Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage dots the sci books I've read over the years, but almost always for scary reasons.
Here's the Navy today announcing work on AirBorne System for Optical Relay and Broadcast (ABSORB), a (for now) low-cost prototype one-to-many (I maybe mis-inferring what multi-access means?) relayable free space system, https://defence-blog.com/us-navy-plans-to-revolutionize-nava...
I’m a bit of two minds about this. Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities.
But the lack of it is what drives and will drive militaries around the world to put more and more autonomy into weapons. It doesn’t matter what kind of treaties we write on paper to prohibit technologies. During a war if your drones/loitering munition are less effective than those of your enemies because your control signals are jammed you will give in and make your weapons find their target without that control signal. That leads to an arm race of ever more sophisticated autonomous weapons. That is scarry for many reasons, and probably a worse outcome for all of us.
On the other hand if communication is possible that puts a leash on this dynamic and ensurers that a human mind can remain in the loop. So… maybe being better at jamming resistant communication is actually better for humankind?
[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-cur... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...
I'm a bit more pessimistic than that. I think the driver for autonomy will be that the speed at which things happen on the battlefield. People being attacked with automated weapons might not be able to make response related decisions fast enough. The automation will be in place to enable a rapid response. It will become an arms race involving speed of attack and response. It will be the military equivalent of high-frequency trading, involving things like swarms and directed energy weapons.
They are not obvious to me. Care to explain?
This sounds like you would also be in favor of backdoored encryption. I disagree. It's a tool / improvement like any other, how you use it makes it scary. BTW this is nothing new, it's just packaged nicely and (I assume) massively improved technology. DIY and open source solutions were possible in 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA (static ones tho)
The most powerful weapons on earth already are immune to jamming. ICBMs use celestial navigation (pictures of the stars) to course-correct, which is a form of navigation you cannot jam.
Our ICBMs have no update mechanism at all. Once they're out of the silo, they're completely on their own.
One can only wonder how small the "receivers" (routers, really) have gotten by now.
But further, jamming is still doable, just not with a portable electronic device. Stir up some dust and all the sudden coms are down.
There is no way these technologies won't be at least trialled for mil use, not when electronic warfare is employed to this degree.
https://thedefensepost.com/2025/01/08/ukraine-fiber-optic-dr...
Such communications can't be intercepted or triangulated.
They've probably had it for decades. Laser communication was being used by commercial TV stations in the U.S. in the 1990's. WNBC-TV in New York used a laser to transmit video from its Manhattan skyline camera in New Jersey back to 30 Rock.
I have a vague notion that it didn't work great in all weather conditions, but it was a long time ago.
https://www.doncio.navy.mil/chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=555...
It's really easy to blast an area with high power disruptive radiation (EFI, RFI, laser, etc.) to deny comms, though.
I can assume that laser links work wonderfully in outer space.
On land or sea, I can imagine using tactical smoke generators to disrupt laser links and visual navigation, giving an advantage to to systems that use e.g. microwaves for "vision", and radio channels for communication.
Also, why are you afraid of this development?
Physically.
Then all the military dramas will flip from "sniper acquired target" to "communication with friendlies reestablished"
Free space optics always seemed like a neat idea. For space-based communication, particularly if your "mission" involves as little stray emission as possible, I would think free space optics would be a win.
I would assume there's more error correction, but otherwise I wonder how dramatically this differs from modulating light on a fiber. It seems like a similar problem.
Single digit amount of photons is needed per bit.
When atmospheric conditions disrupt the light, our adaptive rate and hybrid architecture maintains the connection, with minimal downtime.
In the long run, all these wireless technologies (satellite or optical/microwave terrestrial links) will have a very hard time competing with simply laying down some optical fiber.
What they mention in the article is up to 20Gbps, but they'd have to be pretty dang cheap to out compete just buying 10 of the existing options.
