This section from the marketing blurb doesn't sound too promising:
When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime.
In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.
Some of their use-case they are crowing about on their site cover temporary things: back haul for major-but-temporary events, tethered-drone-mounted units for emergency disaster recover where a cell site is taken out etc. Those are the sorts of things where laying fibre 20km for use for just a day or two just isn't going to happen, but a temporary laser link that you can get up and running in a hour or two would be great.
What kind of data rates and distances are they talking about that isn't served by existing products? For example, you can buy a 20km range, 2Gbps wireless point to point link for a flat $3000 today: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wireless-airfiber-ptp/pr...
What they mention in the article is up to 20Gbps, but they'd have to be pretty dang cheap to out compete just buying 10 of the existing options.
The issue is that you can't put 10 of your 2 Gbps wireless links next to each other. You quite possibly end up with < 2 Gbps as interference kills your signals (unless you put the transceivers so far apart from one another that you sort of defeat the purpose). That said there are other wireless solutions that can get you > 10 Gbps over > 20 km already (not sure about 20 Gbps, but I wouldn't be surprised). The issue is available spectrum, i.e. you can't just setup the link, because the spectrum doesn't belong to you. Not a problem for optics.
That's not the market they're going for though. They're more of a competitor to Starlink
There's also obvious applications to places where weather is more predictable. There's plenty of areas and small towns in the Great Basin region that have basically no internet. This would be a quick and easy way to set those places up with internet with more reliability than something like starlink
But why would these not be places already served by terrestrial wireless internet service providers? It seems like it would be much easier and generally more attractive to serve locations like this using, for example, 5 GHz.
Normally, the lack of (near) line-of-sight is one of the biggest limiting to those sorts of deployments, but that would also have to be solved for any place being served with FSO.
The problem with selling inferior technologies is that sooner or later people are going to stop using them (even in the Grad Basin region). Not exactly a recipe for success.
What are you labelling inferior here? Both Taara and Starlink?
Yes, both of those are inferior to wired infrastructure but they clearly have their usecases. If you were to start a mining project that lasts a few months or even a few years but is expected to eventually be finished and packed up, Taara seems like exactly what you need.
It can also outcompete Starlink because it won't require us to constantly replace decaying satellites. Also means less space debris pollution which is increasingly becoming a huge concern
a point to point terrestrial bridge large piece of equipment that costs $5,000+, needs a professional to install it, and works on either free space optics or V-band or E-band radio is not in any way a competitor to starlink. It's more a place to take a 1 to 10 Gbps ethernet connection as a link between two towers or roofs that can 'see' each other as an alternative to where laying fiber may be cost prohibitive or would take too long to build (or both).
Assuming this thing doesn't utterly fail in rain at a moderate distance, this would be something you use to feed a POP which then redistributes service to end users by some totally other technology (5/6 GHz band PTMP radio system, GPON, XGSPON, G.fast on copper, docsis3/docsis3.1, etc)
It's interesting at 36 to look back at what I think would disrupt connectivity a decade ago:
- Google Fiber (it wasn't possible to do it cheaper than incumbents, so it devolved to standard incumbent x why would 40% margin company invest billions to get Comcast's peak profit margin of ~15% profit)
- Starry Internet (too expensive to build out, I have it and it's good, but the company certainly didn't scale)
- 5G in general (strictly inferior to incumbent, speed isn't faster, latency is higher, not as reliable)
It's hard for me to wrap my mind around why this would work at all, sounds like a more-susceptible-to-bad-conditions version of Starry.
I keep wondering how people make Starlink work, my understanding is the connection degrades then stops then reconnects every...idk, 5 minutes? as the satellites go overhead.
The key breakthrough for 5G was allowing ~10x the number of devices to connect to a node compared to 4G. 5G is what allowed the toppling of data caps that was by far the #1 consumer complaint for years. 4G just couldn't handle heavy loads well, so data caps were needed to constrain demand.
Teleco's aren't going to say this out load, but it's the real reason why they were so celebratory about 5G, despite it coming off like just a renamed 4G to the average user.
Why would they not be loud about it? I think "We've built out 5G so we can get rid of your data caps!" is a message any telecom would want to broadcast out, unless I'm missing something
Could that be because they aren’t as densely populated by users so even if everyone with a phone has no data cap, they won’t overload the network? Which countries were that for example?
And yet probably everyone you know in EU has a cheaper Internet per GB that folks in the US. I have 2 SIM cards, one provider charges me $10/GB, while the other has a 2-GB packet for $6.
In Finland I pay 20€/mo for unlimited data (bandwidth capped at 200 Mbps). With some shopping around it can be cheaper/have more bandwidth. The pricing has been similar at least since 3g. And I recall having a similar deal in the UK five years ago.
There's also 28 GB EU roaming per month included, and 2.23€/GB after that.
Both of those prices are considerably more expensive than what I pay for service in the US. Even the cheaper one is more than 2x more expensive than what I pay per gig, including unlimited calls and texts + roaming to a lot of North America.
