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Wireless Broadband Getting Closer
robertth writes "Wireless broadband is coming to offices and homes using a two-way point-to-multipoint implementation of the cable industry's DOCSIS platform. See the Broadband Week story ." This technology offers an interesting possibility: Building a cable modem-speed infrastructure without getting into the right-of-way hassles that have led to our current local cable TV (hence cable modem) monopolies - and may also offer a rapid way to bring Internet (and telephone, with voice over IP) service to remote areas.
fine, get your wireless broadband, ill still be stuck with 56k .... my damn state/town (ri,usa) has notihng, no cable modems, no dsl, no isdn, nothing at all, we have one cable provider and its only for cable tv.... im sick of my stupid state, i want to move damnit.... what sucks more is, about 5 mins away is mass (swansea), they have Cox as their cable provider, and cable modems..... 5 friggen mins away, but they cant cross the damn state boarder to give me cable? argh i hate all of you, die die die ::cries::
(this rant is by MrP-, posted a/c... you aint takin' my karma away!)
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feugifacilisi.
What does this mean? Is it a curse?
Can you imaging waisting bandwidth for playing games and downloading porno. The only good reason for wireless might be for people in rural areas who still have to rely on phone lines to connect, and at slow speeds compared to us city dwellers that now have DSL. Consider that rural homes weren't able to watch cable TV, then the satellite dishes came along. However, we should be focusing on getting wired out there instead, and it would be worth it now with broadband technology. The U.S. needs another project like the old rural electrification project.
http://www.whnet.com/new.html says a trial program in Palo Alto has 10 MB/sec (probably megabit/sec) for $90 and 100 MB/sec for $170. (the link looks down now) Not bad but looks priced a little more toward the business end.
One of the countless reasons DOCSIS should be replaced with something non-proprietary.
Didn't work.... Oh well... Copy and paste it in a text editor of your choice.
Man, that's a funny idea. But I know some people whose street was being repaved and the night before they went out and buried cable under the gravel so they could network their houses together!
Looks like everyone cares alot about this. Nude pics, the trolls, etc... Anyway, slightly on topic. I have giving up on broadband. They ( Ameritech ) told me it ( DSL ) would be avaiable in 6 months. This is what they told me a year and a half ago. Then 6 months ago, they said another year. Now they are saying about another year and a half. Nice job Ameritech... Bunch of losers.
We need this for people like me... I live out in Bumfuck Egypt... with my sorry ass 56k modem, that connects and 26.4k(on a good day) no chance for ever seeing a cable modem/ISDN/DSL/anything near the speed of all you other bastards
DOWN WITH BELLSOUTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOSERS.
Same problem, they suck BAD. Cary NC Bellsouth needs to get their heads out of their asses.
There must be something we can do to end this shit. Anyone know if we can sue Bell South for this Dark Age service? prob not, what about a petition, or a news story? Bell South are a bunch of damn liars.
its getting very bad, there are more trolls than moderators.. now troll posts arent going down, and good posts arent going up, i have my view mode or whatever set to +2 and because trolls took over +1, but now there are some good posts in +1 but i cant see them... the only way I see to fix this is to disable anonymous cowards, and kill every login made within the last 2 months, and then only let us old members post, forget everyone else. yeah this sounds crazy, but if it doesnt happen we'll be trolled to death.... and you cant just kill A/C cause people will just make a hotmail account and a login name to troll... this has got to stop, im leaving slashdot, ill come back next month, maybe it will be fixed.
I want ADSL and I'm sick of Bell South's LIES. I WANT IT NOW. RIGHT NOW.
DIE Bell South.
And you were dumb enough to reply
Did you notice joker.com makes you provide your own nameservers... What about people just wanting to park a name and who don't have a web host yet? I won't belabor the point... but you should read between the lines.
As one of the sorry wretched that suffer tawdry service and rapacious pricing under the one telco/one ISP regime {56k hahaha -I lose connect about every 15 minutes- on 3 different phone lines, 5 different modems}, I need to insist that broadband wireless become a player. If competition doesn't come to the rural areas, we'll all suffer- I'm a market, I'm a collaborator, and I am representative of 3/4 of the world. Not a market or resource to be ignored. I'm sure that many would like to compete for the radio spectrum-but it's a natural resource licensed by the public's government-we did form that damn thing to provide some equity in this world. No-one reading this is the biggest dog, we all enjoy some benefits of the public commons. Offering bandwidth to rural consumers to let them enjoy what urban DSL/Cable/LAN consumers have recently acquired seems fair to me. I'll pay real money, btw, that's not the root of this issue-it's having any competitive access.
