Facebook Achieves 20Gbps Data Rate Over MMW Radio Spectrum (thestack.com) 61
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook's Connectivity Lab has announced that it has achieved data transmission rates of 20Gbps over the millimetre-wave (MMW) section of the radio spectrum; however, the transceiving stations need to be incredibly tightly calibrated to each other, with the team describing the margin for error as equivalent to 'a baseball pitcher aiming for a strike zone the size of a quarter'.
Fantastic. (Score:5, Funny)
That's fantastic they can violate your privacy even faster now.
Re:Fantastic. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's adorable.
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
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That helps, but Facebook also gets data from partners, some of which you may have accounts with. Facebook probably has more data on any individual in the US readily available than the FBI do.
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Do you give a false name and address when paying the utility bill? Ordering from Amazon?
How does that work? Does someone called Phil McCrackin on 123 Main Street keep wondering how his bills keep getting paid?
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That's a rather touchy response.
I was answering jokingly but the point is valid. If you give your real name/address to anyone, even when paying bills, your data is being saved and quite likely shared with data collection services that will sell the data ultimately to companies like Facebook and Google.
I too use false names online. I use ad blocking software. I have multiple e-mail accounts and sign up for different services with different names; however, I am under no illusion that I have much privacy.
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I know exactly how much there is about my Real Identity in public records, and know there's not a gods-be-damned thing I can do about that.. but at the same time I'm never going to be one of those people who just throw up their hands and say "Nothing I can do about it! May as well give up!" -- which is what most people seem to do. That way lie dragons. You can claim Failbook 'knows'
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Yeah, I hated it when they sent the team of commandos to my house to force me to create an account.
They sent people with guns to make you sign up? What part of Texas do you live in?
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Under the Trump administration, this will likely happen. You'll be required, by federal law, to have and use, daily a Facebook account, using your real, legal name, and your State-ID approved picture of your face. Furthermore you'll be required to carry a GPS-enabled smartphone at all times, and have Facebook log your location in realtime. A voice recognition app will be required to be on your smartphone as well, and all conversations you have, 24/7/365, will be digitized, sifted, sorted, categorized, profiled, and stored for later analysis if any potential illegal activity is suspected by NSA alogrithms. Failure to comply will result in a $100,000 fine and 10 years in federal prison without the possibility of parole, after which you will be implanted with a GPS tracker, removal of which will result in your immediate death. All because you retarded primates voted for gods-be-damned Donald Trump. Thanks for ruining the country and the world, you fucking assholes.
Well, I was going to upvote you as Funny, until I read those last 2 sentences.
Too bad there isn't a "funny troll" option/choice.
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To be fair, as many people play baseball as snooker and snooker has a world championship too.
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In 2016 there were 6 countries represented. (and that's counting England, Scotland and Wales separately instead of under the banner of United Kingdom). There's only 2 countries represented by teams in the world series, but players come from 23 different countries.
I'm actually not disagreeing with the notion that "the world series" is a bit of a laugh as a name, but it is represented by people from a lot of countries, and to be fair, no team from outside North America would be competitive.
(there ag
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Why not try using a sport the "world" plays - a world series that is played by one country...
Two countries participate in the World Series of Baseball, technically. Both Canada and the US have teams. But I would imagine that the best players in the world play in Major League Baseball, I think it's the highest paying league.
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Could we have a bad car analogy instead, that might be more understandable.
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Could we have a bad car analogy instead, that might be more understandable.
The margin of error is smaller than the likelihood of actually getting a car to crank on the first try when being pursued by a serial killer.
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oh yeah I see, a wifi system like that would be really stressful to operate
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Don't worry: it's still an painfully useless analogy if you are familiar with baseball. You really aren't missing anything.
Major League Baseball (MLB) rule 2.04 specifies that " the distance between the pitcher’s plate and home base (the rear point of home plate) shall be 60 feet, 6 inches" (18.44 meters).
MLB rule 3.01 specifies that the ball be "not less than nine nor more than 9 1/4 inches in circumference". That is 72.64–74.68 mm in diameter, let's split it down the middle and use 73.66 mm.
The MLB definition of a strike includes "a legal pitch when so called by the umpire, which: [...] is not struck at, if any p
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If they were using a one-meter-plus parabolic antenna that had to be aimed to an accuracy of 0.07 degrees, and since they pointed out that this part of the spectrum is blocked by rain and fog, I'm going to say "totally". Millimeter-wave gets attenuated by just about anything. If the AC below is correct that there was a ridge in the way, then they must have been using really tall towers -- or, as hinted in the article, an airborne target.
