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Is The Wireless Internet Not Ready For Prime Time?
RabidMonkey asks: "As an employee at a high speed wireless ISP which has gone into receivership (Maxlink communications Inc), I've begun to wonder: Is there actually a big enough market for Wireless Internet access? After reading that Look Communications is cutting 300 of its staff and looking for a buyer, I'm a little skeptical. I'm wondering if there are any other big wireless service providers that are doing well out there, and if they are, what are they doing differently? What are the different technologies in use? Why do these ventures seem to be failing?" With the majority of users still connecting to the internet via phone lines and cable modems and DSL finally catching on, is it too soon to expect wireless systems to be successful in anything more than niche markets?
"I think that the technology and the need are there for this, but why does it fail? I know that our rates are very competitive, installation is the industry standard (free) and our customer service is good. And the same goes for Look. Two companies with good technology that failed. Is it just not the right time?"
I'm sure it's wonderful for you since you're amping way above what is FCC legal in this band. AFAIK Part 15 of the FCC regs dealing with 2.4GHz ISM do not allow you more than 36dB EIRP. At least 6dBi of this must be antenna gain. A 24dBi antenna only allows your radio to output 12dBm of power and with a 1W amp you're probably pushing close to 40 with the lucent radio. Add gain and you're talking maybe 60-70dB EIRP output.
FCC fines will start putting wireless ISP's using 2.4GHz out of buisness when the band starts getting clogged and they have to hammer down.
tele2 has been around for around 2 years, if I remember correctly. Their roll-out to other areas of the UK is frustraitingly slow, unfortunately. It's an off-shoot of a http://www.tele2.dk/">Danish company, but my Danish is not good enough to determine if they're doing wireless there.
The UK is interesting because of the relationship between BT, the cable companies and all the other phone companies. BT is moving as slow as possible in rolling out ADSL (it's only just become available in the last couple of months), and the cable companies are largely ineffective in providing cable modem access (largely thanks to the rapid consolidation in the industry, and the problems in integrating the different networks, I suspect). In the past 24 hours, however, the telecoms regulator, OFTEL, has started to put pressure on BT to speed up the unbundling of the local loop, which could change things dramatically.
Anyway, the point being, the telecoms landscape in the UK makes it difficult to get high speed (and consumer level cost) internet access over fixed wire. Hence, options such as the service provided by tele2 are interesting. Or the grass roots consume.net, or others.
If BT was playing nicely, it wouldn't be necessary, but they may end up shooting themselves in the foot.
No complaints there.
...j
I've been considereing starting a wireless ISP for a while. Here is my perspective:
When a customers looks at internet they want it to work. The default is a modem, which works. Slow, but it works, most people start with it, and soon grow tired of the lack of speed.
When they want to upgrade speed the havce several options: ISDN, DSL, Wireless, satalite, cable modem, in order of theoretical speed. However cost varies. In general ISDN is the most expensive, (maybe wireless is more depending on what I want my profit to be). Satalite is avaiable anywhere, but latency is bad. Web only users will love it though. DSL and ISDN are the only unshared system, which makes it hard to compre speed. Cable and DSL are only avaiable in a few places and you can't be sure of getting it. Satalite and wireless are affected by weather. In theory wireless allows roaming - great if you want to use your laptop under a shade tree.
Where I live with one of the biggest ISDN tarrifs in the nation. ($60/month just for the line, plus ISP charges) DSL is not even in the plans. (My ISDN line is run from a switch at least 30 miles away, appearently with amps along the way, no wonder it is so expensive). Cable isn't in the plans, and the company isn't trusted even if it was - a lot of houses here have DSS dishs and have dropped cable. Perfect for wireless. (Unfortunatly the city has substadised T1s to local buisness for non-isp use, so a large crop of money is unavaiable to me)
right now wireless is undergoing the upgrade from 2mbs to 11. Once the faster radios are stable it is ready. Links of 20 miles are achived all the time with wireless, without repeaters. Normally though smaller cells are desirable.
