copper, docsis3/docsis3.1, etc)
- Google Fiber (it wasn't possible to do it cheaper than incumbents, so it devolved to standard incumbent x why would 40% margin company invest billions to get Comcast's peak profit margin of ~15% profit)
- Starry Internet (too expensive to build out, I have it and it's good, but the company certainly didn't scale)
- 5G in general (strictly inferior to incumbent, speed isn't faster, latency is higher, not as reliable)
It's hard for me to wrap my mind around why this would work at all, sounds like a more-susceptible-to-bad-conditions version of Starry.
I keep wondering how people make Starlink work, my understanding is the connection degrades then stops then reconnects every...idk, 5 minutes? as the satellites go overhead.
I'm guessing this is a US thing? In Europe, 5G is definitely faster while latency is on par with 4G. YMMMV between EU countries though.
Even at my house where I have FTTH, my mobile 5G connection is persistently faster and quicker, that is both bandwidth and latency are superior on my phone from my home location.
Of course, the pricing is structured so you’re better off paying for both, either fixed internet plus mobile phone plane, or fixed 5G and mobile phone plan, depending on what is available at any specific location, but typically not all three options.
Thank you centrally planned infrastructure.
FWIW, most other ISP types are treading water in terms of overall subscribers while the only real growth overall in new subscribers is fixed wireless. Your gut probably wasn't wrong that fixed wireless will probably grab 20-30%+, but just timescale-wise off a bit.
https://www.opensignal.com/2024/06/06/5g-fixed-wireless-acce...
That is not a correct understanding for how the Starlink network behaves today[0]. While I can't speak for using it outside of the U.S., I have not faced any interruptions outside of a few times during very severe weather.
[0] in the early days of the constellation, there were sub-second or a few second drops when there was no satellite overhead. But this dropped off very quickly once the constellation size increased.
Teleco's aren't going to say this out load, but it's the real reason why they were so celebratory about 5G, despite it coming off like just a renamed 4G to the average user.
In many parts of the world uncapped data has been the norm since around GPRS.
But there are other MVNOs out there like tello which also have a 2GB/$6 plan in the US, and other MVNOs which offer unlimited data for like $25-30/mo like visible and US Cellular.
Plenty of cheap MVNOs out there these days.
I'm not a good case study because I rarely use more than 2gb in a month, so Mint would come closer to $10 a gig... :)
There's also 28 GB EU roaming per month included, and 2.23€/GB after that.
The built-in obstruction mapping tool quickly demonstrated that though each satellite represents a tiny slice of sky... over the course of the day you're seeing a vast number of satellites at a high variety of spatial angles and orbits.
I wouldn't recommend that obstructed situation to anyone (and it's going in a much clearer location this coming summer) but the users I was supporting reported it a far far better solution than the 4G LTE they'd been depending on prior. Not a patch on fiber, but a great solution for an awkwardly remote property.
Electricity and twisted pair phone line is really all that's been pulled to their property.
You end up learning this in your own home. Some things are fine with a wired ethernet connection, it's really only my laptop and phone that use wifi.