There's also obvious applications to places where weather is more predictable. There's plenty of areas and small towns in the Great Basin region that have basically no internet. This would be a quick and easy way to set those places up with internet with more reliability than something like starlink
Normally, the lack of (near) line-of-sight is one of the biggest limiting to those sorts of deployments, but that would also have to be solved for any place being served with FSO.
Assuming this thing doesn't utterly fail in rain at a moderate distance, this would be something you use to feed a POP which then redistributes service to end users by some totally other technology (5/6 GHz band PTMP radio system, GPON, XGSPON, G.fast on copper, docsis3/docsis3.1, etc)
- Google Fiber (it wasn't possible to do it cheaper than incumbents, so it devolved to standard incumbent x why would 40% margin company invest billions to get Comcast's peak profit margin of ~15% profit)
- Starry Internet (too expensive to build out, I have it and it's good, but the company certainly didn't scale)
- 5G in general (strictly inferior to incumbent, speed isn't faster, latency is higher, not as reliable)
It's hard for me to wrap my mind around why this would work at all, sounds like a more-susceptible-to-bad-conditions version of Starry.
I keep wondering how people make Starlink work, my understanding is the connection degrades then stops then reconnects every...idk, 5 minutes? as the satellites go overhead.
Teleco's aren't going to say this out load, but it's the real reason why they were so celebratory about 5G, despite it coming off like just a renamed 4G to the average user.
The built-in obstruction mapping tool quickly demonstrated that though each satellite represents a tiny slice of sky... over the course of the day you're seeing a vast number of satellites at a high variety of spatial angles and orbits.
I wouldn't recommend that obstructed situation to anyone (and it's going in a much clearer location this coming summer) but the users I was supporting reported it a far far better solution than the 4G LTE they'd been depending on prior. Not a patch on fiber, but a great solution for an awkwardly remote property.
That is not a correct understanding for how the Starlink network behaves today[0]. While I can't speak for using it outside of the U.S., I have not faced any interruptions outside of a few times during very severe weather.
[0] in the early days of the constellation, there were sub-second or a few second drops when there was no satellite overhead. But this dropped off very quickly once the constellation size increased.
I'm guessing this is a US thing? In Europe, 5G is definitely faster while latency is on par with 4G. YMMMV between EU countries though.
You end up learning this in your own home. Some things are fine with a wired ethernet connection, it's really only my laptop and phone that use wifi.
> The team has figured out how to compensate for potential line-of-sight interruptions like bird flights, rain, and wind. (Fog is the biggest impediment)
> “It’s fast and reliable but quite expensive.” He says he spent around $30,000 for the last light bridge setup he bought from Alphabet for testing.
Interesting that Meta was working on similar tech but abandoned the project:
Google’s Taara Hopes to Usher in a New Era of Internet Powered by Light
https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-google-taara-chip-inte...
More on Meta's internet via lasers project:
https://www.wired.com/2016/01/facebook-zuckerberg-internet-o...
Wireless solutions have orders of magnitude less bandwidth than fiber, and you can run lots of fiber in a bundle, whereas there's limited spectrum and only one already-saturated RF environment going wireless.
Only in the past few months has Comcast (the only actual high-speed internet option in our fairly typical Silicon Valley suburban neighborhood of ~$2.5m average homes) deigned to offer upload speeds greater than the previous 35mbit cap...now we can push 200mbit for $120/mo (for 1.2tb monthly combined U+D, add $20 for "unlimited") and you usually have to buy a new modem even if your old one supported the tech, since they only support specific firmware on specific SKUs. Meanwhile, GFiber is offering 8gbps symmetrical for $150/mo unmetered.
Reminder also that Ricochet was wireless internet in 1994 on 900mhz ISM using FHSS in the Valley. Ooh how far we've come in 30 years.
