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Company Uses Grain Elevators for Internet Access
hohosforbreakfast writes "Here's a different take on wireless networking...a company in West Des Moines, Iowa says it will use grain elevators to provide Net access in rural areas of Illinois and Iowa. The story is here in the Des Moines Register." Ah, flat country.
So this means that a grain elevator explosion has the potential of taking out parts of the internet.
An entirely new mode of network failure has been invented!
I recently attended training sessions on Breezecom's product in Toronto, ON, CA. I ran into a group of geeks there who were doing exactly this--using grain elevators to host their antennae for 802.11 gear to provide 11mbps connections for rural subscribers.
Now I just wish they'd put some damned grain elevators up in suburbant Detroit. I'm having a nightmare of a time getting a point-to-point wireless link to perform well over 4 miles of trees, houses and commercial buildings. Ever see how difficult it is to get the permits to build an 80' tower in suburbia. Friggin' nightmare, man.
The ISP I worked for was going to use the water tower to get coverage for the east side of town, but a problem was our water tower looks kind of like a hamburger bun on a pole, and the curve of it would interfere with people who lived really close to the tower.
An ISP in ND has been doing this for a while now. It works pretty well. Tall trees can be a problem though. A problem we have though is customers say that it costs too much, but the prices seem comparable to DSL in bigger cities. They just want to wait until it's around $30 a month though.
I'm on the East Coast now, but I was born in South Dakota. Out here, I've been told I have a "radio voice"; "perfect enunciation"; etc, etc.
;]
Some of the best speakers come from the Midwest, because, although there's heavy Scandinavian and German background, there are a LOT of people out there with absolutely zero accent. Including myself.
People in the Midwest may tend to "drawl" their words, but there's no Southern accent, and I actually know a lot of Midwesterners who speak very quickly.
Ah well. We're talking about grain elevators and broadband, not deeply inherent lingual characteristics, so maybe I should just go back to South Dakota and get better connection speed than I have here...
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
I think the article might have been right. It sounds crazy, but I've seen similar technology with my own eyes. (Not in Iowa though) A small company (com-pair.net) does a similar thing. They set up a couple access points and one main point on top of a mountain. Although I really wasn't paying to much attention, it was definately fast, and it seemed more like kilobytes to me than kilobits. That's what it says on the webpage too (about half-way down). Cool pics of the equipment on that page as well. They also have some pricing and info on what makes it tick here.
As for weather effects that some people had concerns about in other posts, I think they had one problem when it got to hot, but they fixed that. It has to do with defraction, I think, but that's discussion for another article. You can get DSL in the area if you live in town, but most people don't. The phone lines are horrible, with a 24k carrier speed when I'm at home.
The only reason why I don't have this is cause I'm away at college, otherwise I'd settle the debate for sure. Looks like they changed their pricing plan so I could rent the equipment now. I'll have to look into it further next summer...
Wigs
--"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts." Cecil Adams
The antannas have a range of 6-8 miles I beleive that would be a little under 26 square miles. I wonder how many people/square mile they count as rural? lets just say that tehre is 1 account/mile, at 40$/month that gives them in income of $1040/month + the $600 innitial hardware cost. I have no idea how much it costs to run and maintain on of these antanas, but is it possible to do it with $1040/month?
I'm not fan of that whining either. But this particular fixture is not innovative, other than perhaps as a business relationship. People put these antennas on the tallest things they can find. The notion is not new, and it doesn't require any genius to employ it. I gaurantee you that there have been thousands of other installations long before this on so-called non-traditional platforms. I've seen them on top of skyscrapers, water towers, radio antennas, hilltops, trees... why not a grain elevator? What makes this story any more newsworthy than the hundreds of other similar day to day occurences.
If they wanted to write a piece on, say, high bandwidth coming to rural American, I could accept that. But this is just obvious employment of technology, without any real direction...I wish they'd generate real content, rather than producing fluff like this.
They say in the article it is comparable to DSL and cable, so I'd go with 128 kilobytes/sec (My ASDL line is 128 kilobytes/sec on the downloading side) 128 kilobits/sec would only be comparable to modems and ISDN.
Before I followed the link, the article reminded me of the story about accessing a network by carting a load of DAT tapes around in a van. Great bandwidth, horrible latency.
These opinions are my own and not necessarily
These opinions are my own and not necessarily
the opinions of God or any other supreme being.
Breezecom claims their gear will perform at speeds of 3mbps on their freq hopping radios and 5-11mbps on the single freq radios. I'd say that 128-512 kilobytes might be achievable.
I found the following very interesting: "Without high-speed Internet access, we can't expect many of those communities to survive." That is an extreme statement right there, are rural towns really that cut off?
You needed a pr0n fix bad enough to check it out at your grandparent's place?
Well, the idea of putting 802.11 wireless Internet connections on top of grain elevators is a GREAT idea.
Remember, the northern Great Plains has flat enough topology that the top of grain elevators have a long line of sight out into the country. That is sufficient for most communities to get connected to the Internet using a wireless connection.
Besides, farmers are surprisingly techno-savvy; they want direct access to the weather and agricultural price information to properly plan the year's operation on the farm. In fact, farmers are some of the biggest users of GPS satellites so they can precisely meter out the amount of fertilizer and pesticide/herbicide needed to properly maintain the farm; this has drastically reduced the fertilizer and agricultural chemical runoff that has caused water pollution problems in the past.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Just saw over at ISP Planet an article discussing the explosive potential from grain dust. Not very detailed, but a godd short read none-the-less. - Henry
Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
I find this a helluva lot more interesting than any of the "Richard Stallman whines about someone not worshiping him" stories.
This is nerds coming up with innovative solutions to problems of technology-have-nots.
The other is just whining babies.
Well, that's changed now..
You can get 56k access from pretty much anywhere in the state of Iowa and most towns with 50K or greater populations offer both DSL and @Home, of course, in Iowa, that's not very many places.
Personally, I had cable access almost 2 years ago, and am now using DSL, and I live in a town of about 50K in Iowa.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
More info on their wireless pricing.
So they're going to send each bit up like a little piece of grain? :)
How is packet loss with a system like this?
Regards,
-BK
Chemical Blog
Personally, I don't know why the cows and corn would be on the Internet? Maybe to visit /.
I guess neither of us can read.
It says they spent $10 million AND a year.
So... is this profitable?
-sid
The ultra-privitization of the newer telephony tech really does leave a lot of rural folks in the lurch.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Cool idea, and glad to see more folks getting faster internet access.. but how susceptible is this going to be to weather effects?