I think wireless internet, much like cell-phones, will take hold first and foremost in countries lacking the solid phone/wire infrastructure of the US but having a solid interest in some degree of internet access. I'm thinking of China, Eastern Europe and places like that. They'll be more than happy to put up with expensive, slow and troublesome connections because that will be their only option.
In the US, so long as it is slower, more complicated and more costly, wireless Internet will be nothing more than a curiosity. We have the worlds most dependable phone system. We don't really NEED wireless, regardless of how much the idea appeals to a significant minority.
This is one of the main reasons that the US always seems so 'behind' in these things. Other countries embrace and run with cellular/wireless communications because their existing services are a.) too complicated and expensive (Japan) or b.) of a tech level barely above the Iron Age (China/Eastern Europe).
**>>BELCH
Thinking of the long-term is very much a part of capitalism. Just ask Alan Greenspan. It is only rarely a part of VENTURE capitalism, which is essentially a form of legalized gambling too often mistaken for actual capitalism.
**>>BELCH
DSL and cable are not used for backbone links (e.g. provider to provider) - they are access links, linking the end customer to the network.
This isn't why wireless companies are failing, but TCP does have problems over wireless - e.g. packet drops are interpreted as congestion, when they could be due to a burst of data corruption.
There's a good article on TCP in the latest IP Journal that covers TCP over wireless, see www.cisco.com and search for IPJ. Issues are downloadable or you can sign up.
I've gotta say that most of what I've heard about the "wireless web" is deep into gee-whiz just-because-we-can territory and real short on actual usefulness. Grotesquely truncated web pages on the tiny screen on my cell phone? Pass. Net access while I'm driving? Stupid. Check the latest stock quotes if I bring my PDA out on a date? Whatever. Maybe some people dig that stuff, but I suspect that's a permanent niche market.
Wireless access is not a bad idea inside buildings. It's probably of dubious value for desktop machines in a 600-desk cube farm, but it'd be nice to be able to use my laptop for net access down in the cafeteria or in conference rooms without trifling with cables. Having spent the weekend stringing Cat-5 in my WWII-era not-even-electrically-grounded house, I'd much rather plug in a wireless hub and be done with it. Maybe then I could browse the web while I'm on the can, or whatever it is they expect people to do with webpads.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
You must be 15 or fresh out of high school, you've never started a company or tried to do something to make you money. You don't make your company profitable by making a business contract that looks like the American Constitution. Being "just a company" doesn't mean you're the great white devil to have a Jihad thrown against you. Don't think for a minute the internet has anything to do with individuals. You've been reading far too many papers written by Karl Marx. The internet was originally a military project (government) and then when major communication companies were allowed to use it it became quite the big business. It was AT&T and the like that researched high speed optical circuits. Do you fucking think there would be OC-48's if there wasn't money to be made with them? Everything you own or see was most likely made by a company. The internet is all about business, providing access to it is a business. Don't think you've got any sort of right to use the internet, you're just paying someone to access something they own.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So why would I want wireless net access?
Wouldn't want it for my house - I don't see why a land line isn't appropriate for a box that's too big to move.
Wouldn't want wireless access on a hand held device - they don't have the cpu, screen or memory to be useful. That should change, but when market penetration is sufficient to support broadband wireless is anyone's guess.
Don't need it for my laptop - I can usually connect to a land line when I need to sync with the office and don't need to transfer anything too big.
It looks like the only market for wireless net access is mobile users who need more bandwidth than can be provided by a 56k modem and/or can't depend on being able to dial in.
The big question is why anyone would have invested in broadband wireless before a use was found.
--Shoeboy
There are two situations I know of where tcp has difficulties. (Not tcp/ip, I mean tcp itself).
One: This one I've seen personally and studied a bit. In wireless connections where the wireless MAC does not do any sort of reliable delivery (in other words, frames can get lost, and the radio units don't know it). This might be due to say, radio noise (and the design of the radio mac layer, of course). Say there is a 5% packet loss due to noise. TCP will continually back down because it was designed to assume all packet loss was due to network congestion.