"I feel that some sort of wireless connection is the future for many people" doubtful, unless your talking about small in-house lans. not everyone has a handy dandy mountain nearby for convienient antenna location. in fact very few people do
"I mean, come on, what harm could high-speed vibrations in the air do, really?"
sound waves are not the same as electromagnetic waves.
Broadband wireless PoPs would be swell.
Fiber will never make it out to rural america. Cable companies in rural areas are generally ass backward. They serve larger cities first and hardly at all anyway. DSL is impractical because of the distances of rural living. DirecPC is a joke.
Plunk down some broadband PoPs and let the airwaves carry the bandwidth. Offer cell phone service while you're at it to get some added cache$.
While I'm here. Any people got there CCIE cert? Best method to do this.
phat_code@yahoo.com
you guys think it's a bloody waste eh? I live in freakin' Austin, supposed to be one of the high tech capitals of the US....sure it has a lot of big companies, but where's the broadband? They have cable access almost anywhere (if they can get a Warner cable hookup, xDSL if you have a SWB phone line, and the connection is clean....but I live in an apartment that has both phone and cable hooked up by some company that filed for Chap11 last Halloween, and all their services are landlocked.....SWB can run a line, but it'll cost an arm and a leg for just the line, then the DSL on top of that...but Warenr cannot run cable over at all. Now here's the biggie....Austin has a few wireless broadband companies. they've been around for 2 years or so. 3Mbps (htat's megabitpersecond for thsoe of you who don't know how to use caps when describing bandwidth proper), symmetrical, both freakin ways....and secure! Howeve I just happen to live in a place that seems oh so conveniently outside their service area, me and about 3,000 other college kids that have to use their modems (connect max at 28.8 cuz hte lines are so noisy) and fight being disconnected cuz hte liens are so heavily multiplexed. It's a big market that corner of the world, the co I talked to last August said they'd have something there in a few months.....but nothing yet. YOu people want to run cable (phone/tv/fiber)...that costs a lot and takes too much time....putting up a relay tower for wireless, well that takes an eyesore, it takes zoning laws, it takes a small company to block cuz htey want a monopoly. If telephone and cable monopolies hadn't been banned a few years ago, I'd have an always on broadband connection, isntead of something that won't stay connected if it ever does connect, and is slower than whatever. Wireless would be the easiest solution, but the company takes forever, how come there's a cell phpone tower popping up on a different street corner everyday? guess that's the diff between a huge ever growing/ripping people off cell phone company, and a small startup that puts the tower on the wrong side of I-35 to get any money....
I wish I could get 26.4.
I live in the city of Boston, I know there's copper and fibre under our streets but I pay through the nose for 384K/128K DSL service. I have cable TV service that was first offered in the '80s using second hand '70s technology that still hasn't been updated. The service is terrible, I pay to much for it, and they aren't even thinking about net access. A few years ago they changed their logo and added the word "Optimum" to their name, product was the same only it cost more.
I'd gladly welcome wireless bandwidth that gave me more for less and challenged the current money grubbing bandwidth cartel.
You only need one line if the exchange carrier uses hdsl-2 to carry the T1 payload.
Works like a champ. I'm about sixteen miles from the repeater so I'm limited to 2mbits/second. The big limiter is the upstream link from my ISP is only a T-1. Supposedly there is some deal to fix that, but I won't hold my breath.
See
http://www.adapti vebroadband.com/datasheets/AB-Access_UNII_v2.pdf
http://www.gofuzion.com/broadband _information.htm
:-)
Ps there is linux somewhere in there
For those intrested, there is a how-to on building your own wireless network at http://www.qsl.net/~n9zia
You forget that not everyone lives in an area served by numerous connectivity options.
New XFMail home page
What about Road Runner?
--
Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
It can happen. I set up a similar system (the
:-)
first wireless MMDS Internet outside of the US)
in Lagos, Nigeria this past year. This year it
will roll out in Abuja, Port Harcourt, and
Enugu.