Admittedly, they define this as using "radio waves", which seems like a fairly fault tolerant medium (compared to, say, a beam of some sort), but they DO say it requires a clear line-of-sight. What's going to happen to your game of Q3A when a tornado decides to rip through the area? Even radio is subject to static, which could be pretty painful for an internet connection.
From what I've experienced, the plains states can suffer some pretty crappy weather. Be it rain, thunder, dust storms, blizzards, or tornados. One wonders about the quality of service these people will get; the news article doesn't really explain this much.
I'm just one to trust a wire safely buried under dirt more than radio waves being flung about.
Which brings up another point.. how easy is it for other people to pick up these signals? Channel scanners, start your engines.
"All we are is dust in the wind..." -- Kansas, Dust in the Wind
:)
but:
"We're all gonna be dirt in the ground..." -- Tom Waits, Dirt in the Ground
sorry.
I'm a student at ISU, and the speed (or lack thereof) of my parents' dial-up is always a shock after semesters in our very wired dorms. I'm not sure about UNI, but I know University of Iowa's getting ethernet connections, too. We come out of school craving speed, and if Vilsak, and other governors like him, doesn't want to see the brain drain in the midwest continue, then efforts like this need to continue, so we won't be lured away by the high-speed connections of major metropolitan areas.
Here in Southeastern CT, there's a cable company that services most people from Hartford to the Rhode Island border, called Eastern Connecticut Cable, that teamed with @Home to do cable modem access. (I know, my boss lives about 8-9 miles from me and enjoys cable modem) I just happened to get stuck in a fairly large "city" named Norwich, not even 10 miles from Eastern's service area. By a strange quirk, Adelphia cable (big in PA, but scattered in small areas in CT) has control over this area, and they say 1 year for Western CT, and 2-3 years until they get to my area. And, I happen to live about 4 miles from the telco office, so no DSL. Even worse, I live right outside city limits, and the phone company hasn't even touched the copper here in over 5 years. As a result, I get 19.2 out of my 56K modem. Anyone have any ideas on a fairly low-cost wireless solution that can reach about 9-10 miles? I'd be pleased if I was even getting a 1 meg connection to my boss's house (he uses IPMASQ for all his computers), but I'd like it if I could get an 802.11 connection out of it.
I work for an international company that has 2 plants in Iowa. Our home office is located in Germany. Try to have a WAN over a 56k dialup!!! It has taken us 1 1/2 years to get a T1 from US West/Qwest. And it cost us an arm and a leg. If Prairie Inet had been around when we started this project, that is probably been the way we would have gone. Our one plant is located only 2 blocks from a Prairie Inet antenna.
Hi, I'm from Iowa, and I'd have to say, farmer's daughters can be pretty darn attractive. :p
It looks like somebody hasn't seen enough IBM commercials.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Actually, it is part of a monopoly.
NetINS is owned by INS, which is owned by roughly 130 shareholders--who are most of the independents in Iowa. INS is also a 70% shareholder in the company which took over from GTE in Iowa (Iowa Telecom, IIRC). This means that--through their ownership of INS--these little Mom and Pops can exercise a lot of influence on what can and can't be done in telecom in much of Iowa--up to two thirds of the state, from what I hear. The only other big player here now is USWest/Qwest, which really doesn't want to leave the big cities--and are looking to get rid of some of their exchanges out in the boonies.
As for the shell server and personal web sites, I can only relate my experiences from 2.5 years prior. The shell server had things on it, but you weren't allowed hardly any space, and if you did try to do anything other than read mail or telnet out, your hands were slapped (and no, I'm not malicious. We're talking about sysadmin script development and testing, centralized storage of really important things--things I do on other ISP accounts with no hoopla at all). As for the web pages, I will grant you this. When I was with them, there were no personal web sites without paying extra $$'s (and the "Basic Showcase" does appear under "New"). I remember very well, because it really torqued me.
As for being rough, my experiences with NetINS have been nothing but wretched, and I've the opportunity to compare and contrast with ISPs outside the state of Iowa. Most of them would kick NetINS' butt. Rough maybe, but justified.
---------------------------------
Only in America will someone order a
Big Mac, large fries, and a Diet Coke.
Then there's the topic of their service, and price--premium cost for a paucity of services. Laughable shell server; no personal web pages, unless you paid extra. NetINS has never cared-- and still doesn't--for the individual/home user. Thank heavens USWorst came along with DSL.
And don't get me started about their business service.
Over all, I wish PrairieInet luck.
---------------------------------
Only in America will someone order a
Big Mac, large fries, and a Diet Coke.
I don't think it would take anywhere near the amount of money that you are talking about. First off, let's talk about the servers. These guys are serving 4000 customers. That's pretty much _nothing_ compared to most regional ISPs. You could spent $5000 on a FreeBSD-based server for mail which would be more than sufficient. Add another for things like RADIUS and DHCP and you have about $10,000 in server costs, which I'm sure was included in their $10,000,000 deployment costs.
You wouldn't need a T1 for news. Outsourcing, with a small customer base of 4,000 Iowa farmers, is the way to go. Maybe a hundred or two hundred a month for the outsourcing and $2,500 for the T1s. maybe $30,000-$35,000.
$15,000 for office space a year? This is Iowa, dude. You could run this out of a $7,000-a-year office space and be in high cotton^H^H^H^H^Hcorn, as they say.
$50,000 a year where I live (San Antonio, TX) is pay for senior-level IT people. You can happily live on $35,000 a year here. In Iowa, I'm sure its even easier. You don't need that many tech people, either. My local ISP has at least 7-10x as many customers and does it with three tech guys. You could run this thing on $200,000 a year in salaries, including tech support.
I think they'll probably make it. The chances of a baby Bell bringing DSL to the thousands of tiny towns in Iowa are probably near nil.
Just wanted to find out what the card is that they're using, so I could setup a preconfigured LRP and ship it back to my dad whose been dying for this type of connectivity.
I love how all the southern states are at the bottom of the list....
------------- I didn't know she was your sister I swear!
Sorry, couldn't help myself...
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
I see you, Mr. Ho...
Though, I must agree entirely with my punk & ska friend. Iowa, we've got all sorts of wacky types.
I just subscribed to the Prairie Inet service today. In talking to their tech support people, I was informed that one of their major investors is Heartland Co-op. The owners of most of the grain elevator sites. This would help cut their overhead considerably.
