Comment by kurthr

This is a commercial product, that’s actually been installed and being used. The magic here is a “transparent” antenna. The magic is a carefully tuned, small and innocuous antenna, that when mounted on a window it’s been tuned for, allows 5G to easily propagate through the glass.

Glass facades almost universally use Low-E glass to avoid turning the building into a huge greenhouse. Problem for 5G, is that low-e glass is remarkably good at blocking 5G frequencies[1]. Pair that with 5G smaller propagation distances, and issues of finding viable locations to mount 5G antenna becomes a real problem.

This product neatly solves that problem by allowing carriers to mount these antenna on the inside of a buildings facade, while providing coverage outside the building. Which will substantially reduce the cost and difficulty of installing 5G masts. You can place all your sensitive equipment in normal building voids, without the need for bulky and ugly weather proofing, and you need to break the buildings weather tight seals (which a landlord isn’t gonna let you do without significant assurances you’re going the cover the costs of any water that comes through) to run cables to external antenna.

To make all of this viable, someone has had to do a fair bit of work to figure out how to build an antenna that effectively incorporates the low-e window it’s attached to, into its RF design. The fact the physical antenna is made of glass and partial transparent isn’t actually the interesting part. That’s likely been done because glass is a very rigid material that will make it easy to ensure the conductive parts of the antenna are kept at a specific distance from the window it’s mounted on, to ensure the correct RF coupling occurs.

[1] https://www.ranplanwireless.com/gb/resources/low-e-glass/

> “Usually, there are tens of antennas on a single tower so they can't all look like this. Also, I'm going to assume that you have to keep anyone from getting within 3 meters just due to radiated emissions”

Those towers you see with lots of antennas are massive MIMO installations designed for very high capacity and coverage over a wide area. But not all sites need to look like that. In this case, it’s just a small cell designed to improve coverage within a building and/or on a few local streets. Power levels are also much lower, not all that much different to a WiFi base station. People aren’t going to get cooked if they get close to it.

Do you mean inconspicuous?

- innocuous: not harmful

- inconspicuous: not clearly visible or attracting attention

I don't think it needs to be fully invisible. There are a lot of places in the building where slightly darkened glass panel would not look too out of place, as opposed to a bulky ugly opaque plastic box. Especially if architects really work on integrating it, it can be made very unobtrusive without needing 100% transparency. And, in a lot of buildings there are glass panels which aren't within the foot traffic areas - high windows, ceilings, technical areas, etc.

> turns a window into a base station that can be attached to a building window inside and turn the outdoors into a service area

You could easily enclose this by some architectural feature on the interior of the building or even use a window that's off the back of a maintenance closet.

The transparency is hard to judge from this one photo, where there's a flat background to it and a line or two.

This seems not at all unreasonably subtle to me. Even with the array of feeder lines, yeah, maybe it's not for very high end stash places but for most places this seems ay okay.

Given what the alternatives are for urban and commercial spaces, this feels like a big win.

My main concern is power level. How much power can you emit if Joe in accounting is 8 feet away from it, and how does that compare versus normal building mounted or pole mounted antennas? Also, what frequencies is this antenna designed for; it seems like 5g can run on lots of spectrum; is this mmWave gear or lower?

Apologies for soapboxing, but I want to chip in my belief that this world is driven by those who see possibility & potential.