If the market is there, this technology will come.
I'm already talking to people in Kenya, Mauritius,
and Venezuela about setting up similar systems.
http://www.hybrid.com/ - These guys made the first
reliable (non-DOCSYS) MMDS Internet system. It has
it's faults and it's annoyances, but it's the only
proven platform out there right now. Hey- it's
head end equipment runs FreeBSD, so you've got to
love it..
Anyone out there who wants more information about
offering wireless high-speed broadband Internet
services send me an email.
Robbie
robbie@shorty.com
-- Comtrends!
Huh? There is 10 KHz of bandwidth between 10 KHz and 0 KHz. There is room for expansion in the high-frequency direction only if you consider the propogation characteristics. When you get really high in frequency the atmosphere becomes more opaque. All of the frequencies we are talking about here are line-of-sight only.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Wireless provides an immediate solution. I live in a rural area on a dirt road. I can connect my 56k at best 33000 on a good day. They say we will not see cable (TV or broadband) for another 10 years. There are many places like this in the US that would benefit from wireless... thats why!
pronoblem
Hey... at least it works better in the winter! I live to far for ADSL to be a solution, and the is NO plans for cable in may area until after 2008. Wireless would seem to be a quicker to impliment solution. Whoever said it was a bad idea must own stock in MCI. Oh well.
pronoblem
IANAS but... This is exciting to hear, because multipath signal-integration has been a goal of many networking developers. I'd like to know how they achieved this without violating the FCC clause 385a (regarding M.S.I. for computer networks), indeed at the speeds they are claiming.
What I disagree with however is O/M (orthogonal-modulation), which has many obvious problems in this style of implementation. VODFM and O/M can't co-exist as technologies in a single standardized implementation unless a large amount of redundancy (error correction coupled with signal compression) is also added.
Well that's what I think anyway.
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
I've been using WantWeb's service since mid 98, and have loved it, as I have enjoyed 30-180k/s downloads longer then most of the people in the area. And it's all done with microwave range transmissions fron an antenna on a mountain several miles away to an antenna on my roof. From there, it has a cable going to my cable modem that has an 10baseT port and a 9 pin serial port for the uplink. The parent company American Telecasting has two way rights from the FCC, they just haven't changed the equipment in my city to support it.
I feel that some sort of wireless connection is the future for many people.
The EM spectrum is far from infinite, especially if you're interested in the portion that's referred to as RADIO.
The RF range is relatively narrow, compared to the other sections of EM, but it's characteristics are such that it's very useful. Omnidirectional transmission, and the ability to propagate the signal through solid objects is of great benefit. Unfortunatelly the data carrying capacity of RF is relatively small.
The amount of data that can be crammed into EM is proportional to the frequency, and if you jack up the freq, you lose the neat properties of RF. You go unidirectional, and you start cooking whatever meat you transmit through. Yes, that's right, the high side of RF is called microwave. Then there's X-ray, gamma radiation.. You really want that beaming your data into your house?
Along with the adverse effects of high-freq EM comes the energy considerations. It takes a lot of power to push high freq signals, and they tend to dissipate in water vapor, so distance transmissions via air become a problem.
In order to push a large amount of data through RF you need to spread the signal across sevaral frequencies. These frequencies must be relatively discrete. This improves your thruput, but it fills the medium more quickly, and as far as communication is concerned, air is the wire. Lots of collisions in a spread RF area.
So, radio is of fantastic use where better options are not available, and for short and bursty traffic, but as far as web-browsing... Man, banner ads alone would kill the airwaves.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I'm in the same situation. I'm on a farm 50 miles from the nearest cable or ADSL internet access (province of Saskatchewan in Canada). Just getting a second line so I don't tie up our phone line when I'm online would cost a fortune! (last I heard it was $800) And similarily to you, on a good day my 56k connects at 36000 and I have to wonder if it'll get worse because it used to regularily connect at 38666. So I say bring on the wireless broadband! SaskTel is usually pretty good about rolling out new technology early (ADSL was in the larger cities two years ago) so I'm hopeful that I'll see this sooner rather than later.
It makes more sense to pull fiber?
