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Broadband from World's Tallest Building
StarPie writes "The Chicago Tribune is reporting that Sprint Broadband will be broadcasting DSL from the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago. The range is said to be 33 miles -- a lot better than wire DSL. All you need is line of sight from the Sears Tower." I've spent the last couple minutes straining my eyes but try as I might, I can't see it. I'm stuck with 128kbits.
Is the upload still limited like other dish type Broadband?
-- My HARDWARE, My CHOICE.
Since 1998, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia have been the world's tallest building (not including tower structures like broardcast towers) - 1,483 feet vs 1,450.
How does it send requests, the article only mentions a pizza sized receiver but doesn't mention anything about a transmitter. If you still need a phone line that would kind of suck, you wouldn't get a very good ping in Quake!
Just because you can't see the thing with your naked eye does not necessarily indicate that your location does not have 'line of sight' with the transmission tower.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
I'm skeptical. I'm in Chicago (hence "CBoy") and about 12 miles from the sears tower. 90% of the time I can't see it because of low lying clouds or weather. Otherwise theres nothing blocking it.
I don't put a lot of faith in this if it's line-of-site visibility
I just finished that project out at Sprint 2 months ago. What is sad, is that the system was running on a Linux box, with the provisioning system running perl/php with MySQL. The consultants I was working with (one a USMC Lt. Col) decided that it would be better if it ran on a Sun Sparc station with C++, tied to an Oracle database. Its part of the Broadband wireless group there. Each city has a cybermanager that maintains connections to and from the antenea in 30 degree radian chunks. It has only been rolled out in six or seven markets, but I think its the way of the future.
Great!! Now I will be able to sail on Lake Michigan and still get a broadband contection. I will not have to go home to read e-mail and check /.
Anyway, it was more like $150 a month or something and was still line of site, and I think it's 2GHZ. All I can say is, it sucks. A lot. I think we get about 80% uptime with it and the latency is horrible, dare I say it, even worse than a modem. We're talking anywhere from 30 to 300ms ping time to the first hop on the other side, usually in the mid 100's.
The thing was though, the through put was still like 80K/sec or so, so as long as I wasn't streaming anything or playing games it was OK, say for like the web, except for that 80% uptime thing. Think about that, it doesn't sound too bad, but that means 1 in 5 times that I sit down to use the internet that the route is down.
It was also tedious to program over the link since our webserver was co-located on the other side and with the link going down so much I spent lots of time banging on my keyboard waiting for my cursor to move again, only to see like 5 extra lines deleted in vi or something.
We're getting a T1 now. I'm going to be very happy. :)
PS: About the streaming thing, I stream video with real server to work from my house with DSL, and the best I can get is using the 56.6K setting, and usually that gets all out of sync so I actually use 33.6K. How's that for "High Speed?"
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
just as long as it isnt MLB :)
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Just one man beneath the sky,
Its only by a quirk in the architectural definition of what is part of the building and what is not which makes some people think the Petronas Tower is taller. The decorative spire on the top of the Petronas tower, which is defined as being part of the building, rises above the roof of the Sears Tower, but it's merely decorative. However the Sears Tower's antennas which have a functional purpose for the building, including for the use mentioned in this article, but are not considered architecturally to be part of the building, top the Petronas Tower's spire.
So there you have it. A useless piece of ornamentation hardly makes Petronas taller than the full functional height of the Sears Tower.
It will be too cheap and oversold - resulting in shitty service, low bandwidth and spurious connections.
Sorry, I will never ever ever buy a Sprint product or service every again. 'Crystal clear calling' my ass.
-josh
Wireless DSL is good and everything, but what sort of security is being put on this link? From what it sounds like, it isn't a directional link like most Microwave/Sat links...its more like radio.
I know that there are a lot of good encryption techniques out there, and that they're widely adopted, but I still like the idea of having the privacy of a wire line, which not every freak-with-an-antenna can pick up.
