One of my first purchase orders came in 1988 for a link between Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I was delivering the world's first point-to-point wireless solution for Ethernet, and though it was my design, I knew very little about microwave. After the install, I sweat bullets every time a thunderstorm rolled through, waiting for a 2 a.m. phone call to say that my link brought the hospital's network down. Instead of celebrating a sale to Boston's most preeminent institutions, I was filled with anxiety.
Want to know what happened? Nothing. The link didn't fail once in the eight-plus years it was in service - not from rain or snow, wind or solar flares, not from the recession of 1990, cows farting or the collapse of Communism. And since then, I can tell you that the technology has only gotten better.
After that job we got some good publicity and lots of phone calls. Unfortunately most of them started like this, "Our consultant says that microwave goes down in rain... I understand that snow effects the signal... I hear that exposure to RF energy may be hazardous to our employees... I read somewhere that all the frequencies are taken up," etc., etc., etc. Okay, so I learned that the phone company - who was buying microwave by the truckload, was scaring the bejesus out of anyone else who might want it. I trusted that time would shake out all these misperceptions...