Two: largely assymetric connections. You know.. stuff like lots of the 'wireless cable' stuff where the outgoing goes over landline and the return path is over radio, TCP can get confused (by confused, I mean it will attempt to back off to dela iwth congestion that's not there, etc). I'm not up on this too much, but noticed many research papers out there on this topic while looking into point number one (a while ago).
The real reason wireless ISP's as they are called, have failed, and this is from hearing from techies inside the companies, is simply a lack of knowledge about both wiress & the INternet in general (as separate entities).
Most large-scale wireless operations using MMDS and such (do I have the right acronym? I mean all that 'wireless cable' shit) that fail or are failing are failing because those running them underestimated, or simply did not understand, the business they were getting in to.
THe second reason might be that, although wireless is pretty cool, it can't compete with cable & DSL. IN urban areas, these are just too easy to set up by comparison.
FOr example... I can think of one small city (80,000 people) who had no dsl, no cable.. because there was no competition. Then LOOK announced it's plans. Bang. Instant cable & DSL, with look nowhere in sight. IT's too much setup time.
This effect goes away though, if your radio layer does guaranteed delivery.
Well, I DO know a thing or two about the OSI model.
OSI layer 2, the data link layer ensures that there are no duplicates and that transmission is error free (dropping a packet *is* considered an error). It's designed to guarantee that it makes it across the underlying physical medium intact.
Think about it. If Layer 4 (Transport) is supposed to do this, why does ethernet bother with collision detection? I mean, you think that should be dealt with at a higher layer, no?
The fact is, layer 2 is supposed to make sure that a message is delivered to another layer 2 device.. and it DOES, if you look at ethernet. Where packets get dropped is at a router, or something that can't process them fast enough, and that's where tcp comes in.
TCP is designed around the premise that any packet loss is due to congestion. Therefore, any packet loss for any OTHER reason, and it doesn't deal with it well. It gets very SLOW if you have a constant packet loss, as it keeps slowing down.
There are many research papers out there on the topic. Look for one by Hari Balikrishna, it was his PH.D thesis from Berkeley, I believe. Good paper about using tcp in half-duplex wireless networks that covers a lot of these issues.
Also... several current wireless offerings have reliable delivery mechanisms, and what the hell are you talking about, most tcp/ip neworks over wireless only ever use UDP? I sure as heck think the wireless connection to my office building uses a lot more than that, as do the thousands of other clients out there with wireless access.
If you want to verify this, rig up a router with linux or something to drop every 100th frame (inducing artificial 1% packet loss) and watch how badly tcp deals with it. Then try it at 2%, etc. You may be surprised what happens.
The solution is to use a link layer protocol that improves the reliability of the RF link. There is nothing in TCP/IP that prohibits the use of sophisticated link or network layer protocols to transport IP packets.
http://www.sprintbroadband.com
Speak truth to power.
Good point. I'll have to remember to change my TCP/IP code when I go wireless.
The problem, the computer explained, is that nobody figured out what the question was.
Wireless is the same way. You've calculate that the answer is "wireless", and you haven't figured out what the question is. I've noticed other posters have been describing AirPort/802.11, HomeRF, Bluetooth, CDMA, and 3G, though none of these services has the slightest relation to the wireless you are talking about.
The problem with maxlink is that nobody wants a wireless ISP -- they just want a normal ISP. They don't care if the ISP uses a wire or not. There are some cases (Ricochet, CDMA) where ROVING is important (and then wireless is natural). The question with maxlink is: is it a good ISP? If you are asking if it is a good wireless ISP, then you are asking the wrong question.
You may be concerned that customers might be afraid of adopting wireless technologies vs. traditional technologies. Again, that really isn't the question. Customers are afraid of unproven technologies. If you were using some weird wired scheme, then customers would still be afraid. For example, some companies are dropping fiber to the home. Most customers will stick with the proven older DSL rather than take the risk of unproven fiber. In other words, customers might be afraid of your technology, but it isn't because it is "wireless", only because it is different.
BTW, a lot of wireless technologies can easily be sniffed (eavesdropped, wiretapped), despite assurances by vendors. I wouldn't use it unless I was able to thoroughly review the technology.
