"As fiber" FSO throughput

Substantial investments by carriers to augment the capacity of their core fiber backbones have facilitated dramatic improvements in both price and performance, and they have also increased the capacity of these large backbone networks. However, to generate the communications traffic and revenue needed to fully utilize and pay for these backbone upgrades, higher bandwidth connections must reach the end customers. This requires substantial bandwidth upgrades at the network edge. Essentially, to fully leverage their backbone investments, service providers will also need to expand and extend the reach of their metropolitan optical network to the edge. FSO presents an opportunity that allows carriers to achieve that goal for one-fifth the cost when compared to fiber (if even available) and at a fraction of the time.

FSO equipment: "on the fly" installation

  FSO equipment is usually an analog cable connection and is therefore very easy to install. In order to install it is only necessary to prepare two points that should be connected to a channel of communication. Points must be in direct line of sight of each other. Substantial relief during the installation and maintenance of equipment is the autotracking system. This option allows to obtain a stable channel for several minutes after the installation of transceiver modules.
  The service capabilities of modern FSO (such as autotracking, alarms signalling, multi-level monitoring) minimize operational costs.

FSO security

The common perception of wireless is that it offers less security than wireline connections. In fact, Free Space Optics (FSO) is far more secure than RF or other wireless-based transmission technologies for several reasons:

• Free Space Optics (FSO) laser beams cannot be detected with spectrum analyzers or RF meters
• Free Space Optics (FSO) laser transmissions are optical and travel along a line of sight path that cannot be intercepted easily. It requires a matching Free Space Optics (FSO) transceiver carefully aligned to complete the transmission. Interception is very difficult and extremely unlikely.

• The laser beams generated by Free Space Optics (FSO) systems are narrow and invisible, making them harder to find and even harder to intercept and crack
• Data can be transmitted over an encrypted connection adding to the degree of security available in Free Space Optics (FSO) network transmissions