-Scott
This has been argued actually; note there is only 33 feet difference between the two. Those measurements, if memory serves me right, do not include the antenna tower on top of Sears Tower, yet include the pinnacle* of Petronas. The logic here by the official raters is that the antenna tower can be easily removed, while the pinnacle is a permanent feature of the Petronas towers. Granted, I do not quite see the logic here; if you have a better explaination, please chime in.
If you include both the pinnacle and the antenna tower, Sears Tower beats Pentronas by a foot or so, and the same holds true if neither the antenna tower or pinnacle is counted. Note I am recalling all this from memory, so I might have something incorrect.
Still, the link you provide is intresting. Looks like something (two somethings, actually) may shortly beat Petronas.
* A pinnacle is a fancy top piece for a building, typically with a large point on top of it. The concept dates back to at least Medival times.
Sprintbroadband already offers service in Phoenix and Tuscon. $40/month for 1 Mbps bi-directional. The technology is called MMDS (multichannel multipoint distribution service) and it should work up to ~38 miles using a "pizza box" sized onnidirectional antenna. Very cool. Wish they offered it in Las Vegas.
I'd be screwed without AT&T. (Hear that, RCN?)
--Pete
I've posted this once in reply, but I think it bears repeating since there's already 10 posts concerning this topic... the Sears Tower IS the tallest building in the world. The Sears Tower once again became the tallest building in the world in 1997, when the Council on Tall Buildings met and announced new standards upon which the tallest building would be judged.
The Petronas Towers were previously the world's tallest building, but only because of a decorative spire on top of both of the towers, the Empire State building is the tallest including the antenna, the Sears Tower is the tallest in the other two categories (highest occupied floor and highest to the top of the roof). You can read all about it here.
__
Sprint is already doing this in a few other cities, such as Phoenix, where they have the MMDS license. Worldcom is doing it in Jackson, MS and a few other cities, and will be expanding it too (they have the NY and Boston licenses).
Note that "line of sight" for MMDS is much better than optical; it means "not over the horizon". Since Chicago is basically flatland, hills aren't the problem they would be in, say, New England. Which is why this Chicago rollout is so important; it could give the technology a real boost. MMDS operates around 2.5 GHz. It is not subject to significant rain fade, and passes easily enough through trees. (Contrast this to LMDS at 29 GHz, which has a typical reliable range of around 2 miles, because of rain fade, though it goes much farther on dry days.)
Each market has one MMDS licensee. This was the FCC's last pre-auction lottery, nicknamed "wireless cable". It was intended for pay-TV broadcast distribution. A bunch of shady operators took fees to enter people into the license lottery ca. 1993. The MMDS companies who bought up the licenses from the lottery winners discovered that there wasn't much of a market, so they went bankrupt or sold out to Sprint and Worldcom (who between them have most of the country's population covered by their licenses, but are just starting to offer service). Now it's viewed as a DSL alternative. Some other operators are also in business; Oxford Telecom, for instance, does MMDS data in Portland, Maine.
This is mostly two-way radio, something the FCC authorized a couple of years ago. (Early systems were dial-up return.) I don't really think there's enough bandwidth there to replace DSL or cable modems in urban areas, but it's a good alternative for people who are out of range of those services. Alas, with only one license per city (spectrum being a scarce resource), it's not totally competitive.
For example, where I'm located there is a ring of mountains directly in front of a satellite (Telstar IV). There is no line of site. Yet, I can get decent reception in some parts of town because the mountains form a knife edge and the resulting diffraction pattern alters the signal strengths in some spots.
In other places I have turned dish antenna at ninety degrees to the normal signal path because the reflections off a group of office buildings were stronger.
The only practical way to know is to get the guy with the field strength meter to come and see. Remember, higher is usually better, so now maybe there's a reason to get that apartment on the top of the building.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Now just wait a gosh-darned minute here!
