Sounds like a cool replacement for point to point WiFi bridges. I wonder what sort of distances start to impact data rates and quality just due to air density or weather.
As I understand, this is very low distance, basically for office settings. What ISPs will do to connect to/provide connectivity to a remote site is install point to point microwave radios. They are not impacted by weather too much, but they do lose signal strength if the radios are misaligned. There have been some funny situations where signals will be out of spec because protected birds like bald eagles are nesting on the radio and it is illegal to disturb their nests, or squirrels are storing acorns in them.
That is what service providers will do if they want to offer cellular connectivity to a small town where running fiber would cost millions of dollars. They will contract a service provider to provide CTBH (Cell Tower Backhaul) via point to point microwave radios. Multiple radios can be used for redundancy / to add bandwidth capabilities by bonding channels together, suddenly they can provide 4g/5g cellular connectivity without needing to spend millions of dollars in installing fiber.
Really depends on the size of the receiver. Its possible to use it at interplanetary distances if we are willing to build a mirror 10s of square miles in size. For point to point my guess would be a few miles. The horizon is the cutoff point for sure so one beam could never be more then the line of sight horizon at the altitude of the receiver for sure.
You’d probably need a modified protocol for interplanetary distances, the lightspeed delay would probably cause timeouts and other problems with the usual approach.
A more realistic application might be if there’s a way to get the signal up to a Starlink satellite or similar low-Earth-orbit relay. Cloud cover might be a problem for that though.
Sounds like a cool replacement for point to point WiFi bridges. I wonder what sort of distances start to impact data rates and quality just due to air density or weather.
As I understand, this is very low distance, basically for office settings. What ISPs will do to connect to/provide connectivity to a remote site is install point to point microwave radios. They are not impacted by weather too much, but they do lose signal strength if the radios are misaligned. There have been some funny situations where signals will be out of spec because protected birds like bald eagles are nesting on the radio and it is illegal to disturb their nests, or squirrels are storing acorns in them.
That is what service providers will do if they want to offer cellular connectivity to a small town where running fiber would cost millions of dollars. They will contract a service provider to provide CTBH (Cell Tower Backhaul) via point to point microwave radios. Multiple radios can be used for redundancy / to add bandwidth capabilities by bonding channels together, suddenly they can provide 4g/5g cellular connectivity without needing to spend millions of dollars in installing fiber.
Really depends on the size of the receiver. Its possible to use it at interplanetary distances if we are willing to build a mirror 10s of square miles in size. For point to point my guess would be a few miles. The horizon is the cutoff point for sure so one beam could never be more then the line of sight horizon at the altitude of the receiver for sure.
You’d probably need a modified protocol for interplanetary distances, the lightspeed delay would probably cause timeouts and other problems with the usual approach.
A more realistic application might be if there’s a way to get the signal up to a Starlink satellite or similar low-Earth-orbit relay. Cloud cover might be a problem for that though.