As an aside to the people who have been flaming the midwest. Let me say that we are not all farmers/hicks. I happen to be an industrial programmer for an international company living in Iowa. This change will give me remote access to my systems at work without driving 40 miles.
I wondered when some of the midwestern states would come up with this idea.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Now we just need solutions for people scattered in dense forest, deep mountaion valleys, spread WAY OUT on deserts, on small islands far from land, or moving about on the roads, skies, and high seas...
;-)
We already have them: satellite linkups. And they might even become cost-effective within our lifetimes.
I used to live about 30 mi, south of Dallas Texas and I could not get anything above 26.4Kbps. I also had to get a metro line to have a local call to dallas, so it cost me $75 a month with ISP for that crappy speed. But my brother has told the people about 2 mi away that are in the GTE service area can now get DSL. So the moral of this story Southwestern Bell sucks.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
... now my pr0n will come out all grainy.
;-)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I know it has been mentioned already, but I just wanted to share my email to the author of the article:
:-)
You should know that your article has been slashdotted (mentioned on
http://www.slashdot.org). Congratulations.
In your article you said
"For $40 a month the residential service provides an "always-on"
connection at a speed of 128 kilobytes per second, which is comparable to
cable and digital subscriber line access available in larger cities. An
even faster speed of 256 kbps is offered for $65 a month."
Surely you meant 128 kilobits per second ( 8 bits per byte, so closer to
16 kilobytes per second). If 128 kilobyte per second wireless internet
access is available for $40 a month in Iowa I just might move there.
Have a great weekend,
Eden Brandeis
Moderators: Be kind, I haven't got much karma.
Wow.
*IF* you killed them you managed to "knock them out" for a full 15 minutes. You monster.
I'd say your virginity is intact.
-sid
Kilobytes per second = K/sec Kilobits per second = kbps
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Now,a T3 is about 30 times faster than a single T1. But, if I read correctly (elsewhere - not in the article), a T3 is only about $3K a month. A T1 is 1/3 of that. So for the cost of a third T1, couldn't he just get a T3?
It's a bit off-topic, I know, but I was a bit shocked to learn that a T3 is so "cheap" (ie - 30 times a T1, but costs only 3 times a T1). If I'm wrong, please correct me.
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
Oh great, another supporter of computer/internet welfare.
-----------------------------
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Well the way Slashdot pushed Katz's book which chose an anecdote insulting Idaho as a "hick" state, I'd have to agree with you.
Sorry if I jumped on you about using the word "hick", but there is this double standard around, of which you are apparently aware, regarding insults to rural people (redneck jokes, farmer's daughters jokes, etc.) which amounts to ethnic trashing -- and if you look at the academic achievment rankings, you'll notice there may be a reason for urban cultures to promote this sort of bias:
They're embarrassed at their own performance.
This is, I believe, sufficient cause alone to make this article of interest. I mean what will Katz write about when farmer's sons start becoming millionares by replacing the Chicago commodities exchange with their internet access via the local grain elevator transponders?
Probably something to do with how they're all afraid of showing themselves in person with the real men in the mosh pits of the Chicago exchange or some horseshit.
Seastead this.
At 27 I'm no youngin. My first modem (and I still have it) is a 300-baud acoustic coupler. I know what COBOL is, and I've even worked with stupid 80-col punch cards. I had my first personal-puter in 1981.
I just evolved over time. People tend to do that =) By todays standards, 128Kbps is slow, but speed is relative to what you need accomplished.
A lot things aren't obvious to you.
For example, that there are enormous hidden taxes applied to any physical wiring due to right of ways that exceed even the FCC's red tape by a huge amount.
That the first Cray supercomputer was built on Seymour's farm using guys from rural Iowa and Wisconsin.
That wireless will probably displace physical cable in urban areas once places like Iowa, Montana, Canada, China, Siberia, etc. make the advantages manifestly clear.
That the wireless revolution will relocate the infosphere to orbit.
Or, finally, an example of something that clearly is not obvious to you is the ranking of states by academic achievement.
1. Minnesota
2. Montana
3. Iowa
4. Wisconsin
5. New Hampshire
6. Oregon
7. Washington
8. Kansas
9. Nebraska
10. Alaska
11. Connecticut
12. Massachusetts
13. Maine
14. Vermont
15. Missouri
16. Colorado
17. Arizona
18. Utah
19. Virginia
20. North Dakota
21. Oklahoma
22. Wyoming
23. Illinois
24. New York
25. New Jersey
26. Maryland
27. Nevada
28. Rhode Island
29. Idaho
30. Ohio
31. Texas
32. Michigan
33. North Carolina
34. California
35. South Dakota
36. West Virginia
37. Kentucky
38. Delaware
39. Arkansas
40. Florida
41. Indiana
42. Alabama
43. New Mexico
44. Tennessee
45. Pennsylvania
46. Georgia
47. Hawaii
48. South Carolina
49. Louisiana
50. District of Columbia
51. Mississippi
Now, which state are you from? :-)
Seastead this.
(Now we just need solutions for people scattered in dense forest, deep mountaion valleys, spread WAY OUT on deserts, on small islands far from land, or moving about on the roads, skies, and high seas...)
Some of us enjoy being able to go WAY OUT into the desterts, or on small islands and NOT being connected. It's actually quite refreshing to take a week away from email, pagers, cell phones and everything else except the land.
The north central and northwestern part of Iowa is very flat. Southern Iowa has gentle rolling hills, but is still fairly flat. Northeastern Iowa is somewhat more hilly, but far from what most people would consider mountainous. If you compare the lowest point in Iowa to the highest point, you aren't talking about that many feet of difference. You have to look at things comparatively to other places that have much more terrain than Iowa does... Even many of Iowa's neighboring states such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and South Dakota have significantly more rugged terrain. Tell me a state that is more flat overall than Iowa... About the only one that springs to mind as a possibility is Nebraska... Even Illinois has the tailings of the Ozarks across its southern portion...
My guess is that this was considered newsworthy, because there is an element of hacking involved. It's not much, but it qualifies in the alt.hackers "no hack is too small" sense. And it's this: The ISP used an existing structure, which was never intended for communications purposes, to get their antennas higher.
Yes, it's been done a thousand times before, with people putting antennas on mountains and skyscrapers. Even still, a grain silo on the middle of a farm is something you don't normally associate with "computer tech" things. There's an element of contrast here.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The problem many small rural communities face is slowly dwindling population as all of the capable younger people move away as soon as they are able. One of the reasons that the smart younger people leave is that there is a lack of things for them to do. While the Internet may not be a necessity, it is certainly something that is quickly becomming something that many people feel deprived if they don't have access to.