Not if I'm the service provider. See, I can cheap-like set you up with wireless now. Then, when the mobile applications need wireless, I can sell them my chunk of the spectrum and use that money to pay for fiber.
Sure, it's a hassle and a half to the end user and the mobile application provider, but I get to get in the door for cheap and when I need to go fiber, somebody else pays for it!
Of course, in all seriousness, when you get down to it, _we_ pay it, we being the consumers. If they can start offering broadband cheap over wireless, then that's good for us, too. We only wind up paying for fiber later, instead of now _and_ later.
-JDF
To this poem I must reply,
Moderators shoot your cr*p from the sky,
Surely it is no crime,
when Anonymous Cowards like you behave like slime,
when you submit multiple trash,
we need a moderator to kick your ass,
if we need to see your puns
we just set our theshold to -1 (minus wun!)
Once was a time when Anonymous meant brave and true,
now most post garbage just like you.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Yes, I was dumb enough to reply, but reasonably witty posts, whether you agree or not, deserve a response....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This is not some boondocky place, this is within the New York City limits!!! Now I don't know if wireless is the solution to this problem, but the assumption that everybody has access to DSL or Cable is wrong.
___________________
rooooar
Spread the meme indeed! Very interesting... and scary.
Thanks for the link.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Who Cares? It's in the 5Ghz+ band. That is useless spectrum for anything but line of sight things like this. The more access options the better!
Well, I have a past (and to some extend present) in ham-radio (amateur radio). At a cirtain time a long long time ago the VHF and later UHF-bands were assigned exclusively for ham-usage (at least in my regions) because "those very high frequencies are an useless spectrum for anything"......now, how many services have migrated from the HF-bands and lower to VHF and higher bands?
History (also from within our own field of computers) should have tought us not to deem anything "useless for anything but " - sooner or later they will become usefull for a lot more than originally envisioned.
While I agree on "the more access options the better", I also have to agree with those who point out that it makes more sense to pull a fiber to each house and use low-power, local-area wireless lan in-house, than it does to provide a global (or at least nation-wide) wireless system.
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
I mean, c'mon, what rocks more than taking the afternoon to lug half a dozen boxes to a central locality, spend an hour getting config info set, wires strung, and systems powered for a LAN fest? Wireless just kills the fun there. I mean, I just love to sit there playing Half-life or Quake 3 and have a large mass of RJ45 cable under my chair because it wasn't economical to cut. Having so much extra slack might hinder bandwidtha little, but so what? It's worth it.
It just makes sooo much sence to have miles and miles of cable obliterated in turn for excessively high-speed vibrations in our air waves. I mean, come on, what harm could high-speed vibrations in the air do, really? It's not like you'll get sick from it. And you can just use a different frequency if the one you're using is already taken. There are plenty available, and I'm -sure- the FCC is more than willing to allow just about anyone to use them free of charge.
Hmmm... somehow, that came out sarcastically.
Oops.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
As much as we would all love to have fibre installed to every house and business, at this current time it's just not economical, especially in smaller city centres. While there is fibre running through my area (just outside Hamilton, Ontario) the local loop cost is over $300/month excluding bandwidth (depends on ISP), and that's just for 1meg bandwidth.
... just not feasible for only bandwidth.
With the telco's, it's over $1000/month just for local loop T1, and business ADSL is $500/month
There's a provider around here rolling out wireless 2-3meg for well under that, and it includes professional web hosting, etc... They're called WDSL Inc.
Who Cares? It's in the 5Ghz+ band. That is useless spectrum for anything but line of sight things like this. The more access options the better!
This is not a waste of spectrum. This is 5Ghz+, which only works for line of sight communications. It will not pass through anything. This is above even the microwave band. Therefore, applications like this are really the only way to use such small wavelengths.
I have 11mbps to my home with lucent wavelan from my ISP (which I am the network engineer for) 5 miles away.
Someone asked, "why wireless? why not fiber to the home?" Well, no matter what cable/fibre you use you know the telco or the cable or the power company is going to own it, and paying rent and upkeep on all those lines will add to the cost of the service.
I live in an area with no ISDN even, it would cost me $300 a month to get a T1 from my ISP to the house and about $4k for routers and DSU's etc... this way I spend $300, and no monthly fee. And 11Mbps!
