Gigabit wireless backhaul for IP video

You may or may not have head of millimeter wave or E-band gigabit wireless bridges but they have been around for several years now and are quite proven. We recently installed a pair of these bridges at one of our clients and are extremely impressed by the real world throughput of the link. Using a short range version of Bridgewave 60GHz line up, the GE60, we managed to connect two buildings approximately 800 ft apart, in the middle of Los Angeles with impressive results. The promised throughput was 1Gbps and <1ms of latency, well in reality we didn't have servers capable of pushing 1Gbps of throughput BUT we were able to see 700Mbps of FULL DUPLEX throughput and 1ms of latency. If we had more robust hardware we have no doubt that the product would perform as advertised.

I bring this up because throughput is king when deploying IP video solutions and this millimeter wave gigabit bridging can greately reduce deployment time and reduce installation costs (no trenching etc) of a large installation.

The leader in this space is Bridgewave (www.bridgewave.com) which has 60GHz short range solutions (up to 1.5 miles) and 80GHz long range solutions (up to 5 miles). 

Proxim (www.proxim.com) has also had a 60Ghz short range solution and a medium range 71-76 GHz solution for quite some time.  They offer the Quickbridge 60250 (100Mbps) and Gigalink (1000Mbps) bridge kits. 

Other manufactures include: Gigabeam, E-band Communications,  Huber+Suhner & Siklu.

If you have had any experience with gigabit wireless please comment! 

Thanks for reading!

- Ronen Isaac (Continental Computers & WLANmall)