Re: airFiber (text of the 8 minute video)

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:33 PM, Oliver Garraux wrote:

> > 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
>
> I was at Ubiquiti's conference.  I don't disagree with what you're
> saying.  Ubiquiti's take on it seemed to be that 24 Ghz would likely
> never be used to the extent that 2.4 / 5.8 is.  They are seeing 24 Ghz
> as only for backhaul - no connections to end users.  I guess
> point-to-multipoint connections aren't permitted by the FCC for 24
> Ghz.  AirFiber appears to be fairly highly directional.  It needs to
> be though, as each link uses 100 Mhz, and there's only 250 Mhz
> available @ 24 Ghz.
>
> It also sounded like there was a decent possibility of supporting
> licensed 21 / 25 Ghz spectrum with AirFiber in the future.
>
> Oliver

I don't think it's an FCC issue so much as 24Ghz has so much fade tendency with atmospheric moisture that an 
omnidirectional antenna is about as effective as a resistor coupled to ground (i.e. dummy load).

The only way you can get a signal to go any real distance at that frequency is to use a highly directional high-gain 
antenna at both ends.

Owen