Not so - this stuff is realativley cheap - cheaper than offering dialup service for up to 11mbps! I am doing it at my ISP, we are small 700 users at a little over a year in business.
I am actually tempted in an area where T1's for dialup cost $1300 a month to drop dialup and go full wireless.
How to become rich easily?
(1) Get yourself a monopoly on telephone calls; a monopoly on local call will do;
(2) charge as much as you want for long-distance and international calls.
Why bring in broadband, if you can make truckloads of easy cash in this way? Further, the internet and large bandwidth will only compete with your cash cows. So, as a telco, prevent large bandwidth at every price!
Why do we need wireless to our homes? Why waste the bandwidth?
We need fiberoptic to our homes, and small wireless lans (ie Airport) within them. Save the long range wireless for PDAs, laptops, and other needs outside the home.
It just doesn't make sense in the long run.
cot
The isp's in my area were started by dedicated men and women that with a small amount of captial grew thier business into a service that help bring our communiy into the future. BUT...cable is here...can these little guys who tinker in their basement afford the equipment..if they dont.. no big company is going to go near a small rural area..the unsong heros who helped propogate the future might soon be priced out of it.
It isn't really a waste, because the spectrum is essentially infinite. (the only limits are practicality of the equipment, the spectrum is infinite in both directions) Currently there are as many as half a dozen different cellular networks in any given area. These could easily be replaced with a single system that could provide an IP based network with plenty of bandwidth for all the cellular calls, and the regular phone service, in addition to any new services that are developed.
I think that we should move almost entirely to wireless for a number of reasons. Amongst these are the convenience it would offer, as well as the savings on maintenance. Around here, the slightest rain will cause enough noise on the line to seriously degrade my connection (we're talking 19200 baud here). Cutting out the wires is one way to fix that. (the other is putting in completely new wires for cable modems, something my local cable company has declined to do thus far) Imagine all of the computers in your house are always on the network, even if you decide to pick it up and take it across town on a picnic. Makes wiring PDAs and stuff a whole lot easier as well. My father tells me you can get some very fancy receivers that use superconductor technology to achieve phenomenal results, which means tiny transmitters and vastly extended battery life, so that's essentially a non-issue as well.
Wireless to people's homes would be a monstrous waste of our precious radio spectrum. We will eventually need every bit of that wireless bandwidth for mobile applications. Why use it on applications for which fiber optics would work just as well, if not better? Yes, the cable companies currently have a stranglehold on the market for broadband to your house (xDSL just isn't there yet for most people). The solution, however, is not to go wasting our radio spectrum on wireless broadband! Lay fiber-optic cables. The initial investment is big, but it will pay off big-time when the rdio spectrum starts filling up and peole want something faster than cable modems.
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The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
I currently live in Austin, TX. We have a wide variety of connectivity choice, the best being from a company called NoBell. They offer 3mbps bi-directional connections for aprox. the same price as cable and ADSL.
I live in a hole in their coverage though. If I ever move I will take their coverage into account. Curently I pay the same for a 2 mbps/200kbps cable modem, with no static IP from a cable company who could care less about me.
My other option is ADSL, but even living almost downtown my line barely qualifies, so I won't be going any faster than 384/128kbps, too slow.
I am looking into SDSL from the competing providers, but to get 1.5 mbps (half of the wireless), I am looking at $900 for an unmetered account.
These microwave frequencies are not usable for portable devices, they require line of sight and a directional antanae. While things may change in the future, the spectrum isn't being completely used up. Lets use these frequencies to make things better for home/office use.
This is ridiculous. Why waste the precious wireless bandwidth when the copper wire infrastructure is already in place. I mean technically everyone could have a T1 hooked up to their house if the phone companies and ISP's would drop the prices some. The infrastructure is already in place for high bandwidth access. Its just the greedy corporations who are too stingy to provide the service at a reasonable price. All it takes for a T1 as far as the physical line goes it two regular phone lines. In total you would then pay for three phone lines to your house. One for you regular phone and two for the digital (frame relay) signal.
This solves are bandwidth problem right there. No need for these exotic solutions using satellites or wireless. No need for overkill...
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
What happens when I accidently walk through a router stream during a DoS attack?
