It would add more cost to a price sensitive product and require our techs to carry more equipment.
Rory -----Original Message----- From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Nate Burke Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2018 8:48 AM To: Animal Farm Subject: [AFMUG] A Stupid coax question Comcast has been deploying their WIFI hotspot network like mad in the Chicago metro. Every public park, gas station, strip mall, hotel, and train station seems to have a wifi AP hung outside of it now. These units just hang on their aerial coax cable, and get their power and data just off a single RG-6 coax run off the nearest splitter. Drawing the power off the DC Coax plant. Here's a picture of a typical installation. http://comcastsupport.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/22608i79AFB9E182CD549C?v=1.0 So this got me thinking again, as I have for several years, why are we still using POE to run PMP Equipment on towers. It seems from a installation, RF Shielding, and grounding/suppression perspective, using coax would be the far better choice. Anyone can be taught to terminate a perfect RG6 in <5 minutes. No Colors to remember. Any couplers are inherently waterproof. No loose plugs or broken clips. Cheap cheap cheap outdoor cable. Shielded cables by default. It just seems that there are a lot of benefits for the low power draw radios. Obviously a licensed link can't pull enough power over an RG6, but EPMP or 450 or UBNT PMP radios I would think could run just fine. Instead of having to deal with switching equipment or breakout boxes at the top of a tower, just run up a larger coax to a splitter. No outdoor enclosure needed. Is it simply a lack of products that would make development costs too much, or is there another technical aspect I'm missing. Docsis version 3.1 Full Duplex, which is currently in development will do 10gb sync, Docsis 3.1 is 10gb/1gb. More than enough for any of our AP Clusters for at least a few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison It seems like UBNT or Cambium (heck Motorola already had all the coax products built) could easily make a 10gb Fiber to Coax adapter for the tower base. Feed it with Fiber and DC, then just keep adding splitters and radios until you run out of power budget. It just seems like I've never heard it discussed, and I'm not sure why. Obviously there is something I'm missing. Docsis is a standard, but maybe there's no standard for the power delivery on the coax? So vendor Inter-op prohibits development dollars from being spent on it. Nate