I quote from the article:
"Many Iowa residents have been left behind by high-speed Internet providers simply because of where they live," said Pederson. "Without high-speed Internet access, we can't expect many of those communities to survive."
This is utter and total bullshit of the purest ray serene.
How often does the Internet get touted as the latest and greatest something that nobody can live without? How much of that is true? So it is difficult for rural town businesses to have web sites. Big deal. Does the local corner store have a web site? Not nearly enough people buy things from the Internet to classify Internet commerce as a necessity, like regular off-line, physical shopping.
Rural areas are, by definition, rural. Rural to implies being away from the general population, isolation, privacy. That's what you get, and you also get the downsides, like slow net access (if any). Live with it. Nobody's going to die because their Hotmail is too slow. For crying out loud.
--Markus
BlackholeTV - TV that Swallows
Iowa is in the midwestern part of the US. While technically most of the US speaks something that is often referred to as 'english', it generally isn't expected to adhere to the standards of the 'Queen's English'. And as gor poor grammar, it is hardly something that is relegated to or stereotypical of hicks alone. Some of the worst grammar I see is perpetrated by east or west coasters.
And yes, my grammar isn't perfect. So sue me. And while you are at it, you might try a little attitude adjustment.
We've put some antennas on a grain elevator a few months ago. We had to give the company that owned it free access, but it was significantly cheaper than putting it on a big tower.
Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
--Ambrose Bierce
In my home town in Vermont, cable television has not even come to town yet, much less high speed internet connections. It really does take a while for the ripple effect of technology to reach rural areas, some people even fear it for some reason or another. But very gradually, it is happening. I think it is great what Iowa is doing! I would love to see something like this happen on the farm in Vermont, where I am proud to say my grandparents have their first computer ever in their house as of a few weeks ago and my 80 year old grandmother wants me to teach her how to use "that internet thing". :)
Only about 17% of African citizens have internet access (most of them being compensated by IBM for being in those stupid commercials with an IBM web server sitting out in the open savannah) and we're complaining about some farmers in Iowa wanting something faster? Come on! There's people out there who don't even know what a computer is.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
That, my friend, is a marvelous idea.
Clearly I meant megabits.
-Josh
"Professor, I tried to e-mail you my paper, but it turns out someone fed it to the cows."
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Truthfully, though, California is way ahead of most other states when it comes to the high-speed internet world. I live in a small semi-rural town in central CA and we actually have DSL (with good coverage cause it's a small town). Contrast that with places in the Midwest and Northwest, where you are counted fortunate to get a 56K-class connection!
Averye0
--o You're just jealous cause the voices talk to me and not to you! o--
Which is why you, er, TURN THEM OFF or LEAVE THEM HOME?
Why is it that there are millions of whiners in this country that can't figure out that just because you could be connected doesn't mean you have to be connected? Technology can't take over your life unless you let it; and if you laet it, you DESERVE your fate.
Steven E. Ehrbar
If it's so obvious to you, then why the hell aren't you making money off of it? It's easy enough to say "stick antenas on a silo", but to actually implement the idea requires bringing together the technical know-how, the funding, and the connection to the community to not only a customer base, but to convince people to stick those antenas on their silos.
Besides, it's Sunday night; now that it's part of his day job, Linus only released kernel patches only come out during business hours.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
We cows and corn are actually quite literate, and are quite aggravated at the lack of decent Internet service.
Sure, there's AOL, but AOL incurs long-distance charges unless you live near one of the state's 3 big Universities or in Des Moines.
Small ISPs are slowly cropping up (I couldn't get Internet access until mid 1995), but the max transfer rates in most areas tend to cap out at 28.8k.
Other solutions would include SkyLink, a service which allowed free (one-way) downloading of data through large TVRO dishes, but only if you leave the dish on a certain channel (G4-6 last I knew) and only at 9600bps.And you were restricted to what they felt like sending you; you never sent any data back to them.
The same company offered Planet Connect, which cost over $1000 initially and around $40 a month to maintain, as I recall. However, that supposedly allowed data transfer speeds of up to 230k/second.
I vaguely recall reading about another service which would allow (for similar rates to Planet Connect) you to use your ISP to send data out over the internet, but receive data asynchronously via a small Ku-band satellite dish at around 1Mb/sec. I don't know for sure how accurate this information is though; it was about 3yrs ago I read up on this, so some of these outfits may have folded.
I wish I could remember the name of the outfit in Waverly, Iowa. That one deserves an honorable mention since it's a wireless ISP. I don't recall the details of the setup, but I do remember that it's more or less this one guy's hobby, and that since he never received a degree in EE, it makes it all the more impressive.
Couldn't they also 'rent' space on the several TV/telephone microwave towers that dot the landscape? They are much taller than any grain elevator the the range would be much better(besides, there are a few rolling hills, the entire landscape isn't totally flat like eastern Arkansas or west Tennessee). Would the existing transmitters cause too much interference?
I hope this service expands into neighboring states to the west. My family would enjoy that. My sister has had wireless cable TV (not satellite) for well over a decade, so hopefully her cable TV provider might start offering internet access too.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
This is all true, but it's time to speak up for the other oppressed peoples without high-speed access... the suburbanites. There are many areas where the cable companies haven't upgraded their systems, and where there's no DSL access. And, even if DSL (or ISDN) are nominally available, the distance limits rule out a surprising percentage of households. I live in a fairly densely populated suburb, but I'm too many kFeet from the central office for DSL; even ISDN requires a repeater that about doubles the monthly cost. Wireless is a nice idea, but the obstructions in a suburban environment (trees in particular) make it difficult to implement (I know, I've tried). Both the cable company and the telco say they're working on it, but for now there's a significant suburban population that has no high speed access available.
As a native Iowan, who lives in Southern California (yes it was the high speed interenet that drew me here. :) ) I can attest that Iowa is FLAT, but not quite as flat as say Nebraska. I used to think that SE 5th by Southridge was a steep hill, now I go back there and don't even notice it. Flatness is relative I guess. :)
three problems there - the railroad right-of-way is not all under the same ownership, it gets abandoned/sold a lot, and it's usually near natural geology features (rivers, ravines, etc.) that tend to see quite a few disasters. For the MOST part, though, running telecomm in that space is a good idea.
