Monkey Brains

Again, I can agree that it would be great to have everything wireless. And I agree that it is certainly useful and practical for many things. Just not for all communication.

For many people, wireless /is/ the way they do all their data traffic in their house. They have a router (DSL, fibre, cable, whatever) and it's Wifi to their telephones, pads, laptops. You can do a great deal that way. But it is not good enough for everything. It is simply not fast enough, stable enough, or long enough reach - and this comes from physical limitations. Sure, you can get a wireless link that is fast and stable enough for top-quality video - but that won't go through the floors or walls. Sure, you can have a wireless link that will reach to the garage - but that won't be fast enough if you want to copy large files around. Sure, you can have wireless streamed video to 3 teenager's bedrooms - but that is for small screens, and they might get problems if the surrounding flats are doing the same thing.

You just have to understand there are trade-offs. Often wireless /is/ the right way - but it most certainly is not /always/ the right way.

You should not confuse the use of wireless inside a home for local area networking with the use of wireless for point-to-point outdoors connections as described in this thread. They are really different things, although they unfortunately (partly) share the same spectrum.

In many place, both at residential and commercial, there are far more than a few!

Since wireless is so much more convenient than wireless, the density can be expected to increase over time.

It is another variant of the classic "tragedy of the commons" phenomena.

The first link I found about security and some the applications you mention. It outlines some of the hazards.

If I had time I'd look at what Ross Anderson's group at the University of Cambridge has written about the topic.

That's never happened to me. Oh, no. Never. Ever.

The mistake means you fit in with far too much of usenet :(

Admitting it means you don't fit in - and your reputation is enhanced. :)

I am not confusing them - but I wonder if John Larkin has been, in thinking that because it is good for his internet connection at the office we could use wireless for everything.

There are also point-to-many-point links, such as satellite TV dishes, which are also very useful in their niches but can't be used for /everything/.

Here in Seattle, the 'until it rains' bit is a killer. So, the confident claim that 'the path' has no trees is only a secondary concern. Trees grow real tall, fast, in this climate. Heck, I've measured dandelions here at over 1 meter tall.

I surveyed one link here, with trees in the way, but the map said it would clear the terrain and buildings, so... we got a mile long link at (5GHz? ) by aiming according to the compass reading. It worked fine, trees, rain, and all.

I have an 8km 5 GHz WiFi link that is clear sight except for a tree at about 300m from my side, and in summer the link is 10-12dB weaker than in winter. At legal power limit (1W EIRP) this makes the link fail in summer, especially on wet days. (rain itself does not result in much attenuation but a wet tree does)

OTOH, we have clear-sight link of 30-40km that work absolutely fine. There is even a link from straight "behind me" but 20km further away to the same endpoint that works much better than mine. Those same trees are in the path but as they are not so close to the endpoint they have less effect. (the line of sight is goes over them)

In many places such a draconian rule would rule out a link.

Yes, the opportunities are almost endless. That is one reason why I chose RF and analog as a career.

The problem is laying the first one. In older cities and towns the infrastructure consists of copper and it's all just buried, no pipes. Same where we live. Running a fiber to our house would require excavating on a steep slope while tearing up our landscaping and that of a neighbor. Also, you can't even get a little Kubota trencher in there safely. Not gonna happen.

Satellite is slow, there you really have a hard total bandwidth limit. It's also expensive. In areas where the proper in- or above-ground infrastructure isn't in place RF is IMO the best solution. Also the least expensive one.

No ten horses would drag me or my wife to live in a city ever again.

Famously in London the first fibre optic cables were pretty easy to lay. The telcos bought up the unused assets of the London Hydraulic Power Company.

Fiber is ideal for the terabit backhauls into the net. RF is ideal for the last few miles.

You can jump a mile, at hundreds of megabit rates, with a pair of dishes that cost $300 and can be installed in an afternoon. Or trench and lay fiber in pipes for a good chunk of a million dollars.

A 5G sort of network wouldn't even need dishes, just discrete little plastic tube things here and there.

It's shocking to me how much bandwidth we have already. How many cell phones and wifi connections do we have now?

Our old building had/has a water-powered, mustly wood hydraulic elevator. Sadly, it will be torn down soon for ugly apartments.

Like any resource considered to be plenty, _all_ of it will be taken. That's just the nature of living things.

Jeroen Belleman

The electricity and water and gas pipes into our house are all we'll ever need. I don't think we'd ever have use for more than a few hundred megabits per second of data.

A gigabit/sec per person, for everyone on the planet, should be more than enough. 1e17 bytes/second. Unless we get brain-to-brain interfaces or something.

People are looking at that!

More likely, that bandwidth would be totally consumed by a bevy of botnets.

Eventually, isp's will have to start sniffing packets and refuse to transport some categories of traffic. Like malware, for instance.

The IEEE e-mail aliasing service has been doing that for many years.