You can't beam DSL! Don't they even know what it stands for? It's a Digital Subscriber Line!
I'm having visions of streams of thousands of cables shooting out of the top of the Sears tower...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
With a 33 mile radius, the service would cover an area of over eight thousand square kilometeres. This is about the same size as the Sibayi Lake Lodge eco-tourism spot in Zululand, South Africa. If one of these towers was built there, then all the people who come to experience ecological wonders will be able to get wireless DSL while at the same time! It could be a tourism revolution!
Well that's what the 3G mobile hype is all about :)
I don't know where the poster got the idea that they were broadcasting DSL, but it doesn't say that anywhere in the article. That would be silly anyway.
it's Canada not canadia, and it's a tower not a building!
"Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." Dark Helmet - Spaceballs
I once ran 500 watts on 1296 MHz with a 55 element loop yagi from a mountain top in PA. I got a lot further than 33 Miles, but it would have taken days to download a typical /. comment page at 20 wpm cw.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
Then get a telescope
I can't wait until there's ubiquitous wireless broadband and we all have $50 5Ghz crusoe color handheld computer/cell phone/entertainment systems.
Should be about another 18 months right?
yeah baby.
http://www.hyperpoem.net
hyperpoem.net
It's not DSL. It's MMDS -- Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service.
Sprint Broadband is one of the largest customers of Hybrid Networks Inc.
In fact, there's even an interesting little press release on Hybrid's site regarding the whole deal in Chicago.
This isn't very new to me, as the majority of my work and home bandwidth is provided by a local ISP that has been deploying these systems since the Fall of 1998. As an individual subscriber I've pulled traffic nearing the 8Mbit/sec mark. Yep, that's something a little more than the equivalent of five T-1's.
MMDS has a lot of advantages over your typical "unlicensed" wireless gear operating in the 900MHz and 2.4GHz spectrum... namely the fact that MMDS is licensed by the FCC (in the US).
Businesses that build their existance and survival on the fragile structure of "unlicensed" wireless often don't spend the time to properly research what it is that they are getting into... a mess. The first "provider" in an area to deploy "unlicensed" equipment has great success... and then the second "provider" comes along... and things start to slow down a little... and then another provider comes along perhaps... and things start to break (more)...
And then an Amateur Radio Operator/ham comes along and decides to start using the spectrum for Amateur TV, and the FCC comes in and shuts the "providers" down as they are infringing on the rightful license of said ham to use the 2.4GHz spectrum. *poof* :)
Another thing to consider, and one of the other reasons I like my MMDS provider... They don't have that interestingly restrictive TOS that Sprint Broadband has.
:: transmission initiated
what is a real asian country? someone tell me? i bet you are someone who has never left your country thinking its the greatest country in the world. well... too bad.
malaysia is not a third world country, and it consists of around 20% chinese (migrated from china), 10% indian (migrated from india), 69% malays (migrated from arab), and 2% natives of the land. their skin colors range from white, yellow, brown, to black.
their factory workers have cell phones. and they have one of the widest selections of food in the world. i was there for almost 18 years and i have to tell you that you are horribly wrong if you think you don't need to leave your country. america is not that great after i discovered asia. we have tech. they have tech. we have little in terms of spirituality. they do. we have such boring food. they'll blow you away with their food, and our food. travel. open your eyes. america is what they want you to believe it is. but there are better, more balanced worlds out there.
:: transmission terminated
That's the only real problem with XHF transmissions.. (XHF is basically anything above a gigahertz).. they are all line-of-sight.
.136 m / Hz.
.5 to 1.5 Mbps range.
;)
Clouds, though, shouldn't realy be a problem unless they're VERY thick. The wavelength of a 2.2 GHz wave (I'm assuming 2.2 GHz because I know 2.4 is occupied, and it's the same drek in a different package) is:
c / freq == 300Mm/s / 2.2GHz ==
The wavelength is 13 cm or so. That's mighty small (when you consider that AM 1000 is 300m and FM 100.0 is 3m), but they can pass through anything short of a heavy rainfall or a blizzard. (I have a DBS system and can receive in virtually all conditions. Idiot involvement, though, seems to screw everything up royally.)