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
Second, what's the density in your area for cable connections? I live in Carroll Co. MD, about 50 miles north from D.C. and if there aren't 100 possible cable customers in a mile stretch of road, it don't go there. My road has 3, so I'm screwed with that media.
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
What do they pay for it with
--
--
The New World Order is upon us, and it's about damned time.
A company in the southern part of Illinois (an hour's drive from where I live) is using water towers in a town...they couldn't get permission to build towers (eyesore) but they *could* get permission to put antennae on water towers. :^) Apparently very nice data rates...the only problem is that the southern part of Illinois is a bit hilly, unlike the vast wasteland of central and northern Illinois.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
"Many Iowa residents have been left behind by high-speed Internet providers simply because of where they live," said Pederson. "Without high-speed Internet access, we can't expect many of those communities to survive."
Without unfettered access to Brittany Spears Topless pr0n pop-up ads and the latest 3L337 VV4R3z all communities in Iowa will disband.
I love it when rednecks get dramatic. Lets not take this internet thing TOO seriously now...
eeeesh
I'm from 34. California.
Duz that mayk me stoopid? Below average at least....
Do they even have colleges in Iowa?
Yes. I believe the University of Iowa and Iowa State are both Big-10 colleges and one of which (can't remember which one) had a very active Internet-based BBS over 10 years ago. That and Rutger's Quartz BBS were big time sinks for me then. =)
Also, if you would look at this post, you would see that the two states that beat Iowa are Minnesota and Montana. Education is still considered very important in those areas. Since many small rural communities don't have the ability to create the jobs needed for their children, unless one plans on taking over the family business, the only way to get a decent job is through education and moving away. Even then, I know several farmers that have Bachelor of Science degrees. These states also have the advantage of generally being very homogenous populations, so there's no incentive to water the school systems down for political-correctness' sake.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
"Insightfull" doesn't mean "I agree with it". It meens it offers a new way of looking at a problem or issue that might otherwise not have been discussed.
Hehehe...This was on yesterday. Anyways, don't screw with Iowans. They're mostly runned by Mexican laborers and West Des Moines Asian communites. Well too bad I'm not old enough to get a job, otherwise I could provide more info.
I was having this conversation with a colleague (yes, I work in a cathedral :) a week or two ago. I was thinking that broadband is pretty much necessary for the internet to progress to the next level. I was bemoaning the fact that our 'merkin friends (I'm a Brit) are a bit lucky in the broadband area. James (t'other guy) said that although Silicon Valley and a few other places have good net access, there are still plenty of places in the States that could be called 'backwards' (in more way than one hehe :)
:) networking has a special place in my heart. I remember reading about packet radio in PCW magazine years before I encountered the Internet. Maybe you need some pretty powerful transmitters to cover big rural areas, but let's face it, no-one wants to run cables everywhere...
I guess he was right. Which makes this story interesting.
I was initially thinking of satellite access. As far as I know, satellite access is awful right now, being horribly expensive. The MSN developments are interesting w.r.t. bidirectional access, but it remains to be seen whether the price will be prohibitive.
Wireless (over here we call it 'radio'
I think, from the ranges and speed, that they are deploying Clearwire's technology. Yes, this is a proven tech, but it's old and slow.
I feel sorry for all these companies investing in this architecture when it is going to be so completly bipassed by a faster and cheaper method within the next year
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
I work for a company that does cable modem access in Georgia and most of the deep south.
Most of the calls I take sound like this...
"They dun comed out here yesterdee to hook up the internet. Naw ah caint geet awn lain. Cin you fix this thang fer me?"
The last thing the world needs is more uneducated bumpkins getting online and taking up precious bandwith.
Think about it. How are the good citizens of Iowa going to react when then discover the presence of literally millions and millions of pictures of the penis bird. Church ministers, prepare your sermons.
Adelaide Wireless Network
Canberra Wireless Network
Although there isn't anything extremely new in this current story, it's important that the internet is becoming more and more available to EVERYONE. That's what makes the internet so exciting. A hick in the sticks can have just as much power as a corporation by learning a little html. Well that may be pushing it. But the divide is theortectically shrinking, and that is a good thing (TM).
Actually, Internet is quite useful (and quite popular) in rural areas. The reasons: updated commodity prices from Chicago Board of Trade, research into new farming techniques, buying selling equipment (kinda like classifieds, only cheaper), keeping up with children/relatives, - This list goes on and on . . .
The problem with dialup in rural areas is that the local telcos have not done a very good job catching up. My parents (on the farm) cannot get 56k(bits) from their dialup provider to save their lives. Their modem is a USR/3com 56k, and their provider (the telco) swears up and down that the pop they dial into is 56k-ready. After doing some research I discovered that, while all that may be true, if the phone switches between them and the pop are not new enough to handle 56k, then that speed isn't possible. In fact, my parents celebrate when they get 28.8k!!
I personally think that Prarie iNet will make a fortune. There are no other options for high-speed access in rural areas. I mean, my parents can't even get cable (although they do have DirectTV). In case you didn't figure that out - yes, I didn't grow up with cable. Heck, I didn't even have Fox . . .
- mikehWell, maybe. Even if all 4000 of the customers they hope to sign up are only receiving residential service, that adds up to nearly $2M/year income. Office space is pretty cheap in those parts, and I'd bet the cost of routers, servers etc. is folded in with the $10M figure cited. Depending on how the equipment costs are amortized, I could easily see this being profitable, if only marginally so.
And the brethren went away edified.
I find it hard to believe that even slashdot calls this newsworthy. I mean, what is news exactly? That highspeed wireless internet technology requires line of sight? Or that these places are relatively flat and unobstructed? That this can be done economically? That "hicks" might want high speed internet access to? The whole thing strikes me as terribly obvious. The only thing I wouldn't know is that it is happening there and right now. But the same can be said for many many more things.
I won't go on a big diatribe here.. but wireless networks are far easier to set up than cable networks as far as the amount of work goes.
Remember, these rural places don't HAVE the cable infrastructure. THere is no landline to be had... no cable, not enough phone circuits of enough quality to do DSL, and the distances are too big.
How on earth could putting up some towers (or using the roofs of grain elevators) be harder than getting right-of-way and burying cable all over the place?
OK, I am an Iowa native, and I am all for broadband, but:
....said Pederson. "Without high-speed Internet access, we can't expect many of those communities to survive."
The community won't survive? Please. That is overstated the importance of high speed access to the point of drawing everything this person says into question.
If one is in a community in Iowa that doesn't have cable, then the only thing that communities survivial is based on is corn, soybean, beaf and pork prices.