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
h3h3
damit, i'm just happy to finally see broadband coming around and in many more different forms. i live in an area where you're lucky to get 56k performance and the geeks are all day dreaming about Cable and ADSL because we may never get these services before we frikkin die. So there.
;-)
............ no.
Where microwave data links are good is linking office buildings across town. This works especially well when you have a couple large buildings that are willing to host your antennas. It might also work ok for apartment buildings. But for residences? Nope.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Hmmm. But what if I were carrying uncooked grits in my pockets?
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Have the people that keep shouting that this should be used for handhelds stopped and thought about this? The last thing I would want to do is put a small device emitting microwaves in my pocket. It would be like carrying a small cooking device around on your person. And what about you car keys have you ever seen what happens when you put something metal in a microwave? Now imagine that happening in your pants not to mention that if your going to start irradiating large areas with microwaves your going to end up with a bunch of hairless mutants running around checking stock quotes on there PDA's. (shudder) this may be cool but I don't think it's vary practical
I've never noticed it before but my thinking cap does sort of resemble a hockey helmet
I remember it was the same time Al Gore was telling us all about the information super highways. It was about 6 years ago when Apple Computer's partitioned the FCC for access to a large hunk of band width in the Giga HzRange. hundreds of channels with 24 Mbits each. But did Al have the forethought to let us build the true internet. no. The radios would have broadcast range of only 10 to 15 Kilometers. Now if every slashdot nerds set up a router on there roof. With many Gigabits of band width per zone We all would have built our own Internet. We all would have free air time on our cell phones which in turn would supply Internet access every where all the time. But AT&T got in there and said dumb things like we can't have people attaching microwave ovens to there PC's. People will say anything to maintain there monopoly over our communications. And they did.
Think of the possibilities of global wireless broadband. I've heard that Qualcom is going to have a 2.4gig wireless laptop modem out soon. And you know it won't be long before a variety of smaller devices with this capablity hit the market. Access to information, no matter where you are, is one of most enticing opportunities the web has to offer. PCS phone services and advanced pagers have only scratched the surface in this regard. I just can't wait to be "working from home" while sitting at the beach.
Q: What kind of troll decries ACs while posting anonymously?
A: A fucking dumb troll!
I don't think there's much a government or a corporation can do about you or me. Where they exert real leverage over the net is in unified, single-point services. AOL, for example, controls enormous swaths of the Internet. This makes it a high-profile target for laws hostile to Internet freedoms. The Australian experience is that yes, Governments will go after big targets.
Wireless broadband is the backdoor out. Not necessarily the "transmit to base" kind advocated for wireless access companies, more the "point-to-point" kind which l0pht (amongst others) have tinkered with.
If people are determined to keep the Internet free, than the key is to have free tubes. Cheap, personal point-to-point networks can form small areas where Free cells can survive and even prosper. As these grow, they can link up, eventually providing uncontrolled tubes for the Internet to route uncensored material into.
Of course, it can be argued that such devices can be regulated. Of course they can, but not in the same easily-policed fashion as a single-point provider. If twenty million people have personal point-to-point, it won't be very practical to regulate them. Examples have been given where the FCC gave up on certain kinds of CB radios.
We shall see. If nothing else, somebody cursed the 21st century. These truly are interesting times ...
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Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
As a radio astronomer, I worry whenever I see stories about wireless communications, especially broadband. Is there going to be room for us in the future? Astronomers measure signals having strengths on theorder of 10**-26 W/m**2/Hz, and we need large bandwidths to get these signals, even with cooled receiver systems. Even a small amount of leakage from adjacent bands can kill our signals (We've already had problems with Russian GPS satellites, and IRIDIUM satellite signals).
The problem is made worse by the fact that spectral lines from many atoms and molecules can only be found in the radio frequencies (the whole range, but it gets very congested up in the mm to sub-mm wavelengths), and thus we either have a clear frequency band, or we lose the science. And much of the science can only be reached at these frequencies.
So, the question really is - how much does astronomy mean to you? Are you willing to forgo theknowledge and wonder that is astronomy (as well as the technological benefits that flow from people trying to push the envelope in a different direction than industry) for the sake of a faster connection, or a funkier cell-phone (or so the engineers can get away with a sloppy implementation to meet budget and time constraints)?