The short wavelength dictates the LOS and the power of the frequency will determine the range.
I have to commend Sprint's good timing, since a lot of DSL'rs got screwed when northpoint Comms. went bankrupt.
And now, for the coup de grace that'll get me jacked on wireless broadband: It's two-way. According to this marketdroid page, it's completely free of the telephone grid.
However, for you QUAKErs, your ping time may be slightly slower than it would be on a comparable hard-wired connection. This appears (from what little data that's available) to be (at least in part) a party-line system.
According to the site (use zip 60625 if asked), the max d/l is 5 Mbps, and they project 'typical' to be in the
They have an upload cap of 256 kbps.
A few things worth keeping in mind:
1. It's running on RF frequencies, which means that, depending on your paranoia level, you may not want it since quality receivers are available that can receive above 2GHz. And it's not protected by the anti-cell-scanner bills (not like anyone interested in cracking t
2. IP Masquerade is probably the best way to go. They seem to be MScentric. (They are intending to charge an additional ten bucks a month per extra rig online. I didn't know IP's were that rare
Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
While there are many different properties one could use to decide which is the "tallest building", the people who make it their business to keep track of records, namely the folks at Guinness, say that the "tallest building" is the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada. See their page on the subject.
Miko O'Sullivan
Actually, yes it does. Right now Look Communications has been using the CN Tower for wireless broadband internet for quite sometime. However at the moment it's only downstream. They're working on two way wireless right now so that uploading won't be limited to 56k, but I don't know what the status of that is
Sprint is clearly symbolic for the four horsemen! We must prepare our souls for the war, before it is upon us. The plaque has hit already, and the pestilence is taking a new form... Slashdot Trolls and Crapflooders!
Run! Run far away! Very, very far away!
But don't tell my ex-boyfriend... he's a motherfucking asshole.
Impatiently waiting for my popcorn to pop in the microwave
2.) IMO, the Petronas Towers is essentially ripping-off the Sears Tower in the World's Tallest category. The Sears Tower has more occupied floors and the heighets occupied floor. As can be seen from a side-by-side to-scale comparison here, the only reason the Petronas Tower is considered tallier is that the antenna on top is considered to be part of the art-deco cap, while the antennae on the Sears Tower aren't.
So, now we have proof that architecs (sp?) smoke crack! :)
... to a few of the questions I saw here: - mobile is really hard to do in this band. they're doing good to get fixed wireless working. that said, wireless does lend itself to portability and mobility; it's just a question of technology development. - upload is still limited; I think they claim like 32kbps or something. it should burst to ~200k though. - it's two-way wireless now, though it used to be dial-return back in the day. - it can burn through clouds, smog, rain, snow, etc., without much problem. trees and cars and walls start to cause trouble. - the hardware uses FreeBSD (not Linux) plus some fancy rf stuff from Intel. The vendor didn't ship a provisioning system, so one was written by a few chicago guys in perl/php/mysql on a va linux box and ported to to c++/perl/oracle on a sun e3500 - it's in 14 markets total (phoenix, tucson, san fran, san jose, colorado springs, denver, houston, chicago, detroit, melbourne, fresno, salt lake city, wichita, ok city) - it has nothing to do with pcs technology - the link is still unencrypted but the modems don't bridge, so they're slightly more secure than you'd think. then again, never underestimate the power of a bored ee student with a radio shack. - besides sprint and wcom, bellsouth and a company called nucentrix have a lot of mmds markets - people in most markets routinely get multi-mbps downloads
As long as I am rolling on a stream of consciousness, reminds me of a story, back in the day microwave station operators in the artic used to stand in front of their dishes to warm up. Maybe true, I don't know. Anyone can corraborate?
