Always have thought microwave horn antennas look cool/weird

[wwillson]

According to this video, these transmitters are "more popular than ever" because they can send data faster than fiber optics, which apparently has an impact on how much money can be made by some power players in the stock market.

Everyone else is saying that they are obsolete and are being dismantled.

So, which one is it?

High frequency algorithm trading is based on speed. Whoever can place the trade the soonest, wins. When you tell a financial customer that a fiber optic route from Chicago to New York is 22ms RTD, they laugh at you because they can do the same route over microwave in 19ms. That's 3ms faster over radio waves that travel in a straight line. 3ms can make the different between getting the trade completed or not. The problem with fiber optics, when you are a high frequency trader, is internal reflection. Light traveling down a fiber optic strand of glass does not travel in a straight line. Instead, it reflects off the sides of the glass and it takes the light a bit longer to travel down the fiber compared to radio waves in the air.

There are some corner cases where microwave is better than fiber, but only in very rare instances. In the application of bandwidth that the vast majority of use, fiber is light years ahead of microwave.

 

[BHopkins]

Where I grew up, there was a microwave antenna tower behind the local Bell Telephone office. Being right next to the mountains, the method used to get microwave signals over the mountain, was a pair of "reflectors" - essentially steel plates, I would guess about 20' high by 40' wide. There was a pair of them, somewhat

parallel to each other, and about 80' apart from each other, up on top of the mountain.

My understanding is that the microwave signal was bounced off these structures, so it could be reflected down to an antenna on the other side of the mountain.

These are not the towers that were over my home town, but instead over a neighboring town. This pair of reflectors were taken down a couple years ago, but I believe the ones over my home town still stand. These look smaller than the ones I climbed on top of one night, when I was young and foolish.