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Look around and check with your local telecom operators and explain your problem. In some areas power companies also provide broadband access. I ran into this site on the net: Wireless Internet Service which seems to be offering a set of alternatives.

Well, the specifications, and typical consensus amongst people on the internet say EV-DO is many times faster than EDGE. Though, I don't use EV-DO for Slingplayer, I use it for work... VPN connectivity, file transfers, remote administration tools; which are typically bursty traffic. I perceive it to be much faster, especially considering my situation is the opposite of yours... I don't even have GSM coverage at all in my home, unless I stand in my driveway, where I get 1 bar, whereas I get a full CDMA signal. We have 2 of each type card here at work that the sales people take when they travel, they prefer the EV-DO cards, and fight and bitch over who gets them.

It's hilarious because AT&T won't even show you where they have 3G/HSDPA coverage unless you zoom into the city level! Hmm... wonder why that is?

You must be comparing 3G/HSDPA to 1xRTT (that would be faster). Because EDGE is not faster than EV-DO (it also has higher latency) nor is it faster than EV-DO rev. A.

while you guys are having fun making fun, satellite internet companies face serious qos issues when the military takes over the airwaves. The gov can do what ever they want and the satellite dependent public will have no connectivity to hear about it.

I was having a discussion with a friend last week about muni wi-fi and its practicality. I said that I thought it was a pink elephant, and outlined the following reasons. The assumption based on these points, of course, is that you are trying to blanket the entire municipality with WiFi service, which comes with the potential for a lot of people jumping on.

Shared fabric - Like hubs in the days of old, a WiFi AP can only move as much combined data per second as the number on it.

Half duplex - Bandwidth is further limited as WiFi radios typically can only either listen or broadcast at any given time. I _have_heard whispers about prototype chips out there that can do full duplex, but I'm not aware of what products, if any, use them.

Limited range - The ISM band is very limited as far as how much power you are allowed to output. Most laptops and WiFi PCMCIA cards only have a broadcast power of about 30-100mW. At the top end you'd be lucky to get service past 500 feet with a standard dipole. Yes, you can use an external antenna, but that's impractical for laptop users and requires professional installation for desktop users.

Now add up all of these three factors - Because you have limited bandwidth, you must install a lot of APs to make sure your service doesn't grind to a halt. This is doubly so becuase the idea is to have a blanket of coverage. But there is another problem - If you have that many APs, you will need a wired connection for each one of them. You can uplink them to a main site, yes - But line of sight is a factor there, as is radio spectrum - If you have dozens of installations trying to talk to a main site, there is a big problem because WiFi only has 3 channels (1, 6, and 11) to pick from that don't interfere with each other in any way, which means your bandwidth will tank because of transmission collisions.

To get around this, you could uplink your APs serially, but then the problem is that the users at the last AP in the line will be contesting for bandwidth with the users of every AP after it, all the way up to the network access point.

In conclusion - While WiFi has a lot of great applications, city-wide Internet access isn't one of them. IMHO, the future of wireless Internet access likely lies with cell providers, who have paid for their (large) piece of the spectrum and are allowed to broadcast with a lot more radio power than ISM ever will. I'm already seeing this going on in EVDO.

Guys.. we got WISPA Members to add their WISP AP locations too... cool thing about this is that now folks can compare Boingo to EVDO to FIXED Wireless Smaller Providers... let me know what you think... wireless internet map

hah! funny...youre not too far off... we added live webcams to the site now... http://evdo-coverage.com/webcam/ ... you can add your own tooo BUT keep it pg13 will ya?! :)

hah! funny...youre not too far off... we added live webcams to the site now... http://evdo-coverage.com/webcam/ ... you can add your own tooo BUT keep it pg13 will ya?! :)

yeah... funny thing about that hack part... when we started the project.. we all had this wierd hunch that some amorphous multicolored shadow was looming over our shoulders... and guess what.. just when we started beta testing.. the MULTICOLORED GOOGLE released the API!!! hmmm... odd.. dont sociologists have some name for this kinda phenom? when 1000 people run to the patent office for the same idea at the same time? 100th monkey or something right? Robert kim, EVDO Consultant. And CoBuilder of http://wifi-hotspot.wirelessinternetcoverage.com btw... what else do you guys want to see on the maps? We want to build the map based on YOUR Slashdot Savviness Direction. Lemme know..

At least for Verizon's EVDO we've got a horde of folk in our IT dept. using it thanks mostly to Phil Karn's notes on getting the card working in Linux.

Might want to dig a little deeper and see if "no support" really just means "we don't know if it works and don't know how to support Linux." Hopefully some folks further down will have info on the other services.

Disclaimer: I happen to work for one of the companies involved with EVDO.