I've been shopping around for a wireless solution for my wearable. Right now, my local ISP is putting in an 802.11 network that is starting to cover all of my town (Ithaca, NY). This is a good option, and about my only option.
Most of these services only cover places that are very densely populated, but ignore the fact that those places are very radio-wave unfriendly, with lots of gorunded steel structures everywhere.
Also a lot of them try to force you into a proprietary browser/client/driver/etc... I think if people can't use _all_ of their normal software they won't do it. Another thing is that the bandwidth charges are astronomical. Sometimes up to $1/meg for some of the services, or they will charge you cellphone rates per minute "connected" even when you are on a digital section of network...
I'm looking forward to the 802.11 from my local ISP because the bandwidth charges are going to be the same as for wired connections, and he has hired a bunch of progammers to write drivers for windows, linux, etc... for a tunneled secure protocol to keep sniffers off. It ought to be cool =:-)
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Come on. Think logically, not emotionally. Business works on logic. Emotions never made a business a dime.
To squash the competition, they have to beat them. To beat them, they need to sell more. To sell more, they have to offer something that consumers will like better. Consumers are always the end judges that make or break a new company. They have the right to buy whatever they want. Power to people, man!
There is ALWAYS a financial reason to innovate. Innovation means you can offer more to the customer. See above.
As long as a company stays private (or is majority held by one entity), they can't be bought out. It will be their choice to be bought out. Power to the little guys!
The best part about the wireless revolution is that there will be very little regulation. The prime reason we have telco regulation today is because it is a sanctioned monopoly. Only one telco gets to bring copper to your house, so regulations ensure that competitors can get to that copper and the consumer isn't held hostage. Anyone can bring wireless to your house. No need for regulation!
The reason wireless "last mile" internet will happen is simple: competition.
Nowadays, the only options are DSL, cable, ISDN, or analog dial-up. Most people are lucky to have 2 out of the 4 and they all suck in their own unique ways. Analog dial-up is just slow, ISDN is still too slow and too costly. DSL and cable are the only ones to provide sufficient bandwidth for reasonable $, but they have little legs. Their days are numbered, especially DSL, since they have horrible bandwidth/distance restrictions.
Now imagine that you are a new company that wants to offer service and get a subscriber base. You are really faced with only two choices today: buy a cable company or resell DSL. Buying a cable company is a hell of a proposition and most companies aren't going to be willing to take the plunge. If you resell DSL, someone else is holding your balls (be it Covad, Northpoint, etc). Sure, you could install your own DSL equipment, but when faced with that cost, you might as well buy a cable company. Even if you go this path, you are still subject to the phone company's whims. If your little company doesn't controll its own destiny, how can it be sure to compete?
Competition is severely limited by our current technology. The magic bullet to that is wireless. The technology isn't there yet, but wireless systems are potentially cheaper to implement and faster to deploy. Cheap and fast are the key words. It means a small company could put up a single receiver in a neighborhood, be operational in a matter of weeks, and grow from there. They don't have to bury lines, deal with Telco's that move at a snail's pace, and deal with endless gov't regulations (most are needed for monopoly-busting, but not needed in wireless since there is no monopoly). In other words, they deal directly with their customers, realizing all of the profits and controlling their own quality levels.
As a consumer, I want choices. Right now, my choice is between the cable company that sucks or the DSL reseller that sucks. I would jump at the chance to be able to choose between a few different wireless providers in my neighborhood.
I also feel that the technological hurdles left to jump are nothing compared to the potential market. In other words, there is too much money to be made to let something as simple as "its not technologically possible" to get in our way. We will find a way, we always have in the past.
But so will the other other endpoint that you are connecting to (remote servers and what not). Since the greater amount of traffic flows *to* the mobile connection than from it (images/webpages vs. HTTP requests), it's the code on the other end that you need to worry about, and that you usually have very little control over... The receiver can set some options (segment size, etc) for controlling the window, but it's the sender who ultimately does the work.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I agree that TCP/IP per se is a little bit tricky over high-speed wireless, but AX.25 is NOT the answer.
