• Lee@retrolemmy.com
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    19 hours ago

    There’s often niche cases where the obviously better solution (cable) isn’t practical. Let’s take 2 mountain tops with a massive valley between that can’t realistically have fiber due terrain / environmental reasons but are only 0.5km apart.

    A related scenario is where environmental or other factors make the fiber at high risk of damage (mud slides, earth quakes, etc), while wireless has its own reliability issues, they don’t have 100% overlap in their likely failure scenarios, so can be a good combination.

    Another scenario is multipoint. It seems that most people think of point to point use cases and a wire is point to point, but what about point to multipoint / broadcast data? You could have hundreds of wireless receivers vs hundreds of cables. In some multipoint scenarios, the data throughput is higher and cheaper than fiber. Obvious example would be satellite TV 30 years ago when very few had access to internet that could handle the data rate of even a single TV channel.

    • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      people think of point to point use cases and a wire is point to point, but what about point to multipoint / broadcast data? You could have hundreds of wireless receivers vs hundreds of cables. In some multipoint scenarios, the data throughput is higher and cheaper than fiber. Obvious example would be satellite TV 30 years ago when very few had access to internet that could handle the data rate of even a single TV channel

      This particular wavelength won’t work for multiaccess as it is literally too small, the radio waves are millimetres wide.

      The others are interesting but any environmental problem that stops wired will effect this medium because of the wavelength size. Even a light shower will stop this frequency in its tracks.