Starry: The company wants to bring Gigabit Internet to your home with air

Start-up company Starry has announced that it will bring Gigabit speed Internet service to users without using fiber cables, instead the signal will be transmitted through the air. Currently mobile networks are also transmitted through the air, but the highest 4G LTE speed is achieved only at a few hundred megabits per second, not yet 1 Gigabit, let alone faster.

Starry uses central transmitters with a 2km radius of broadcasting, each area will have a few such stations and you just need to put a device to receive the wave out of the window to be able to catch the signal (like photo below). Connecting to the Internet from the receiver will go to the Wi-Fi router to use the device. You can use the router as Starry provides or uses any Wi-Fi router on the market (you need to support Wi-Fi ac or higher).

The technology Starry uses is the milimeter wave , ie the electromagnetic wave range with a wavelength that is within 10mm to 1mm.

This wavelength is much longer than X-ray or infrared but shorter than radio or microwave, and it corresponds to the band from 30GHz to 300GHz. That's why it is sometimes called super high frequency band . The Milimeter wave has no broad coverage like mobile networks but is still more than Wi-Fi, Bluetooth . Notably, this type of wave may be disturbed by fog, rain and snow, which can reduce the transmission speed. Data in bad weather conditions. And the more waves have to go, the greater the effect.

The technology Starry uses is the milimeter wave.

The use of milimeter wave is not new, in 1997 some companies wanted to raise funds to develop this type of technology and put it into the consumer market but at that time there were many technical limitations and economic models. business is not good either. Two decades later, Starry reappeared with technical innovations to better compete traditional fiber optic cabling in terms of speed, reliability and a better way to make money.

A New York University professor said recently that new technologies have been developed for millimeter wave waves and that achieving gigabit per second transfer rate is possible. The only problem now is that you have to put enough transceivers near each other (Starry's transmitter and receiver at each user). Starry said they can serve the network for users within a 2km radius from the central network transmitter even if you don't see it directly , and New York University has only tested successfully at the 200m. Because of that, many experts seem to doubt Starry's promise, they say that if the range is 300-500m, it is reasonable, but 2km is quite difficult.

Starry confirmed all of these challenges, both the broadcast and the bad weather, and they said they had achieved breakthroughs to solve those problems. Starry also believes that the urban Gigabit network idea will soon explode, when they can deploy a large number of stations on top of high-rise buildings or even residential houses.