Listen to the column Point to Point Radio Broadband, or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.
Here's a network headache for you: connect a high speed link to the building across a half-acre parking lot. Or maybe to the building on the other side of the busy city street. The quick answer is call up your datacom supplier and order another T1, but that's the old way with limited bandwidth and continuing charges every month. The new way is to run an inexpensive radio broadband link at 36Mbps on up to 48Mbps based on unlicensed radio frequencies.
That's the story I heard from Jim Guido, Vice President, Sales for Radwin USA during the Houston ITEC (www.goitec.com) show. Here's his pitch in a nutshell: two endpoints with Ethernet ports, two wireless outdoor transceivers, two cables to link the two, about $2,000, and less than two hours to install. If your second building is farther than a parking lot away, and you have line of sight, you can connect the two ends up to 50 miles under the right (excellent) situations. You can watch a video with Guido explaining his product and applications at www.TechnologyIsBroken.com.
A few companies, including Rad, made a splash with point to point infrared systems, but they struggled with weather such as rain, snow, and fog. Radio systems suffered some weather problems as well, but now they have access to frequencies outside the normal size of rain drops, meaning little weather problem for the new radio systems. That was the key: if the radio waves are smaller than raindrops the signal breaks up. You can mount the outside portion yourself and aim the units until you hear three beeps signifying you have a good connection.
The list of data jobs for point to point wireless broadband seems endless. Link two buildings without digging a trench across the parking lot. Backhaul cell phone traffic. Disaster recovery to a nearby hot site. Broadband redundancy. Link to remote surveillance cameras. Anywhere you need your company network to connect and it's too far to run a cable, check out the Rad Airmux-200 and the WinLink 1000.
Don't limit yourself to traditional data connection uses: Guido talks about linking villages in Africa and India with cell phone and data connections using solar powered devices. If a pair of Rad point to point radio broadband units can "light up" an entire remote village, they can solve a data connection problem for you.
