Thinking of broadband access for the last-mile—now being recognized as the first-mile—everyone talks about optical fibre or ADSLs. However, frustrated by the complexities, cost and time involved in digging and laying optical fibre—or implementing DSL, with only 1.5 Mbps to offer, on incumbent's copper infrastructure—one would certainly like to look for an easy way out. And that is offered by the air. Air space represents higher freedom and the ability to move fast. That has made wireless the fastest transmission medium to deploy, and generally inexpensive too. Microwave technology has truly come to the rescue there.

George Gilder, in his latest book "Telecosm", says, "Above 14 GHz—at wavelengths running from millimeters of microwaves down to the nanometers of visible light—is the new frontier of the millenium, empires of air and fibre that command some fifty thousand times more communications potential than all the lower frequencies we now use put together. A purely human invention, they provide the key arena of economic activity for the new century." Rightly, to be able to exploit the freedom associated with air, one looks to microwave technologies.

The First-Mile: Missing Gigabit Link

Advances in fibre technology have extended the capacity of WANs to terabits per second—i.e. trillions of bits per second. With gigabit computers and gigabit Ethernets, LANs have also evolved to Gbps. However, to connect the two is still the biggest challenge: to help solve the customer's nightmare of crawling at kilobits speed, which a typical Internet user faces, between these gigabit worlds.