Re: airFiber (text of the 8 minute video)

[Greg Ihnen <os10rules () gmail com>]

Respectfully, the claim isn't a "decline in the cost of backhaul bandwidth between 10 and 100 times", the claim is 
"Operators will be able to get 10 to 100 times more data throughput for the same dollar." which granted is a very good 
thing, but it does not imply how much more money one would have to spend with a competitor to reach that bandwidth 
level. It is only an assumption that you would have to buy between 10 and 100 of the competitor's products and put them 
in parallel (not feasible anyway) to get the same performance thereby costing between 10 and 100 times a much. 
Logically it's possible that the competitor's product which matches AirFiber is only penny more, which it's not, but 
that's all one could logically conclude from UBNT's statement - for the same price you get a lot more bandwidth _not_ 
how much more you'd have to spend to get that performance level from a competitor.

Ubiquiti gear is shattering price barriers, but I believe the difference in cost between their product and their 
competition's which can offer the same bandwidth is less than 10:1 and certainly not 100:1. AirFiber is reported to be 
$3000 a pair (both ends of the link). 100:1 would mean the competitor's cost is $300,000. I don't believe anyone else's 
24 GHz UNLICENSED gear is in that price range.

Also keep in mind this is unlicensed gear (think unprotected airspace). Nothing stops everyone else in town from 
throwing one up and soon you're drowning in a high noise floor and it goes slow or doesn't work at all. Like what's 
happened to 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz in a lot of places. There's few urban or semi-urban places where you still can use those 
frequencies for backhaul. The reason why people pay the big bucks for licenses and gear for licensed  frequencies is 
you're buying insurance it's going to work in the future.

Greg

On Mar 29, 2012, at 1:53 PM, Gordon Cook wrote:

> On Mar 29, 2012, at 1:58 PM, Josh Baird wrote:
>
> > Anyhow, check the
> > video out on ubnt.com for an introduction and technical overview -
> > it's worth watching.
>
> The claim is a huge decline in the cost of backhaul bandwidth for wisps between 10 and 100 times.  I have just 
> finished the preparation of an extensive article on a nebraska wisp whose network is backhaul radios on towers about 
> 5 miles apart.  he is on over 100 towers across a space of 150 miles by roughly 40 miles
>
> here is the text of the video which indeed is very good
>
> Robert Pera, CEO Ubiquity:  Ubiquity had a lot of strength.   We had hardware design software design, mechanical 
> design, antenna design.   We had  firmware and protocol design but the one thing that we were missing  was really our 
> own radio design at our old modem design.
>
> Engineer 1:  The group of guys who are here have been working together for about 20 years.   we collectively have a 
> lot of experience in the wireless data world -  probably more so than any other company. This team of people 
> originally were all hired into Motorola,  some of us go back to  the late 1980s. We actually worked on a program 
> called altair.  Altair was one of the 1st attempts at doing in building wireless networking. It was  the 1st wireless 
> local area network product ever.   It was actually the 1st time that I am aware of that anyone had actually built a 
> broadband wireless networking product.
>
> What we did on altair continued on through Motorola and  eventually became a product called  canopy.   Canopy is a 
> very popular product now. It is a wireless Internet distribution system  used to provide high-speed Internet people 
> in houses where there typically is no access to cable or to DSL 
>
> Gary Schulz:  we had kind of run the canopy product through its maturity and did not see a lot of additional room for 
> growth there.  When the ubiquity management approached us, we were looking for the opportunity to continue to build 
> new stuff and that's what made it very interesting to come over and work for Ubiquity  Because their focus is on the 
> new stuff. It is on working on high speed and low cost.
>
> The freedom to design at our level was just go and do it. What are you going to do?  it was like start with a clean 
> sheet of paper.  start with nothing. We could build and design this product in any way we saw fit.   The idea was 
> just to be the best we could.
> air fiber is the start of the new product line within Ubiquity. It is the 1st of several products  that are highly 
> efficient, high data rate,  wireless broadband products.
>
> Greg Bedian:   Our design is something that is a little bit crazy. We are  trying  to build a 0 IF radio at 24 GHz 
> and do this for a 100 MHz bandwidth which  is something that I am not sure anyone else has been crazy enough to try.
>
> Chuck Macenski:  As fast as you can send a packet on an ethernet wire we can receive it and transmit with no 
> limitations.
>
> Air fiber is designed to be mounted in a reasonably high location.  It is a point to point network where the 2 
> antennas see each other.  this is a system that under certain circumstances can work up to 10 miles.  It is going to 
> be very easy to deploy and align.   It is a product that is going to require only one person to carry it up the tower 
> and install it.   There is a display on the bottom that tells you what sort of power is being received as well as a 
> very comprehensive web interface.
>
> We designed all aspects of it. The modem, the radio,  the mechanical housing. This is a completely designed from 
> scratch, purpose built solution just to deliver backhaul.  So it is not based on wi-fi or anybody else's standards.  
> As a result it does not suffer from any of the other overhead normally associated with that.
>
> Built for speed -- if you want to compare the data rates of existing products to our product, other products on the 
> market today would give you the expected data rate of the flow of water through a garden hose.   Our product will 
> provide the flow rate of a firehose. This product will provide 1.4 Gb per second of data flow which is 300 times 
> faster than you would normally be able to get from your own home Internet service provider.
>
> Operators will be able to get  10 to 100 times more data throughput for the same dollar.   That is the big impact 
> that this product is going to have.
>
> Rick Keniuk:  we looked at 24 GHz.  We actually wanted to do something up in high frequency and that happens to be 
> the next unlicensed band beyond six gigahertz.  You can put it out anywhere. You don't have to do anything. No 
> special paperwork. No license fees.  Nobody to go get permission from to operate the radio.  The nice part is  that 
> it him allows anyone to operate  the product and started up without any issues of having to get licenses or jump 
> through certain hoops  of where you can place the product. It is a freedom thing.
>
> Inside the air Fiber Design  -- As far as I know no one builds a modem with this level of sophistication.   Most 
> people when the building modem commit to custom silicon.   But doing it this way is very expensive very 
> time-consuming. It is rigid in its architecture. If you make mistake, you cannot reprogram it.   If someone wants to 
> change a feature, it's locked in stone and too late, once it is committed.   We call this a modem but there may be 
> times that we can actually change the identity of it by loading new software into it on the fly.    This 
> programmable. It is flexible. And it can basically do whatever function you want to do.
>
> With most systems, the farther you get away, the longer the amount of time that you have to wait for the packet to 
> actually get there.   we actually have a patent pending that allows us to synchronously  send packets in between 
> radios. So that packets transmitted from both ends of the link and actually meet in space halfway in between.   It 
> does not have to wait before it transmits. In this case they are both synchronize through global positioning  And 
> they can send packets simultaneously
>
> [This next  paragraph is a summary] They point out at the end that in the developing world there are many people who 
> given the high scrap value of copper are motivated to dig up copper cables between transmission centers in order to 
> sell the copper. And furthermore that in many cases they go looking for cables and do not understand the difference 
> between a fiber-optic cable copper cable. When they find the cable, they cut in order to extract it. And when they 
> see it's not  fiber, they just leave it alone.   The nice thing about our solution is that other than the radios 
> themselves there is nothing you have to protect in between the point-to-point links.  [End summary]
>
> When you are given an opportunity to try to create something new and do something differently than anyone else has 
> done, as an engineer, that's always very exciting.  Ubiquiti has a reputation for being very disruptive in the market 
> place and we found hat very attractive.  We like to think about products differently than anyone else.  It is going 
> to be a whole lot less costly and much higher performance than anything else that is out there right now.
>
>
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>
> On Mar 29, 2012, at 1:58 PM, Josh Baird wrote:
>
> > Anyhow, check the
> > video out on ubnt.com for an introduction and technical overview -
> > it's worth watching.