Wireless or not??

The question is simple. How much "wireless" technology can we have before we run out of bandwidth. I know from my own training that there are physical limits to how much information we can put into the "free air space" that surrounds us.

A story on ITWire (Unwired & Austar: "Spectacular performance" needed to succeed) shows how major companies are looking to push us into the whole wireless environment.

I am already starting to see on a regular basis people having issues with existing 802.11 systems. They are often having to change channels on a regular basis to avoid cross talk between networks. A recent installation i was involved in was attempting to use a very directional attenna to achieve a link between 2 buildings. These buildings are 400m apart. Both ends had extremely high gain attenna's to achieve enough signal strength to maintain link. Upon starting up the "receiving" end of the 2 points we picked up 14 wireless networks all within line of sight of the attenna. Out of interest we swung the attenna around thru 360 degrees and picked up a total of over 100 wireless networks. This was all within a commercial environment - imagine what a domestic or home environment would be like.

Can i ask the simple question. When will it all end. People are already stating that mobile phones are causing cancer. Wouldn't the massive adoption of wireless networks and the amount of transmission power required to send data over longer distances cause the same sort of issues?

We also have a limit to the amount of physical frequencies available (lists might be available on ACMA). There is also a limit to the amount of data able to be sent on each of these frequencies. Cables allow for basically the same amount of frequencies to be sent down it as there are frequencies transmitted via wireless. (again there are limits to this too). Fibre allows for multiple streams of information to be sent down a single fibre. You can transmit multiple streams all at the same frequency simply by using a different color. To me this seems a better option. The more adoption of fibre there is the less it will cost to install and maintain. This also leads into a recent story regarding FTTN and FTTH. Both of these technologies will allow extremely fast internet/telephony/IPTV services all on a single piece of glass.

Well that has been my rant. Lets hope that someone might be able to make a judgement call on this.