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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.
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
More info on their wireless pricing.
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
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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
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All generalizations are false.
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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?
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
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.