AX.25 is a variant of LAP-B, the X.25 layer 2 protocol. It is optimized for 300-1200 bps local links only, and if I felt like wasting the space, I could recite a litany of what's wrong with it. Indeed, AX.25 is even prone to congestion collapse, because it lacks even the most basic congestion control mechanisms. Been there, done that, back in the 1980s, on 2-meter amateur packet radio (both "raw" AX.25 and TCP/IP over AX.25, which btw usually used "unassured" mode, which worked better).
It is indeed possible to design a wireless subnetwork/datalink protocol that compensates for the problems of wireless. But AX.25 ain't it. I'm somewhat embarassed when I see commercial products still attempting to use it, although it's workable for the simple one-hop mobile dispatch application.
Many of these 'places like Africa' you talk about don't even have electricity, and you want to give them PDAs? To turn them into global capitalist countries brought to compete against such noble adversaries as China and the USA?
Dude, you got a strange set of priorities. Try living in the real world, sometimes.
What's happening to the wireless companies is the same thing that's happening to all the dot-coms: the venture capitals are getting fed up with seeing their money thrown to the winds, and they're starting to demand return on their investments.
From a commercial point of view, wireless is perfectly viable. It can be marketed and sold no problem. But the companies that are trying to build these are the same ones that lived on venture money for two years. It's the venture capitalist's fault, really: they bought into the hype so much, they gave away money without thinking.
Regardless of technological problems (there's always technological problems, and you just have to throw manpower at them), what you need is a vision and a business model.
Until these companies stop acting like teenagers getting free lunch money from their benevolent parents, and start planning ahead, keeping their growth in synch with their vision of the market, and constructing intelligent, sensible business approaches and revenue models, the thing is never gonna get off the ground.
It seems to me all those hip CEOs who managed to live off somebody else's money for the duration of the Internet business boom are trying to do so again by throwing in the word 'wireless'. Well, tough luck, guys. The investors are up to your game.
You are *almost* correct saying that if you can't see the antenna, you can't get great service. If there is a large hill in the way, you are sunk. If it's a small hill or houses, trees, etc. that is no problem at all for 2.4GHz wireless at sufficient wattage. Just sticking an unamplified PCMCIA card on your computer, though, you are certainly right; it has barely enough power to make it through the walls of your house out to a few hundred feet.
I'd have to agree, maintaining a big antenna would stink. My ISP stuck a 20 foot antenna on the roof of their building; they are uphill from most of town, but not enormously so. Works great.
Matt Barnson
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
802.11 latency is typically 10ms, usually 3-5ms. 30ms would be a worst-case scenario; the WaveLAN card uses a collision avoidance algorithm. Latency to the rest of the world depends on your ISP; I regularly get game time pings of less than 100ms.
Matt Barnson
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
The good:
1. Wireless is easy to install. If you are close enough to your nearest access point, just pop in a pcmcia card with a pigtail, install drivers, and you're done.
2. Wireless is extremely reliable. The link itself basically never goes down. The only times I've had a bad signal to noise ratio are when I screwed up my internal wiring to my antenna and during very high winds.
3. Wireless is very fast. At up to 11Mb/sec, it's one of the fastest access methods available in the price range.
4. Wireless is cheap for the ISP. Initial setup cost for your ISP is lower than some comparable technologies (DSL particularly). They can hook up 30 customers to each access point using the same frequency-hopping spectrum, and add cheap additional hardware for each new group of 30 customers.
5. Wireless is cross-platform. Many drivers are free software.
The bad:
1. Wireless can be very complicated to troubleshoot. It's easy for the customer to screw up their link; when something flakes out, it is often tough to tell whether it is you or your provider.
2. Wireless is very expensive for the consumer. While setup costs for people very close to an access node is relatively small (less than $250 for the card and pigtail), costs range up to $1000 for people further away.
3. Wireless can be very slow. 802.11 is designed to slow the link as the signal to noise ratio drops. You may connect as slowly as 64Kb/sec.
