On 4/4/16 2:28 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei wrote:
In a context of providing rural communities with modern broadband.
Reading some tells me that Microwave links can be raised to 1gbps. How common is that ?
for wireless backhaul of cell-towers, some wisp infrastructure and for this like inter-building point-to-point connectivity. pretty common.
I assume that cell phone towers have modern microwave links (when not directly on fibre). What sort of capacity would typically be provided ?
an example would be something like http://www.dragonwaveinc.com/solutions/mobile-backhaul
And in the case of a remote village/town served by microwave originally designed to handle just phone calls, how difficult/expensive is it to upgrade to 1gbps or higher capacity ?
well if you're describing at&t longlines or bell canada C-band microwave relay networks those were built a time when cost was not the primary consideration, (e.g. there were not signficant alternatives in the 1950s to 1970s)
Just a change of radio ? or radio and antenna, keeping only the tower ?
modern radios are dramatically cheaper. use of unii bands or licensed spectrum are options, distance and spectrum choices tends to dominate the set of considerations that goes into selecting a system. examples of unlicensed being something like https://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber24-hd/ https://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber5/
(keeping spectrum acquisition out of discussion as that is a whole other ball game).