What I learned at uni is that because all wireless transmitters and receivers share the same “air” it’s always only as good as a single cable basically. Means that having 100 senders and receivers wirelessly they need to share the airspace and thus share bandwidth. If you had 100 wires, they could all send and receive without interfering.
Wires almost always seem to show better performance and consistent reliability than wireless connections (irrespective of the rated specs).
I have a WiFi 6/AX router and clients and irrespective of the type of data being sent (lots of small files, large movie files), my desktop Gigabit Ethernet connection is always faster and more consistent.
This is with ~5m line of sight of the router. It gets even more funky when the connection has to pass through 2 thick walls.
A new transceiver invented by electrical engineers at the University of California, Irvine boosts radio frequencies into 140-gigahertz territory,
Right… So 140ghz isn’t for mobile access. its too high of a frequency, needing line of sight as the wave is too small to bounce or reflect off things.
I don’t see it being feasible for mobile back haul because of range limitations. At 80Ghz you need a 60Cm antenna to get 1Gb at 2ish KM using 64QAM. So getting 64QAM on a 140Ghz carrier would need a larger antenna or a shorter distance. At which point you can throw a fibre cable at the problem and have a better solution.
Still a good achievement.
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.
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.
Yea, when I see stuff like this I always think about special use-cases.
Like rough conditions in an undeveloped space, whether that’s a developing country or just an undeveloped area starting development.
