Can you do POE over a balun?
Nate Burke wrote:
Comcast has been deploying their WIFI hotspot network like mad in the
Chicago metro. Every public park, gas station, strip mall, hotel, and
train station seems to have a wifi AP hung outside of it now. These
units just hang on their aerial coax cable, and get their power and
data just off a single RG-6 coax run off the nearest splitter.
Drawing the power off the DC Coax plant. Here's a picture of a
typical installation.
http://comcastsupport.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/22608i79AFB9E182CD549C?v=1.0
So this got me thinking again, as I have for several years, why are we
still using POE to run PMP Equipment on towers. It seems from a
installation, RF Shielding, and grounding/suppression perspective,
using coax would be the far better choice. Anyone can be taught to
terminate a perfect RG6 in <5 minutes. No Colors to remember. Any
couplers are inherently waterproof. No loose plugs or broken clips.
Cheap cheap cheap outdoor cable. Shielded cables by default. It just
seems that there are a lot of benefits for the low power draw radios.
Obviously a licensed link can't pull enough power over an RG6, but
EPMP or 450 or UBNT PMP radios I would think could run just fine.
Instead of having to deal with switching equipment or breakout boxes
at the top of a tower, just run up a larger coax to a splitter. No
outdoor enclosure needed.
Is it simply a lack of products that would make development costs too
much, or is there another technical aspect I'm missing. Docsis version
3.1 Full Duplex, which is currently in development will do 10gb sync,
Docsis 3.1 is 10gb/1gb. More than enough for any of our AP Clusters
for at least a few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison It seems like UBNT or
Cambium (heck Motorola already had all the coax products built) could
easily make a 10gb Fiber to Coax adapter for the tower base. Feed it
with Fiber and DC, then just keep adding splitters and radios until
you run out of power budget.
It just seems like I've never heard it discussed, and I'm not sure
why. Obviously there is something I'm missing. Docsis is a standard,
but maybe there's no standard for the power delivery on the coax? So
vendor Inter-op prohibits development dollars from being spent on it.
Nate
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