Wireless Symmetric Broadband Last Mile Access Solutions for Multimedia Applications in License Free Frequency Bands

A dominant percentage of the last mile Internet connections within entire Europe are realized with copper cable pairs (POTL) which are limited in bandwidth by the cable length (attenuation) and the number of XDSL lines in a telecommunication cable (crosstalk, NEXT). Peripheral users often cannot get the state of the art broadband Internet connections. For these reasons and also sharing the existing bandwidth with other users may lead to low bit rates. Current trends show a strong demand of synchronous broadband Internet lines for high quality multimedia applications (e.g. VoD, online video communities and video conferencing). This paper focuses on alternative wireless synchronous license free optical and radio frequency last mile access technologies and shows advantages and disadvantages of the different techniques.