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--hongpong.com
Recently a company has started construction on a new building in Chicago. When completed it will be the tallest building in the world. Coupled with the Sears Tower. That makes Chicago a pretty impressive area for tall buildings. Sorry, but the name of the new building escapes me.
I would love to see things from your point of view. But I can't seem to get my head that far up my ass
Trollicuous
Actually, there are four standards by which a building is considered the worlds tallest. The Petronas Towers wins out over the Sears Tower in only one category (that which includes spires). The other three (highest floor, highest occupied floor and something else) are still held by the Sears Tower. Speaking of which, I can see the Sears Tower from here. I've got line of site. I think I'll stick with the university's T3 line though.
I'm sure it's going to head that way. You'll get a life-time IP address, and use it in everything. Your preferences will be able to follow you... and so will your email. (which, given the amount of spam i get these days, may not be so hot...)
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Seems that this debate has been going on for a while.
You know, everybody used to this Canada was spelled CND, and then somebody asked a Canadian to spell it...
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
If you are in an apartment building on a upper floor, you may have a clear shot at the transmitter from more than 33 miles. This is because the horizon is a 5 to ten miles away from the apartment window, and this adds to the horizon distance as seen from the sky scaper.
Not accounting for trees, hills, and intervening objects, etc.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Take a look at this article from the Chicago Tribune. It would have been known as the Dearborn Tower, but I guess not anymore. The model of the proposed building is pretty cool.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
...was with the title "Broadband from World's (second) Tallest Building", in deference to the fact that Petronas in Malyasia is technically the world's tallest, though that's only counting the spire, etc., etc.
I don't think Taco realized the flamefest he was starting by deleting that little word in parentheses. Anyway, I do live in line-of-sight to the Sears Tower, but I'm a tad out of reach of the Petronas Towers, so I guess I'll have to live with the shame of getting broadband from the second banana in the skyscraper world.
There's more to it than that. The Petronas towers are hardly the tallest thing on earth, manmade or not! There are plenty of manmade structures that have more absolute height, both HAAT (height above average terrain) and referenced to sea level.
The "rules" for tallest building used to be straightforward back when the Empire State Building was the undisputed king. But around the time that Chicago was to become home to not one, but three buildings that beat it out, a group of New York City architects decided to codify the "rules". And guess what? The new "rules" favored the NYC buildings!
Rather than go by the obvious, absolute height, the new "rules" didn't count any structures that were primarily functional, but allowed those that were purely decorative. And since the Empire State Building just happened to have an art deco spire that rose beyond the antennae, well you know... (Yes, I know about the dirigible mooring mast; it was never used AFAIK.)
As a result of the "rules", anybody wanting to build a new "tallest building" could do so at a minimal cost, by tacking on some doodad and calling it art. It's a wonder that it took so long to happen! Call me biased, but as a Chicagoan (and broadcast engineer) I have seen my city's tallest structures with and without their antennae, and I know that they play a large role in the aesthetic impact of the buildings. This is especially true of Sears Tower, with the antennae completely enclosed by white radomes, which contrast with the building's black exterior. The building was "tallest" without counting the antennae! Maybe it's just me; I also think that the Marina City towers look strange without their radomes.
The bottom line is that Sears Tower still has the highest occupied (by people) rooms, and is tallest if you include structures that do something more than just being high.
Amateur radio invented the first notion of a 'packet.' The Internet HAD to come back to the radio waves!
Anyway, I wonder how this will interfere with future wireless internet endeavors. They say the 'effective' range is 33 miles from the Sears tower, (lookin out my window at it right now...) but on a clear morning, signals from the top of the Sears tower can be heard from Maidenhead gridsquare EN71ma. (NE Indiana) I should know, when I'm home, I hear bad B96.3 Chicago radio over the top of 96.3, The Extreme out of Ft. Wayne. As the crow files, that's probably 100 miles! But this also means Internet kiosks on the riverboats! So you can send an email home asking for your wife to wire you money cuz you lost all yours...