4. Wireless can be tough to install. Setting up my link involved several hours of attic and drill time.
5. Wireless competes in common frequency ranges, and has the usual problems with radio transmissions. As the so-called "medical band" (2.4GHz) becomes more cluttered, you're going to notice higher packet loss and latency, conflicts with cordless phones, etc. Also, hills, trees, and bridges can all interfere with your line-of-sight to your ISP's antenna.
6. Wireless has trouble scaling over distance. Your ISP will need a repeater every mile or three in order to broaden their service. DSL and cable have other, similar costs, such as upgrading local loops.
My take? I believe wireless is a great technology, and will continue to enjoy a strong and growing *large* niche market. I know I love mine : )
Matt Barnson
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
However, the WAP Usability Report which you can purchase for download from useit.com (which is an excellent site for learning how to write good websites) says that people just don't like WAP.
From the report summary:
The other thing folks might want to do with wireless is get on the net from a laptop while they're out and about, but I don't think that's as big a potential business as it might sound. It's hard to use a laptop standing up and you can't really carry one with you all the time like you can a cell phone.Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
In many third-world nations, the fraction of the population that have cell phones out of all phone owners is higher than in industrialized nations for this very reason.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Oh, and while I'm whining, how about the cellular plans, that let you use your cell phone with a data jack to surf under your regular plan? Those would be great, too, except the dumbasses who designed the data links used a fricking serial port, which my laptop doesn't (and never will) have! It's USB or nuthin' bay bee.
Now, you've probably guessed by now that I have been trying to find a good way to get wireless internet access, and you're right. But the fact is, I'm not going to sign up for a service that is too expensive, too cumbersome, and/or too redundant with my current internet service. Hope you providers out there are reading this right now, I'm curious what you think...
Free music from Jack Merlot.
- How well will mobile IP addresses work in practice?
- Have operators (esp in the UK) paid too much for the 3G licences? Probably so. Vodaphone has certainly lost its gold plated credit rating as a result. This leads to the next question
- Is there going to be a bloodbath in the telcos? The operators are desperate to claw back the licence fees. I read recently that some operators are looking for revenues of $250/month average per user. That is up from an average of probably $50 a month at present. So there are some stupid penalty clauses around to the manufacturers...who are desperate to win contracts because of their position on Wall St. It may well all end up in tears...
Keep that resume sharp... Tree_frogMaybe, once these african countries start getting the majority of their population into urban centers, we can talk about the best way to wire them up, but as it stands there's just too damn much area and not enough people packed close enough together. I think you're going about it ass backwards. First they establish stable capitalist democracies, then they start wiring up an expensive information infrastructure. When you've got a country with a GDP per capita below $5,000 (or $10,000 even), you have got much more pressing concerns than obtaining a fast net connection.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I've been dealing with Air2Lan, a wireless company providing service in Mississippi. As of right now I don't think I could recommend it to a single person.
The first problem is there are no real sys admins or network techs. It's mainly RF guys. Everytime we've had a problem of not being able to get out they send an RF guy with a laptop to check the signal, but not the network! We get the same reply "it's goin' from this antenna to that one so it's working, must be you computer" Finally after much frustration they realized our crapply lucent router died.
I've also found out we've had bandwith restrictions put on, because their backbont is only a T-1 and can't handle much more from it's current customers, I've been told a DS3 will be put in, but that was 5 months ago and nothing, they advertised a gauranteed 2.5Mbs and I'm lucky to get 1Mbs.
I've even had as much as a week downtime because it took them that long to change an antenna and router at the main location. Also my company bought a new billing office in a location that we were promised they could give us service in. We thought it was fishy since it wasn't line of site, but they said it would work. Well after spending $130,000 on the building they say "can't do it" This was the best thing that could have happened, because instead we got SDSL. It's cheaper, faster, and more reliable than their crappy wireless service.
Basically, I think it could work, in the right hands. But with customer service like this and network management like this, I can't expect too much. If you decide you want to try this then besure you aren't contracted if you decide it isn't what you're looking for.
"The Internet" is verily a nice marketing buzzword, but it is not truely something thou canst sell. The Internet is a platform. Ye shepard! Heed mine words: Thou needest to sell applications. A lame wireless application that happens to useth The Internet is still lame. Doth thou really thinkest sinners shall payest $20/hour to playest cribbage?
