FAQ Page

Why not wireless?

So, on to the wireless question. Although there are some great wireless services available today, the difficulty with wireless technology is that, when deployed, the beams interfere with each other. Hence small 'slices' of spectrum are licensed to each network provider. With fibre, the light is contained within a cable, and therefore we can make use of the entire transmissible spectrum. What this means is that much more data can be encoded and sent with fibre optics, and the effective bandwidths are always going to be larger. That's not to say that wireless solutions are poor, rather they have a place that complements the offerings of fibre optical systems.

People living a long way from exchanges will still be best served by wireless because the cost of installing the fibre and equipment to boost the signal over the distance outweighs its advantages — and there are fewer neighbours to share the bill with! Even Korea is using wireless technology to reach remote areas.

We will still continue to see great advances in wireless. The current world record for wireless, held by CSIRO, is 6Gbps. This is indeed faster than PON, but the corresponding world record for fibre is 100Gbps. Unfortunately these record holding speeds are not yet available en masse!