February 13th, 2012, 9:15 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: farmerYour cost rises linear with your number of towers, and your number of successful signals does not, while your latency goes up. So is not the sweet spot for profitability possibly one hop? I could see that your number of successful signals would more than double for adding a second hop, and a third hop.Signal success is not linear in the number of towers because signal attenuation is an exponential process and LOS blockages are 100% attenuators. With less than N hops (where N is a function of distance, geography, and tower height), you will get ZERO success due to line-of-sight blockages. But even if you have enough towers to have LOS between them all, you can still have long periods of no signal due to rain or snow. For long chains of towers, the probability of having rain or snow on at least one link can be very high.No doubt, there is some optimum number of towers in which the cost of an added tower isn't justified by a sufficient increase in signal reliability. But the minimum number of hops may be more than five.