And if you have every pedaled a bike across Iowa you might question the "flatness" assertion. Strongly.
It says they spent $10 million AND a year.
So... is this profitable?
4,000 customers * $40/month * 12 months/year = $1,900,000/year. And that's just the start.
$2,500 capital cost per customer is in the ballpark with the costs of rolling out DSL. Cost per customer will drop with time.
Unlike DSL in a city they don't have to tear up streets and string more wire all over the place, or test and upgrade existing wire. And they don't have to install a DSLAM in every two-bit switching center and wire up separate pairs for each customer to it.
Instead they have one, or a few, antenna sites, plus an antenna and a box at each customer's house, and only air in between. The customer covers the cost of their setup with an install fee. The base station and internet connection is already set up. (If they need several antenna sites they might radio-link them to each other, too, and only need a landline to one of 'em.)
The small number of antenna drivers also limits the amount of routing boxes they need. (They can probably drop it all into a single Redback box.) Ditto with limiting the number of backbone connections (maybe two, running by divergent routes). Piece of cake.
I won't predict whether THIS one will succeed. (Think how many cable companies went belly up in the early days.) But I can't see anything that would doom it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
She lives in Chariton, which is quite a small community south of Des Moines. All of her friends have Net access and they're as busy as anybody I know anywhere sharing email back and forth.
In Iowa terms, I wouldn't call Chariton "quite small." It's more along the lines of average size. At a population of ~4,600, it's virtually a metropolis compared to the town I grew up in. (I, of course, packed up my things and got the hell out of there the day after high school graduation.) And there were plenty of other towns around that were even smaller.
As of a year or so ago (last time I checked), there were still plenty of Midwestern towns that not only couldn't get broadband access, but couldn't even get dialup access without paying long distance charges.
Unfortunately, it just doesn't make financial sense to provide access to a community of a couple hundred people.
http://www.sprintbroadband.com/what/index.html
Kinda nifty
I don't know about other states, but Iowa doesn't have railroad tracks anymore. There are maybe 3 rail lines running across Iowa. And the railroads are already using them to transmit there own data. All the rest of the railroad tracks have been pulled up, and made into bicycle trails.
Not likely, for this reason: the signal frequencies used for the wireless Internet access is very close to that of the frequencies used for telephone and TV systems, and the result is potentially serious interference problems.
By putting them on grain elevators, they already have access to a building with pretty high elevation that have line of sight far out into the countryside.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
that's not nearly as cool as the cell towers behind the goalposts of our local high school football field. what the hey, its revenue; they sure don't get enough money from our taxes after the city morons divvy it up for their relatives.
Kansas. Eastern and southern Arkansas and west Tennessee are pretty flat too. South Dakota east of the Missouri river is about like most of Iowa. West of the river is more rolling prairie hills, badlands, and of course the Black Hills at the extreme western edge...the 'Wild West' part of the state.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
How about we keep kbs for kilobits/sec as its traditionally used and kbbs for kilobytes/sec. Its simple and crazy enough to work!
What makes this article news for 99% of slashdot? I find it difficult to believe that most of slashdot would be suprised to discover that this could be done from a technical point of view. Likewise, this article fails to illustrate the technical side of rural America. Instead, all we have is a brief [and flawed] description of a specific application of well established technology. It's not even tied into a larger message at all.
There are hundreds and thousands of similar installation stories that could be posted here too, but that does not mean they all should be national, or even international, news.
As for your comment(s), I fail to see how they actually apply. I did not say, nor did I mean to imply, that these states are inferior. Though it is apparent that it is a touchy subject for you, I assumed that my putting "hick" in quotes would be sufficient....
I do, however, disagree with you in regards to wireless's future. It will certainly grow, but I'm convinced that most high bandwidth connections will remain in domain of wiring in urban and suburban areas.
Isn't that why they have the satellite system? I thought the guys at Direct TV or Hughes would have this market all wrapped up by now. ISDN speed even in the hinterlands still sucks.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
FWIW, and you can believe this or not, but your average Iowan is better educated than the average person from 94% of the other states in the country.
128 kiloBytes/sec isn't slow at all.
When I were a lad, 128 kiloBITS/sec wasn't slow at all. In fact, way back when (== June '99), 56 kbits was pretty much it. It's them nasty modems that give you that perception.
(Full Disclosure: I was on modem '89 - '99. I first got cable in January. For about a month or so afterwards, I used to wipe my harddisk and reinstall Debian Potato every other day, just for the hell of it. Consider this: While I was in high school, I hoped that I'd one day make enough money to afford a 2400 baud modem. We've come a long way, fellas.)
Amazing how tough it is in some places to get permission to put up antennas, even for the cellphones that the yuppies who live there use. At least in farm country they're a lot more relaxed about it (just another frob on top of the grain elevator that was there already), and probably get a lot of benefit from it. Next step might be telephone service, if it's reliable enough?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Iowa is hardly flat... But this is a awesome idea. short of getting fiber strait to the farm house, this is a really inxepensive, effective way of getting the internet to those who could probally really USE it. This combined with new startups like e-markets well maybe they can start making money again... Maybe.
End Transmission....
Two nice long contiguous metallic conductors. Even if they are quasi grounded, they'll act as a good RF waveguide at some frequency.
Nope. Their resistance to ground is very small compared with the resistance of the track. Very lossy.
And a train is a rolling short. At best you'd get trains or data but not both at once. B-)
Besides, they ALREADY have LOTS of dark fibers buried alongside them. (Sprint developed from the Southern Pacific Railroad's own network, for starters.) Just rent a couple of 'em and run OC-192 (or whatever) to any convenient population center. That'll beat any concevable data rate you could get from the tracks.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
Although, on second though, that would explain why my hamsters keep dying. I gave them a home, clean water, and plenty of food, but I forgot to drop them a DSL line! *sniff* Poor little Boo, if only I'd known...
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Sorry, your post just reminded me.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
What a lot of people don't realize is how behind techonology wise a lot of rural communitys are. I used to live in Iowa, and there are parts where there is NO chance of Internet access. Even the bigger cities can't get anything abouve 56k. I think this is a wonderful step in the right direction, but I wonder how many other regions in the United States don't have access to a high-speed connection?
The speeds here are comparable to some cablemodems, and for similar prices. I wonder how they manage to do this, considering the wireless infastructure is far more difficult to set up than landlines are.
