There is NO WAY that optical systems are NOT line of sight. Optical implies directly LIGHT WAVES, and these are by laws of physics, line of sight.
As for fixed office, it may be that you already have a wide area network mobile PC card in your laptop (HDR) and to use it indoors you just use the same card with a lower power transmitter and the same coding. this scenario would lead to an overall lower cost. And in that environment, you would be able to use small repeater microcells enough to allow higher than the mobile bandwidth. Instead of using 1/10 of the HDR signal, an office worker might be able to get 1/2 or so.
I agree that the inner office fixed market will be solved in a variety of ways, but then you can do this today wiht quite a few solutions. It is interesting why none of these have caught on. One used to be sold by NCR Corp. It was 900 Mhz and ran at something like 1 Mbps. It was realtivley cheap at about $500 per computer.
I think it will be interesting to see what develops in the next year or two, but I think that each and every one of these has their own place and I do not see one dominating so much that they displace the other. DSL, Cable, fibre, T1, Broadband fixed, HDR, 3G. they all provide somewhat the same thing....access to the net. Now when you tradeoff costs, availability, easy on use, ease of installation, overall cost to install, flexibility....then you will have some consumer choice. |
