28G LMDS System Deployment Considerations

The advantages of wireless local access over competing broadband delivery systems is the significantly lower infrastructure cost and the time to market. The technology exists today to develop solid state hardware to economically deploy Local Multipoint Distribution Systems (LMDS) at 28 GHz. In addition to low infrastructure cost, the key to successful deployment lies in the ability to manufacture customer premises equipment at low cost. At these high frequencies it is well understood that line-of-sight or "near" line-of-sight is necessary to assure coverage. Nevertheless, obstacles and other path impairments will be encountered in most environments. The challenge to the system designer it is to engineer an LMDS system in such a way so as to maximize household coverage. This entails some tradeoffs in infrastructure cost. The goal of this tutorial is to provide you with some insights as to how one might go about deploying a broadband two-way wireless access system at 28 Ghz that takes into account coverage and cost.