Mint. 15GB for $20/mo works out to $1.33/GB while your 2GB plan is $3/GB.
But there are other MVNOs out there like tello which also have a 2GB/$6 plan in the US, and other MVNOs which offer unlimited data for like $25-30/mo like visible and US Cellular.
Tello is actually what I use for my secondary data, Fi is my main (mostly because I travel somewhat and the data costs the same in all the destinations I care about without having to juggle SIM cards).
I'm not a good case study because I rarely use more than 2gb in a month, so Mint would come closer to $10 a gig... :)
As I deployed Starlink in an extremely obstructed spot last year for a few weeks, where multi-second dropouts were quite common... it impressed me JUST HOW MANY satellites they have up there, and just how usable my dish was despite only having ~60% of its field of view clear. It's switching satellites much more often than every five minutes.
The built-in obstruction mapping tool quickly demonstrated that though each satellite represents a tiny slice of sky... over the course of the day you're seeing a vast number of satellites at a high variety of spatial angles and orbits.
I wouldn't recommend that obstructed situation to anyone (and it's going in a much clearer location this coming summer) but the users I was supporting reported it a far far better solution than the 4G LTE they'd been depending on prior. Not a patch on fiber, but a great solution for an awkwardly remote property.
> I keep wondering how people make Starlink work, my understanding is the connection degrades then stops then reconnects every...idk, 5 minutes? as the satellites go overhead.
That is not a correct understanding for how the Starlink network behaves today[0]. While I can't speak for using it outside of the U.S., I have not faced any interruptions outside of a few times during very severe weather.
[0] in the early days of the constellation, there were sub-second or a few second drops when there was no satellite overhead. But this dropped off very quickly once the constellation size increased.
For Starlink the User Terminal (antenna a.k.a. "Dishy") is a phased array. It tracks the satellite as it passes from west to east. Each satellite is in view for around 15 seconds - the phased array instantly flips from east to west and acquires the new in-view satellite in microseconds. There's no degradation in almost all 'flips' especially if the U.T. has an unobstructed view of the sky.
From my perspective, Google Fiber 100% disrupted connectivity - it woke the incumbents up and made them offer competitive Fiber.
In that sense, they succeeded! My last three connections from my last three ISPs have all been gigabit (one of which was Google Fiber, easily the best internet I've ever had). I think they're expanding again, too, though I wish they had stayed as aggressive with rollout as they started.
You're right, it's definitely better than 4G, my wording was unclear, more in the sense of "Would I make this my home ISP?" than "how did 5G go?" (I would have thought cell providers would have 20-30% of the market now, ah, the follys of youth...)
TBH I think a lot of it is many people still don't understand the product or misunderstand their actual needs/usage. Plenty of "normie" households can easily meet all their needs with a decent 5G fixed wireless install. As we see more cord cutting we'll probably see continued growth in fixed wireless.
FWIW, most other ISP types are treading water in terms of overall subscribers while the only real growth overall in new subscribers is fixed wireless. Your gut probably wasn't wrong that fixed wireless will probably grab 20-30%+, but just timescale-wise off a bit.
5G home internet is the preferred in Australia where fibre isn’t present.
Even at my house where I have FTTH, my mobile 5G connection is persistently faster and quicker, that is both bandwidth and latency are superior on my phone from my home location.
Of course, the pricing is structured so you’re better off paying for both, either fixed internet plus mobile phone plane, or fixed 5G and mobile phone plan, depending on what is available at any specific location, but typically not all three options.
It's crazy that almost every house is able to be attached to a pipe carrying high pressure water that will flood if it is broken or attached wrong, thick wire carrying high current that will shock you, a pipe containing explosive gas, and a six inch cast iron pipe full of poop, but adding one more connection to a tiny thin strand of glass wrapped in plastic is too expensive.
A lot of the houses that don't currently have modern high speed internet access also don't have water pipes and sewer pipes. They have wells or water collection/delivery and septic tanks.
Electricity and twisted pair phone line is really all that's been pulled to their property.
You can say the same thing about running wired ethernet to your TV in the living room. It's simpler and more reliable than wifi. But wifi is much easier and quicker to install. Which one do most people use?
For most users (me included), there is zero difference in user experience between using wifi or Ethernet for their TV. Otherwise, running wired Ethernet would probably be a lot more popular.
So you think. You may be right, but most users won't even realize that a good chunk of their "buffering" / "Internet is slow today" / "Netflix is broken today" problems might just be a WiFi issue, and it would go away if they used a wired connection.
Optical fiber is absolutely the simplest and best option for almost any form of long distance connectivity. Maybe this technology will become cost/performance competitive in about 15 years after the HFT firms have invested billions trying to extract an extra cent out of our financial markets.
The economic burden usually falls on governments, so, like StarLink, Alphabet is probably hoping for some of that sweet, sweet government subsidy/grants for military applications.
When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime.
In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.