Seriously. After $1 million to build the antennas, probably another $50-$100 thousand for routers and servers, whoknowshowmuch for office space and perhaps $5,000/month minimum for bandwidth, how long until this will pay 6 guys a worthwhile wage for 24-hour duty???
Maybe that's a question for Ask Slashdot?
-sid
-Josh
Yes. I believe the University of Iowa and Iowa State are both Big-10 colleges and one of which (can't remember which one) had a very active Internet-based BBS over 10 years ago. That and Rutger's Quartz BBS were big time sinks for me then. =)
:)
:)
Close! Iowa State University, located in Ames, (my alma mater) is in the Big 12. The University of Iowa, located in Iowa City, is in the Big 10. The third state school is the University of Northern Iowa, where I work, is located in Cedar Falls, but I don't reccomend going there.
The BBS you speak of is the legendary ISCA. You can telnet to it at whip.isca.uiowa.edu
It used to be really popular, circa 1995, when there'd be 1500 people on at a time, and hundreds more waiting in the queue, but now it's usually around 300-500 at most.
Just consider us the Sili-corn Valley.
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
James T. Kirk now has internet access.
Or that should be, now has faster or cheaper internet access.
Money is the root.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
You don't have to be in the rural midwest to have trouble getting broadband service. I'm right over the hill from the Santa Clara Valley. ("Silicon Valley" for you folks down in LA LA land.) DSL is theoretically available in my area, but in fact the copper's so antique that you can't get broadband unless you live right next door to the telco office.
And the brethren went away edified.
Seems like Prairie iNet are using the 2.4 GHz band, which is generally unlicensed around the world - assuming they are using the same technology as Midcoast Wireless, a Maine ISP, which has a very useful FAQ
This is all based on IEEE 802.11 technology, which is normally used for wireless LANs with a range of a few hundred feet. The trick here seems to be using more power and directional antennae so that you can go up to 9 miles (or maybe much more).
One company making this sort of kit is Breezecom, who have an overview of wireless Internet access here.
This technology, along with the competing licensed LMDS technology, may make mincemeat of DSL and Cable - it involves no rights of way hassles, no cable laying, and can give very low latency plus bandwidths in the 1-2Mbps range. Having used Wireless LANs at conferences and trade shows, I found the latency and bandwidth very similar to a T1 line.
For info on 802.11, see the Linux Wireless LAN FAQ, which also has good links to generic WLAN info at the end. Although the technology for 802.11 long-distance (i.e. wireless local loop) is not identical, it should give you an idea of how things work.
For info on LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution System), see the Webopedia entry for LMDS, which has links to related pages. One new European telco that is rolling out LMDS quite aggressively is FirstMark - they are also doing cool things with MPLS VPNs, which is how I know about them since my company just sold them the software to manage this
Low latency is important because it's a key determinant of web response time, particularly for sites with many small GIF buttons, and also because Internet routers tend to treat high-latency sessions less fairly, so they get even less bandwidth then they should. It's also essential to winning at Quake, which is clearly the critical driver here
This story matters more for the technology than for the particular ISP using it - it will affect most Slashdot readers in the next year or so, particularly those not covered by DSL or cable. In the UK, BT is being astonishingly slow at rolling out ADSL, and the cable companies have very little coverage, so wireless technology may be the only way to get broadband for many people...
Can you use repeaters in this setup, or some sort of remote stations that link back to base via microwave links? This would make it easier to cover larger areas particularly in towns.
I'm interested to see you are using ATM via the Newbridge kit - you might like to investigate MPLS, which is a way of combining ATM's fast forwarding mechanisms with IP's routing mechanisms. The result is that very large best effort networks and VPNs are very easy to set up - no need for a mesh of PVCs, you just plug them together and the routing sorts things out.
MPLS is not currently so strong on the traffic engineering side, i.e. setting up the equivalent of PVCs to steer traffic along less utilised paths, or for guaranteed QoS or fast failover paths, but Juniper and Cisco routers can already do traffic engineering and the standards are coming along.
More MPLS info is at http://www.mplsrc.com/
Come on - internet access is cool, its even occasionally useful. But rural communities have been around forever and they will be around forever, internet be damned. To say that they "will not survive" without high speed access is just silly.
I do hope their transmitters are correctly and properly grounded. On thing that one does not want around grain elevators is faulty wiring. Grain dust is extremely volatile stuff.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
So THAT'S it! All those people in various parts of Africa are dying off due to lack of internet access! Silly me, I always thought it was fascist politicians, poverty, disease, and starvation that was causing it.
So, does United Way need to send them computers, or just the grain elevators? :-)
Joe Sixpack is dead!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Would you want to live without net access?
Believe it or not, Iowa's not flat. Iowa is almost entirely hilly. We're not talking mountains here, just little hills... but it's definitely not flat. Take it from someone who grew up there and lived there for many years, including a year in Des Moines. There's so many friggin hills it makes some people sick to drive through it. I'm not kidding.
I work for a high speed wireless ISP in Toronto, Ontario, Canada named Maxlink. We offer a range of services, from 0-4mbps uncommited upto 10mbps commited rates. We also offer IP-VPN as well as other network services which are forthcoming.
:) :) (we do email, web, dns and voice services also) :) (shameless plug).
This is all done using a combination of Cisco routers/switches for layer 3 stuff, and Newbridge switches for the layer 2 stuff. We use 46020 to mange the layer 2 stuff, and HP openview for the layer 3.
All our customer sites have an antenna on the roof, which is connected to an NIU. The NIU handles all of the RF stuff. The NIU is connected to a Cisco 2924 by an OC-3. A port on the switch is connected to a Cicso 1605r in the users space by a 10mb connection. The users then come off that with their connection to whatever they need.
The transmitting stations (BTSs) are located on the top of medium sized buildings spread throughout our 5 markets (Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal). By the time we are done the expansion, we will have >60 BTS. Each of the BTSs can cover an area between 2 and 4.5 km out depending on the weather in the area. Vancouver, for example, has a lot of rain, but it's very small drops, and has a range for 4km. Toronto, however, has very heavy rain drops, and it's range is only 2.5km. (thats rain fade). Because of the frequency we use (28ghz), we are effected a lot more by weather than something like radio/etc.
The BTS's are connected via OC-3 links to our 'core' where the data is sent off to the internet or through the internal network as required. We are a startup, so there is still a lot of development in the network, but we are currently hosting over 150 customers.