Be thou realistic. Ye shepard! Heed mine words: Thy cannot browse the sacred web upon a screen that displays 20 characters at a time. Sinners who are set upon by 100 emails a day dare not read them upon a cell phone. If the tech hasn't caught unto with the app, do not plague us with the app.
Behold: the killer app may be something simple and low tech. In the great wide world, providers art makingest a smoting selling SMS messages at $0.20 each. In the Philipines, the humble users send 50 million SMS messages a day. This in a land with only 81 million sinners!
Stop treating thine customers like idiots. Forbear from selling them obsolete tech pasted upon with meaningless buzzwords. Yea, thy network is digital. Big deal.
__________________
The first thing that needs to be clarified for this article is that it is talking about non-WAP, non airport wireless. What it is talking about is direct competition wireless to DSL and cable, something in the order of anywhere from 256k/s to over 11 mbps/sec for laptop/desktop/corporate lan. After looking into this, there were a couple reasons we found that were not favorable. 1) Line of sight. Most of the high speed wireless internet equipment on the market today uses the ISM unlicensed 2.4 Ghz range and spread spectrum. The biggest drawback to using such a high frequency is that it is pretty much line of sight. If you can't see the transmitter, you're likely to not be able to get service. Water is also another factor, trees in the way? The water in them obscures the signal. Snow on the dish? Plan on an outage. These two points come after many hours of reading mailing lists and from word of mouth of another ISP in the area that is now doing wireless and experiencing daily outages measured in hours. 2) Location We are in the midwest. Its flat out here and to get any height on a antenna you have to erect and maintain huge expensive towers. There have been several wireless sucess stories, most of them coming from mountainous areas where the ISP places the transmitter on a mountain and serves people in the valley. This work very well. However in the midwest, without a lot of height, you find that there are shadows in any major metropolitan area (regions where the signal just will not reach due to obstruction) Those are the reasons why we decided against a wireless implementation at this time. Hopefully solutions will present themselves in the future that address these issues.
With the majority of users still connecting to the internet via phone lines and cable modems and DSL finally catching on, is it too soon to expect wireless systems to be successful in anything more than niche markets?
In my opinion, if you can answer these questions, you might have an answer.
A)How cheap
B)How useful
C)How well it works
D)How cool
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Violence in places like the Balkans and Rwanda is not racial. The Serbs and friends are the same race: they have the same skin tone, speak the same language and wear the same clothes. Tutsi's and Hutu's are less similar, but still show fewer differences than, say, the Polish and English.
Your understanding of the origins of these conflicts is somewhat lacking. Historically the majority of violent acts have been perpetrated by one racial group against another very similar one, with the current spate of violence in the Congo (a continuation of the Rwanda ethnic violence in many ways) being just one example of similar racial groups embroiled in bitter conflict.
In a similar vein, black on black violence in America has reached endemic levels, with such cases outstripping other kinds of violence. For some reason it seems as though people are more disposed to hate those that appear superficially similar but aren't actually the same than they do those that are markedly different.
Simple economic principal. If the demand for a commodity is low, often a seemingly bargain price just won't drive demand.
Cel phones work because they are on demand service of a single media type: voice transmission. They are easy to use and moderately interfer with the ability to do other things (such as walk and chew bubble gum.)
As for wireless internet, it could be the same rate, or cheaper than at home, but won't appeal to as many people for the requirement of devoting effort and attention to a laptop or whatever. Saturation of the market happens with a small population, it doesn't mean the value isn't there, Iridium was a high value service, but not for Joe on the street.