I've had ATT gigabit fiber for ~6(?) years now. And for the first time ever (started with a 300 baud modem in 1985), similar to recent CPU releases, don't feel a compelling need to upgrade. In fact, would consider 0.5 Gbps if it offered substantial savings, since we don't fully use 1 GB. But no caps, and getting measured throughput of 850+ MB/s for $85 (started at $70) is affordable (for SV) and has been very reliable other than when the very-early transceiver they installed (I was one of the first to get it) got waterlogged and shorted out - the replacement was installed indoors, so that won't happen again.
I'm not a fan of ATT's corporate policies by any means. But the alternatives are, well.. Comcast with a much worse service (not symmetrical) or some flavor of 5G.
I live a little north of you, and had Webpass (wireless) in 2012 - $50/mo for 100 Mbps. Now it's $70/mo for 1 Gbps, but I'm with another wireless ISP for $35/mo for 500 Mbps.
I've looked up some non-shitty parts of the UK with 1gb/1gb fibre for about $40 a month (Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol ect) and all do seem to have population densities about twice that of Silicon Valley.
Then again my village with a population of about 300 does as well so i think it comes down to centralised investment.
Does state or federal not offer incentive to connect low density communities for the good of teh wider economy?
[0]: https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/18/technology/google-x-new-log...
People will license anything. Something you can get over the counter in one country needs a prescription in another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_optical_wireless_co...
This problem was possibly solved in the ten years since it defeated those four or five startups? Or not solved, who can say.
The thing proceeded to go down every time it rained, and no amount of tweaking settings, power, phase, polarity or orientation helped. This is the manufacturer/vendor doing the tweaks, mind you, not clueless me (I wouldn’t dream of touching this arcane technology I knew nothing about).
In the end we ditched the microwave and went with a good old copper link which worked without a hitch regardless of the weather.
So since you are, in your own sarcastic way, asking how I know, this is how: from experience. I don’t know about the technology but I do know about when they promise you it will work in the rain.
Plus there's the possibility they're well aware of this problem but are going full steam ahead anyway.
Whenever I travel and see the high latencies in hotel, I'm waiting for being able to Starlink from my mobile phone.
It requires huge antennas on the satellites, but we're getting closer to that with every Strarship launch.
I doubt it's really that big number. There will always be a gab because... toddlers and kids <5 years old don't use internet.
that's wishful thinking
https://www.dfmg.de/en/our-benefits/radio-relay-links.html https://www.dfmg.de/de/unsere-leistungen/richtfunkanbindunge...
so now instead of electromagnetic waves it's light?
what am I missing?
Google itself replaced many of the early big name search pioneers like Altavista.
If the light is "invisible" then is it even light? I looked it up and it's infrared.
Do we consider UV and infrared to be light? Or are they UV and infrared period, in contrast to light? I mean, nobody would ever call x-rays or radio waves "light". You'd never say "it's emitting infrared light", would you?
Or do they just not want to use the word "radiation" in their marketing, because that sounds scary and cancer-causing?
I'm just curious, since "invisible light" immediately jumped out to me as a contradiction in terms.
Yes, we do. No, it's not. Yes, they do. Yes, I would.
However, what was initially called "infrared light" is what is called now "near infrared". What is called now "far infrared" was traditionally called "radiant heat", which is a term that dates from before it became understood that both radiant heat and light are electromagnetic waves.
The traditional divisions between radio waves, radiant heat, light and X rays were determined by the fact that each of these 4 required different kinds of emitting and detecting devices. However the evolution of technology has extended the ranges for each kind of emitter and detector, so now the ranges of the corresponding kinds of devices are overlapping, so any precise thresholds in the frequency ranges are only conventional.
By that definition, UV and infrared are "light". Light that's outside of the visible range for our eyes, but still potentially visible to other camera sensors (and some other animals).
X-rays are not "light" because they're emitted by the atomic nucleus itself, rather than by electrons changing orbitals.
Radio waves are not "light" because they're created by macroscopic-scale movement of electrons back and forth in free space.
I've never in my life heard that. That sounds completely wrong to my ears. (Which is why "invisible light" sounded so wrong, too.)
