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Originally Posted by Beard
Isn't there some rf bands already dedicated to industrial/business use?
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Yeah, there are several. For example, the local sewer system here has a SCADA over RF data link ring connecting all the substations and remote pumps, that uses a low-power license in the 460 MHz area. It functions fine for limited instructions ("Turn off pump 1") which are a few bytes, but the bandwidth is so limited that it makes more complex data unreasonably slow. They can't do real-time monitoring of pump station tanks levels for instance.
As far as I know however, there is no licensed band designed for mid-to-high power, high-speed data, akin to 802.11 (i.e. a licensed "wireless Ethernet".) Admittedly, I haven't looked at it in a while, so maybe the FCC has allocated some band someplace. They had been looking at re-allocating some 1.9MHz stuff a while back, but I'm not sure what happened with that, or if any was set aside for business/industrial.
Wrzwaldo and Beakmyn might have some insight into that. They deal with SCADA & industrial apps all the time.