Expect consolidation and slow growth. Best of luck.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The slow-as-hell transfer speed (similar or less than that of a 33.6K modem)
The speckled coverage map (in the Northeast U.S., it's covered everywhere, but in the Midwest it has no chance at all)
The moronic companies marketing the devices (Novatel is by far the worst: their product names are "Merlin" (PCMCIA) and "Minstrel" (Palm V); come on, what's so magical about an ultra-slow connection that fails in certain regions?)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Wireless just does not seem like a good idea for the United States. Here there are phone lines everywhere and ethernet jacks spread across campuses, and hotels. For the money, the temporary convenience of being able to move around in a limited area that comes with wireless is not that wonderous
Countries that are technologically strong, but dont'have the people-base that the United States has are good candidates for wireless ISPs. Take, for example, Australia. Australia's population is concentrated in a few major cities. With wireless, a company manager can take his laptop in essence to any other venue and know for sure that he will be connected. Without wireless and with the limited spread of LANs within cities such as Sydney this would not be possible.
Large universities in Australia are already taking advantage of wireless. Large campuses (they have the space over there in Australia) provide their students with wireless (take for example University of New South Wales. Acting like a wireless ISP, UNSW does not have to spread ethernet jacks around its many buildings for the limited number of people that use the service while on campus. This saves money for the school.
I'm interested. For those slashdotters that live in countries with large populations centered only in a few cities, how common are wireless ISPs?
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
There's fixed wireless internet. This is where a company is trying to avoid using a cable to connect your home to the Internet with a broadband connection. Despite apparent cost savings, it's failing because in practice there are already cables up to most homes in the country, which telephone companies and cable companies are making use of to provide broadband services, either directly or by leasing out the loop to others.
As this cable is largely "paid-for", and still receiving revenue by other means, the cost savings over covering an area with radio towers and paying millions for a licence are immense.
Fixed wireless has a limited market, largely confined to areas where cable quality is too poor to provide access, or where the telephone or cable companies are abusing their monopolies either by refusing to provide a wanted service (usually to protect leased line prices) or by pricing it absurdly high. As regulators are pro-actively beating the sods with heavy clubs at the moment, areas of the latter type are shrinking dramatically in size.
There's mobile wireless communications, including Internet as one of the services. This is what most cellphone companies are trying to do. Currently it's hampered, on the Internet side, by no clear direction forward to what form a mobile Internet workstation should be. Attempts like WAP have not been the successes they could be, the ability to hook laptops to phones has been hampered by the expensive equipment usually needed. And poor bandwidth means many people don't want to try it anyway. The US has an extra problem in that PDA phones are practically useless under any mobile phone system that ties your account to a particular phone, and the two dominant US standards, D-AMPS/TDMA and cdmaOne/CDMA do exactly that. If you can't put your overwieght PDA-phone away when you don't need it, and use a smaller phone in its place, you soon lose any pleasure you might once have had in having such a device. If it's true AT&T intend to adopt GSM (which implements 'personal mobility' via SIM cards), then this will go some way to solving the problem. For AT&T customers anyway.
The final option is dedicated mobile wireless Internet access, implemented by AT&T via their low bandwidth CDPD system, BellSouth via their system whose name temporarily escapes me, and companies like Ricochet. CDPD and the BS system both have appalling low bandwidth, and the pricing is lousy as a result. The Ricochet system is higher bandwidth, but can't use the existing cellular infrastructure that the AT&T and BS systems use, so has to be built from the ground up. The result is a choice between the overpriced and underusable, and the competitively priced but useless outside San Francisco (or other set of metropolitan areas.) The latter is important, the market increases exponentially the more land you cover, as while, for instance, I wouldn't be happy with something that allows me access in my home town but not where I work, I'd go out in an instant for something that gave me the whole east coast.
Both systems also suffer from a dearth of workable mobile computing platforms. You can CDPD-enable a Palm Pilot, and a laptop, but the latter isn't exactly portable, and the former isn't exactly going to show you the website with the information you want to see.
As a conclusion on both types of mobile wireless access, you need coverage, you need portable equipment that are good content viewers, you need enough bandwidth, and the pricing needs to be right. Every solution on the market currently falls short on most of these areas.
A geek like me, while in the UK, had a reasonable solution in a Nokia 9000 for mobile wireless access, but that's because I wanted IRC and a limited set of websites. I seriously doubt I'm typical in what I wanted out of mobile access, and I know most people would expect a lot more.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.