While LEO satellite internet remains stupid, this is just line of sight radio transmission. Nothing new, and certainly not anything like starlink.
post
Excellent. The fewer things that Musk controls, the better.
The Telegraph's Ukraine the Latest podcast reported earlier that the Starlink outage two years ago during the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive was directly due to Musk ordering it shut down.
The man has blood on his hands.
This just sounds like a microwave link? lol
Yea, nothing new here
Probably not as fast as they claim either tbh
We typically use fairly modern E-Band Links at work (which this probably is, being marketed as mmWave lol), they do like 3-5 Gbps max at 1 GHz of bandwidth (which already requires really beefy radio equipment, I kinda doubt a super compact one can handle that). If you do XPIC (basically adding another radio at a different polarisation) you can reach higher speeds of course.
Also, the images make it look like they're using a phased array instead of an actual parabolic antenna so that would reduce gain as well I assume.
All in all I'm sure it works (P2P wireless is not that hard) but I call moderate leves of bullshit
I found the data sheet
At 71-76GHz it's about a 4mm wavelength in the E band. These kind of signals can't penetrate much and throughput will be significantly reduced in bad weather. They are also used primarily in terrestrial fixed links because aiming is difficult (as you must know having worked with other brands in this band). However this is a 240 node flat panel array with electronic beam steering, so it's able to maintain its own aiming and the throughput would remain decent if its aimed in the general direction since it has about 5 degrees of high power spray. At 32DBI it's going to do about 50% of the 10gbps over 3-5km and down to mbps over around 15km or more.
After looking at it in more detail it's cooler than I originally thought, but it's not doing anything that hasn't been done before.
In the autumn of 2022, Musk ordered cut coverage during a Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson. The move disrupted surveillance drones, artillery targeting, and troop coordination, according to a Reuters investigation.
Later that year, Musk refused a request to activate Starlink near Crimea for a naval drone strike. He was also allegedly asked by Vladimir Putin to limit coverage over Taiwan — as a favour to Xi Jinping.
Terrestrial mesh radio using mmWave. Doesn’t seem to be a practical alternative for residential use.
Yeah. Looks like more oriented towards military use, but I thought there already were similar solutions in use by militaries, albeit for much simpler radio-communication (like analogue voice and stuff).
So, not really a StarLink alternative for everything StarLink provides, but something that should reduce the need for StarLink, in certain scenarios.
For residential use?
Hmm, well if you consider it as "community use", maybe it can work out.
Perhaps one station can have connection to the Internet using Fibre and it can act as a bridge for the "peer-net" made using multiple of these, owned by each person.
How useful/viable it turns out to be, will depend upon pricing and stability. I can think of the following:
- if buildings are fixed, fibre is better
- in non-disaster prone areas, fibre is better, even given the peer-peer model
- for areas with frequent earthquakes, this can be used (similar to WiMAX?)
- this can be better than WiMAX, if the peers' bandwidth requirements are less than what a single node can provide, meaning they can act as a node for others farther away from the server
- if people want to move around while using this, then this makes more sense
- you will have to factor in additional costs of running relay nodes on drones
- in plains, drones having an extendable tripod should be good enough and would require a much smaller number of relays
- in forested areas, you can have drones perch on top of trees. Either way, prevent requiring continuous hovering
- need to worry about both, wildlife-safety and wildlife-proofing.
- the relay nodes will still require battery-recharges, so that needs to be take in account

no comments (yet)