They started installing poles along a main road near where we live and I’m not sure what the white antennas on them are for. Some of the poles have traffic cameras like the one in the picture but others don’t. They are spaced every half to one mile and have antennas on opposite sides, with what looks like a radio cabinet near the base. The antennas are all aligned along the road, pointing parallel to traffic. This is in southwest Pennsylvania.
right, one is just a small piece of the others infrastructure.
No bro. A mesh network is a bunch of access points that repeat each others signals. This is like a single cable, but using RF. It is not an access point.
So, more like a token ring? And mesh would be like Ethernet?
I wonder how resilient the system is… It would seem like all it would take is one pole being tilted by high winds, or a car wreck to take down the entire network.
Token ring != Tolkien ring. Tolkien rings are much more reliable than token rings, as long as you manage your hobbit infestations.
This is the wireless equivalent of a single Ethernet cable. if you follow each of the dish pairs in a roughly straight line, you will hit another transceiver. This pole would be middle three nodes of this:
(Air Fiber) <-------> (Air Fiber) (switch) (Air Fiber) <--------> (Air Fiber)
Camera could also be plugged into the switch.
And yes, if a car impacts the pole, you lose that point to point link. Hope you got a failover plan or another set of air fibers that take a different path.
Yup, that is a wireless token ring.
I get how much cheaper it would be to install, but the maintenance has to be outrageous. But I guess ongoing costs are easier for them to budget.
It is not using token ring protocol. It is a wireless implementation of the Ethernet protocol. I don’t think you fully understand what token ring is, or we’re not doing a good job of explaining what a point-to-point radio is.
I wasn’t talking about the protocol, I was talking about the topography. Each station is dependent upon the station before it. So much like an old fashioned string of Christmas lights, if one bulb dies the whole string goes dark.
Sure. And if you ran an Ethernet cable between each station, they’re still dependent on the station before it. What point are you trying to make?
Then you would still have a token ring configuration, because that is not home Ethernet works.
Although you wouldn’t have to worry as much about high winds, so it would have some advantages, but I still wouldn’t recommend it.
Forgive my ignorance in that case. I did very poorly on the unit that covered token ring, and was in perpetual self doubt because I got an answer wrong when I referenced the original manufacturer document instead of the slides.
Nothing against the protocol, I just didn’t learn it properly and was born too late to see it in person. (I love learning about all tech)
Be glad you never had to suffer through the hell that is token ring. And given how awful it truly is, I am surprised that they have decided to recreate it wirelessly. I understand why (the why is money, it’s always money) but you would have thought they would have learned their lesson.