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If they were using a one-meter-plus parabolic antenna that had to be aimed to an accuracy of 0.07 degrees, and since they pointed out that this part of the spectrum is blocked by rain and fog, I'm going to say "totally". Millimeter-wave gets attenuated by just about anything. If the AC below is correct that there was a ridge in the way, then they must have been using really tall towers -- or, as hinted in the article, an airborne target.
I can't begin to imagine the ERP needed for sustained propagation in that frequency range, even with the +1m parabolic! Yow. But hey. Fast.
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Still not as fast as an IR free-space link, and I'm struggling to see what other advantage it has. It's still blocked by atmospheric water or precipitation. It might be harder for a bird to block it by flying through the beam, but if you expand a laser beam's diameter to 1 m, no one bird's going to block that, either. And I can't imagine you'd need anywhere near 100 watts to get IR across that distance.
Terrain (Score:1)
The article does not spell this out, but I lived in Woodland Hills so I know from looking at the map that the path between the receiver and transmitter is not even remotely line-of-sight. That's up over a very tall ridge and then back down onto the floor of the san fernando valley.
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As I said up-thread, the part of the article that talked about a large parabolic reflector aimed within 0.07 degrees implies a very precise line-of-sight alignment. If it were possible to bounce this signal off an atmospheric layer or rely on backscatter, they wouldn't need that kind of accuracy. From looking at the terrain on Google, I don't think towers would do the trick -- I'll bet that they had the transmitter and receiver set up on peaks near Malibu and Woodland Hills, high enough to see each other.
Th
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It's like aiming a car at the library of Congress and hitting only books by Ayn Rand.
Calibration is not a big deal (Score:1)
margin for error as equivalent to 'a baseball pitcher aiming for a strike zone the size of a quarter'.
For fixed-point unobstructed line-of-sight this isn't so difficult, especially if you use lasers to do your initial calibration.
The problems happen if you have obstructions (trees, rain) or movement (buildings move in the wind, so top-of-skyscraper to top-of-skyscraper would be hard to maintain). But for indoor use or near-ground-level use for tens or hundreds of meters, this might work. If you have a way of keeping calibration despite movement, these limits may be relaxed.
I can see this as a possible way
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It would be easier and less trouble to just run a fiber that short distance and ta-da... trouble free communication without interference and easier to reach higher speeds without worry of eavesdropping..
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Please tell us more, O Expert AC, about the circuitry you use to generate an array of phase-controlled mm-wave signals.
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Ah, QA, I didn't recognize you without the space/3D-printing hat. Tell me, do you maintain a list of everyone who's ever criticized one of your posts? Because, while I get tired of your shtick pretty frequently, I don't think I've posted in response to you (or anyone else) that frequently.
In any event, the presentation you linked does show considerably better technology than I was aware of. (For anyone who couldn't already tell, no, this isn't my field.) And yet -- look at the performance graphs scattered t
Of course (Score:4, Funny)
It's well understood that compression efficiency is inversely correlated with the amount of information contained in the data string. Since we're talking about Facebook, the information content is basically nil.
Missing data (Score:3)
Conveniently, they left out the effective radiated power (ERP) needed to get microwave radiation in the 30-300GHz range to a receiving point at the distance mentioned in the article of 13km.
Yeah, but good part about RF (Score:1)
You don't have to worry about the wind drift. The Pringles can is able to squeeze the signal real tight.
In Other News (Score:2)
It's the size of two football fields (Score:1)
'a baseball pitcher aiming for a strike zone the size of a quarter'
These comparison are really useful when have never seen a baseball field and only have an extremely vague idea of how far a pitcher is standing from the strike zone.
To be honest, I don't actually know how big an olympic-sized swimming pool is either
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Should that not be (Score:2)
1/32" radio or some other absurd imperial unit?
It's not impossible (Score:2)
heck it's easy if the "pitcher" is a computer controlled servo system that keeps the beam on point.
A more American simile please (Score:1)
as equivalent to 'a baseball pitcher aiming for a strike zone the size of a quarter'.
I don't think that's American enough. Can we get it in terms of Statue of Liberties per acre of Freedom?