Wireless Ethernet Blog

Millimeter-wave Body Scanner (tsa.gov)

What do the TSA’s new body scanners and 1Velocity have in common? Both use millimeter-wave spectrum.

The news this week is filled with stories about new body scanners at airport security that can see through passengers’ clothes. Those scanners use the same millimeter-wave spectrum 1Velocity uses in its Gigabit Ethernet backbone ring.

Does that mean 1Velocity can see under your clothes?

Millimeter-wave Spectrum

A spectrum is a range of light frequencies. Millimeter-wave is a spectrum not visible by the human eye.

A rainbow shows the visible spectrum, from the red frequencies all the way to the purple (Ever seen a double rainbow?). But there many spectrum that we cannot see with the naked eye.

Millimeter-wave, X-rays, gamma rays, microwave, and infrared are each different spectrum of light above or below what we can see with our eyes. And each spectrum has its own characteristics, useful for multiple applications.

Your TV remote and night-vision goggles both use infrared spectrum in different ways. Radar and microwave ovens use microwave in different ways.

Does your TV remote give you night-vision?

Like infrared and microwave, millimeter-wave has multiple uses.

While the TSA scanners send broad beams like a flashlight, 1Velocity uses targeted beams like a laser.

Using pencil-thin beams, 1Velocity can provide business Internet and metro Ethernet at a rate up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). With a much-broader beam, the TSA body scanners to scan under passengers’ clothes for guns, knives, and explosives.

Since your TV remote doesn’t give you night vision, you have probably already guessed that 1Velocity’s pencil-thin beams cannot see under your clothes. All we can do is provide high-speed data connections across town or to the Internet, which is still pretty cool.