The technology is also VERY line of sight - 1 or 2 degrees off is enough to drop the NIU off the network. Because of this, and a few other things, security is garunteed because as soon as line of sight is broken, which is needed to get the signal, the site drops and the bts stops sending anything other than a "ping" to try and connect. There is no way to 'snoop' because you have to have line of sight, as well as know a bunch of information about the network to break the (admitedly light) encryption.
If you are interested in more info, you can email me and I'll see what I can do. If you are interested in our service, visit the web site
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Might as well put them to some use, better then letting them rust away.
If you can't take the blame, submerge it!
SVI's system is older and not geared to end users like Prairie iNet's service is, although there is talk of experimenting with one. I think that in this age of free-installation DSL and Cable, that people won't go for a $600 installation fee... even if DSL/Cable isn't in the area yet. If the dollar amount could be brought down to the $200-$250 area, it'd probably become palatable for many households. The $40/mo - $65/mo charge is probably fine, as most people arent' going to go much above 256kbit anyway (unless you're running a server at your house).
However, with people hotrodding their Apple AirPorts and Lucent RG1000s, the 2.4Ghz band is going to rapidly become saturated and you'll have many rejected frames and dropped packets. That's one thing we've seen with the SVI system @ 900Mhz - all the cordless phones and other systems can wreak havoc with you, even if you are using a spread spectrum device.
Businesses like SVI and Prairie iNet should be applauded for having the guts to undertake such ventures, though. Building your own infrastructure outside of regular telcos is difficult, time consuming, and expensive.
If you're interested in putting a wireless LAN at home, I've got a review of Lucent's products on my site at NullDevice.Net.
-- WildBill
Satellites suck. They have a modem uplink and insanely high latency. While some may argue that latency isn't a big deal for home users, A) they haven't used low latency links, and B) the kind of latency Direct TV has is absurd.
I heard that the modems being used in the area are made by John Deere!
I think this is a wonderful step in the right direction, but I wonder how many other regions in the United States don't have access to a high-speed connection?
Lots.
This isn't the first radio ISP for rural areas, by a number of years. (One rural southern valley got wired this way using spread-spectrum quite a few years back, starting from a link from the town, with its phone center, to a college tens of miles up the valley.)
But it's nice to see it's catching on more generally.
This idea has a beautiful symmetry with DSL.
DSL is dandy for dense urban areas. It's distance limited and the costs rise with distance from the central sites, so you need a concentration of customers and infrastructure to be practical.
Line-of-sight radio is similarly dandy for rural areas. It's limited by obstructions rather than distance, but in the absense of urban obstructions the costs are approximately constant out to the horizon. That's quite a distance if the central site is elevated - either by a tall structure on flat land, or a tall peak where things are bumpier. So you can collect enough customers in a sparsely-populated area to support a POP. If your area starts to populate, drop power and add more antennas, until things are thick enough to switch to providing DSL.
(Now we just need solutions for people scattered in dense forest, deep mountaion valleys, spread WAY OUT on deserts, on small islands far from land, or moving about on the roads, skies, and high seas...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This service is available in much of central illinois also. I have order my equipment and hope to have it all running this weekend or early next week. Prices are affordable compared to other alternatives in this area (56Krap). The company, PrairieInet.com just opened the new site today and started services in this area today. Check it out.
Damn, yet another article that confuses kiloBytes and kilobits... At least, I sure hope it's a confusion, because 128 KBytes/sec is not slow at all.
On another note, I'm just wondering how much money there is to be made servicing rural areas. I don't mean to discriminate, but there can't possibly be hundreds of thousands of subscribers (that wouldn't be rural, huh Jim?). But they have interesting technology ideas for what's involved.
Gain access to the net and clean out your colon at the same time. Cool.
Its true! Its true!! Call in the Red Cross!! If these people don't get Internet access soon, they may all DIE!!!
I'm wondering if the technology allows for repeaters, essentially maintaining line of site through a third antenna. In Montana, where mountains can run down the middle of communities, the community antenna could be LOS with the mountain top which could then feed out to the rest of the community. If this is possible, what are the potential weather effects on one's internet connection.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
something similar to this was done in india not too long ago, they used railway tracks for network cable to take internet access to poor rural areas.. :P
dont remember where i saw it, if anyone has a url please post
An interesting point of view. I live in Iowa, and I am in Iowa right now. Des Moines and many of the larger communities have cable modem access through @home, and many smaller communities have already gone with companies such as ISPconnect. Iowa Network Services had local dialups everywhere in Iowa and DSL/frame relay is common all over the place.
This is not to mention the speed of some of the pipes coming through. Places such as LightHouse.net and Court Avenue Internet in Des Moines have decent sized pipes and where I'm at, Iowa State University... we're one of the top 25 wired schools in the nation according to one of the news mags.
Just because you used to live here doesn't mean things haven't changed... technology changes and we're doing a good job at keeping up... oh wait, or should I point about about the ABC (first digital computer) and how it came from.... here!
I guess that they are coming up with a new metric... Silobits!
This is a pretty cool idea. I don't think a lot of people realize exactly how much technology goes into farming. Stop by a John Deere dealership and look at the tractors. I'm talking the nice big ones. You'll see everything from GPS units, Satellite hookups, and Weather computers. Some measure moisture and exactly how much seeds to plant, etc. I've been in one that gave the guy a view of his field from above so he knew exactly where to plant or what needs more water. 90% of the work is still done by hand, but at least it keeps the mistakes down and increases productivity.
As for Iowa being flat...I can tell you after having been a runner for 16 years in this state, it ain't flat:)
----------------------------------------- Well damn...so that's what that does...
Ok, I'll admit that it would really add to the ambiance of the game, but if you have a tornado ripping through the area, do you really think you'd be concerned about having your Quake fragfest interrupted? Anyway, remember that they're only suggesting using radio waves from the grain elevators to people's homes... assuredly the grain elevators will be interconnected through (buried) fiber lines. It's cute making fun of the situation, but I don't think you realize how well Iowa has done so far in keeping rural areas connected. AOL was just barely gaining steam and every rural town with a population of 5000 (and frequently less) already had local internet access (thanks mainly to NetINS). Iowa's fiber backbone isn't anything to chortle about either.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
as opposed to vaporware you can't actually buy yet, just 'here within the next year'?
Hey, Ma! The net went down again! Oh, it's coming up again! Going down again, dadblast the consarned, confounded luck!
The speed is pretty good - about the same as DSL. A little pricey it seems though - but then, it IS wireless. $65 monthly with a one-time $600 startup fee...
You mean megabits, didn't you? Ignore me.
Regards,
-BK
Chemical Blog