Frank,
Putting aside the questions of fried pigeons, atmospherics, sunshine, weather, low-e glass, not to mention what the landlord will allow, isn't there also a question of the efficiency of such a system?
I'm referring here to the fact that most RF schemes are radial, or radial/dendritic; from what little I've seen, the TeraBeam concept would have to be dendritic, and hybrid dendritic at that. That is, in many urban environments, there are "islands" of skyscrapers; their population of the urban landscape is non-uniform. I am supposing that continuity would be maintained with wires or fiber; if not, then repeaters would be required, and these have their own set of problems.
The efficiency that I'm speaking of is transactional; the mouse-click on the twentieth floor of some tower presumably has to make its way back to some central node, where it is processed, and the result returned to the originator. In a dendritic system the load at the trunk is cumulative, and oft-switched. Well, I guess that's not much different than conventional copper, but what happens to that 99.99% reliability after three atmospheric hops and two switches to fiber (twice)?
As an old carpenter, I don't have a hundredth of the technical sophistication of many here; but the only way I can see this making much of a dent is a new insight into physics that will rival anything we've ever heard of. It will have to be something no one has previously imagined.
I've seen panic-stricken posts on other (RF) fora asking if this is the end. I'm in the camp of the sceptics: if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.
I have a feeling that it's something more like the Transmeta initiative: not so much a change, as a re-ordering of things. The basic realities (and problems) will still be the same.
OTOH, maybe that's why I'm a carpenter! |
