[MLB-WIRELESS] Free Space Optics Info

[Todd Hubers]

Well that is even more limited than what I recalled from our Geelong meet
discussion.

If that's the case, an FSO 1 gbps link over 2.5km is quite good then. I
have a feeling the upper limit is very affected by fog (and other weather
factors), and that a backup link is needed if full speed needs to be
maintained the occasional time the fog is too thick. This puts it close to
par with RF IMO (subject to price comparison). If used in a pure mesh
network there may be one RF route and another FSO route, rather than having
the redundancy on the link, it would be more economical to have redundant
routes (given enough nodes).

Cheap short p2p (in the order of ~100m [and up to 1km] distance) LED FSO
links would possibly beat RF links. I'm considering setting one up,
pointing across the road. Such links are keyed very simply suffering
little, if any, MODEM delay. Much research has been (apparently 100s of
Millions of USD) spent on developing long distance and fast FSO with no
success. Lightpointe is one such effort, but bundles RF redundancy (=
fail). It would be great if FSO research could focus on the 50-100m range
to reach ~10Gbps speeds cheaply - maybe a good candidate for crowd funding
one a successful prototype is completed.

Would be a nice hack day - building an LED system that could reach at least
100Mbps.

Todd

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 12:34 PM, <mw at freenet.net.au> wrote:

> 24GHz Airfiber @ full speed is good for about 1km if you stay within the
> ridiculously low ACMA regulations ;)
>
>
>
> There is a 5GHz model, though, that claims similar data rates which can
> push a bit further, but you need a lot of free spectrum ;)
>
> Cheers!
>
>
>
> Mike.
>
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