Millimetre wave.. omigerd it's going nowherrr.. Apple, you say? Apple may not be the invincible force it once was in mobile, but it is still unrivalled in its ability to scatter stardust over new technologies – just ask the companies which struggled to push Wi-Fi Calling or wireless charging into the mainstream before the iPhone maker came along. Now it has kindled new sparks of enthusiasm, …
Never.
I had a few Vodafone shares (not worth the transaction fee to sell). They immediately tanked after buying 3G licence, then 15+ years later were bought by Verizon. Giving me the chance to cash out with no fee, which I did.
Its a natural monopoly. The whole spectrum auction thing is just an attempt to create competition where theres no need for any. And fill in some short term government funding gaps whilst at it.
Like the postal service the mobile network should be a state owned, and profitable, monopoly. A long term investment that we all own.
"we’re doing long haul where you’re out in a rural area and you don’t have anything for five miles before you get to the next house.”
Er no, there is five miles of inclement weather to the next house. Also unless your super Massive MIMO antenna is made of stern stuff it will be destroyed by the wind. Where I live you do not see external TV aerials unless they're built by me*.
I know that rain reflects Radar and seems to slow my microwave linked broadband but maybe someone here knows if mm waves are similarly affected.
*A dipole with 220mm legs made from 15mm copper pipe with a 15mm push-fit plastic Tee in the middle. All connections are internal and it's totally waterproof. Works fine in the UK for all the usual digital Freeview channels.
Rain reflects radar, but not all of it. That's how they can tell the various intensities. Consider satellite TV - it has to be raining pretty hard to attenuate the signal enough to lose signal. The signal at the dish is on the order of -90 db, because a single satellite is broadcasting a signal that's spread over the entire US or all of Europe. Obviously a beamforming antenna broadcasting a tight (as tight as they can make it, at least) beam from a few km will be broadcast with enough power that it is received at far higher power than a satellite downlink. So it would take a lot more rain to block the signal.
mm wave is at 28 to 39 GHz which is higher frequency than the 12-20 GHz used for satellite TV, so it is affected more by rain, but the increased power should more than compensate for it. It won't be weather proof, but I think you'd need some pretty extreme downpours far in excess of what knocks out satellite TV from a perfectly aligned dish before rain should be a problem.
yes - mm waves are severely affected by rain fade and atmospheric absorbtion. Similar bands (26gig, 38 gig) have been used for a number of years in Uk/Eu for point-to-point backhaul links and rain fade is a major limiting factor. A stable link over, say 5km, can be reduced to nothing for 30-60 minutes during heavy rain.
I can see a cell of these frequencies working over 5km in the dry deserts of Arizona and Nevada, but next to no chance in most of the wet and well vegetated UK and other regions.
"I know that rain reflects Radar and seems to slow my microwave linked broadband but maybe someone here knows if mm waves are similarly affected."
My simple rule of thumb is to compare the wavelength of the signal with the thickness of the conductor; EM waves won't be attenuated by anything much smaller than they are (as the conductor is not big enough to set up an opposing wave). The most dramatic example of this is sending radio messages to submarines: where the waves used are thousands of kilometres long.
The fact that AT&T and Verizon (the two big gorillas in the US room) were mostly capturing different spectrums (Verizon did get some of both - but more of the 28) so as to make handset portability a myth. Yet again.
I wish there was an even playing field and all operators were made to play by the same rulebook, in the same space, at the same time. I can see that as an opportunity for the businesses and consumers to win (or at least lose less for the consumers). I really need to stop daydreaming though.
After decades of reviewing aerial proposals, too clever by half would sum most of them up ... great comment on clever, claims and physics ... never have been that polite, wish I could claim origin ... advert on page for GDPR Forrester Brief, all I see is a spiral antenna ....
It's a pretty big dish. Two way is bigger, it's MUCH lower modulation complexity due to the poor signal to noise (fewer bits per Hz), also unless you are very far north (or south on southern hemisphere) most of the path is outside the atmosphere. See what size dishes they use Sat TV in northern Alaska, Northern Canada, Northern Norway.
The rain path on most satellite TV isn't even a mile.
Given the battles that Apple has had and is continuing to have over Wireless patents, FRAND and all the rest, my guess is that Apple wants to be in on the ground floor and get some essential patents to the tech needed to make this all work nicely.
They are advertising for chip designers and they recently hired an engineering VP away from Qualcomm.
If they get in on the ground floor then cross licensing will be a mere formaity.
Well, that's my worthless 2p on it.
Really high frequencies behave more like light than radio, and the higher you go, the worse it gets. Our ham radio club decided not to put in a 1.2 GHz repeater because our city has lots of trees, which would interfere quite a bit with the signal. We use 146 MHz and 441 MHz signals which work well.
Millimeter wavelengths are a good bit shorter and likely to be blocked by not much of anything. We'll have to wait and see if the boffins can somehow overcome the problems with such high frequencies.
lots saying this wont work, yet the huge comms innovators are betting big on this tech.
If Verizon are saying it solves their last mile problem and are taking it seriously, i can only agree with them. they are putting their future into this tech, it must be working for them to be confident in it.
NTT, ATT, Verizon, Samsung, Apple, Nokia, Ericsson, very successful names, big pockets, they and others see a future in this.............
Which is great if you want lots of short range communication cells, but as people have noted the attenuation goes up a lot inside buildings.
Remember those satellite cell phones designed to operate anywhere, except "anywhere" did not include inside steel framed buildings?
~60GHz, IIRC, is (soon) going to be the ubiquitous Internet of Cars M2M - think the cell is around a hundred metres. That will be big business.
The Ham bands at 47GHz and 24GHz have achieved many hundreds of kilometres direct range, with good preparation, and worldwide coverage via a lunar reflector - with a lot of care.
Some of the very small motes for next generation computing nodes only have enough space for a λ/4 mmW array - so that's a niche use for the sort of IoT stuff that you buy by the kilogram.
cognitive/white-space was also supposed to solve the 'spectrum' - with my £20 NooElec (. . ..co.uk/dp/B01HA642SW/) I can see rather a lot of empty stuff, but thats just upto 0.0017THz, using SDR# on Win & Gqrx (old standalone) app on macOS newer macOS GQRX here
Ah!!! so it is not just me then :)
I keep reading that EE et al are wonderful and work everywhere ..... but seemingly not my house.
I am not the only one who is believing the hype as the 'Smart Meter' I almost got was based on mobile connections, until they tried to get it to work. Suddenly, I am in an area NOT currently supported :)
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