Comment by avianlyric

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/