IBM microwave applicationearly data communications 2821

isn't there a big unfinished half-built tower off of connecticut(?) somewhere around friendship hills(?) ... behind a whole foods(?) store.

sometime in the 70s(?), san jose had put in (microwave) T3 (44mbits) collins digital radio. roof of bldg. 12 (on the main plant site) had dishes to a repeater tower on the hill above santa teresa lab and down to STL and to a repeater tower above los gatos lab and down to bldg. 29. there were a number of subchannels split on T3. this is standard c-band ... when (elevated section) 85 was built, some number of people noted radar detectors being tripped when pbutting line-of-site between bldg. 12 and the tower above STL (tower above lsg went when that site was sold off for housing development).

when almaden was built, something like six fiber pairs were run from main plant site up the hill (instead of doing microwave), i believe the drivers were initially oc3.

recent postings on main plant site, stl, almaden

when ibm formed sbs (with comsat and aetna), there were something like a dozen or two 10m dishes put into major sites around the US that ran T3, this was also c-band. there was some runs-ins with the MIB when the data aggregator (aggrevator) was built and installed on the network (doing bulk T3 encryption).

misc. past posts mention collins digital radio

when big part of the ims group was moved out of STL to off-site (leased) bldgs (96 & 97), instead of doing traditional remote 3270 for access back into stl datacenter (really, really slow and tortuous), we put in T1 channel extenders (using HYPERChannel) and ran "local" 3270s at the site (subchannel over the T3 stl-bldg12 and the microwave tail-circuit from bldg12 to bldg98 (and wires into the two adjacent bldgs). detailed discussion:

this was essentially one of the first hsdt (high-speed data transport) projects.

we also did a number of terrestrial and satellite high-speed links. in conjunction with sbs, hsdt designed a new tdma earth station and put in an three-node satellite dish network with lots of high-speed terrestrial circuits. it had 4.5m dishes at los gatos lab and ykt research and a 7m dish in austin. this used a ku-band transponder on sbs-4.

misc. past posts mentioning hsdt & ku-band on sbs-4:

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