In Chicago, we do not "jump up and down".
We make payoffs, and if those don't work, we send Luigi over with a sledgehammer to make sure your building isn't taller.
Construction of that building was cancelled... couldn't get funding (gosh, we need money to construct the world's tallest building). Like Chicago needs more space, I live downtown and it's full of construction cranes. I wonder if any of these developers are considering the space that will free up when all these financial exchanges go the way of the buggy whip and blacksmith?
"My mother works for Microsoft now. A whole other cult."
I checked with Sprint & they said $40/month if you sign up for their long distance ($50 BYOLongD), $200/month for businesses. $200 equipment fee unless you sign a 2 year contract, then it's $100. downloads to 1megabit/second for residential, or up to 4mb/s for commercial. They're coming tomorrow at 7AM -- less than a 6 day turnaround, as opposed to the 4 month wait i had with Amerishit. why go with sprint? northpoint & flashcom left me high and dry, and ameritech dsl BLOWS no support for macs or multiple cpus (how else to test my webserver?). downside -- there's no hosted firewalls, so feel free to hack away at my IP (just kidding) anyway, ameritech losers have cut my company's T1 service 10 times in the past 3 months, so we're giving them the big HEAVE HO as soon as I feel that Sprint is a tested & true alternative. NOPE, it's not DSL -- it's MICROWAVE
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I have installed this service in several cities and Line of Sight for DATA services is honestly Line of Sight, but the twist is its not your Line of sight, but the Antenna's...The Antenna has to be able to see Sears tower and the transmitters basically unobstructed, otherwise your limited power output return to the tower will never make it and you will not get your next request or have a high packet loss resulting in slow speeds.
Information is the Key, the problem is finding where the Locks are and to know what key fits what lock~
It fits all the requirements for a masterful troll, as described in trolltalk and on geekizoid. Masterful! Has a single troll ever gotten so many responses? I would call Taco the king of the trolls, but I guess he probably already holds that title.
This isn't really OT, because I say it's a helluva lot of RF radiation coming from that tower. Maybe the raving derelict is onto something!
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--hongpong.com
That's all I have to say.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
Distances per FCC And the antenna mfgrs state that a mininum distance of 22 inches for a 17dbi antenna is required for safety, and a distance of approximately 30 inches for a 24dbi antenna are required. It has been my experience to avoid any unnecessary RF into the body as it tends not to like it very well, ask the motor cycle cop in Hawaii who lost a leg and a testicle to Cancer from his old fashion Radar Gun. enough said.
Information is the Key, the problem is finding where the Locks are and to know what key fits what lock~
If anyone has LOS to where they live from the tallest building in their city, then they can get wireless DSL. This can be a problem in rural areas, unless the wireless DSL signal can be generated from an antenna tower, then all a person needs is to be able to "see" their house from the top of the tower. Overall, I see this catching on in major US cities, and internationally.
I can't believe it. This story has NOTHING to do with DSL and everything to do with Wireless Broadband access.
as defined by c|net:
From the article itself:
*** I am the real stylewagon
This service is already available in Toronto, from Look/Idirect. Moreover, the broadcast is from the world's tallest freestanding structure, the CN Tower.
CN Tower: 1815 ft, 5 in.
Sears Tower: 1454 ft, 1707 ft. with antennas
I think that topic has been discussed a few times in this thread. If you would pull your head out of your ass, you would see that that has been taken care of. Please read the other posts you fucking moron.
[ ]
How the hell are they broadcasting DSL? Isn't this wireless?
the building designed by the chief architect with the largest penis.
This accolade goes to a strip mall in Minneapolis, by towering acting architect Benjamin Johnson, locally known as "The Big Johnson Building".
There's another category for "highest architect", but the winning building fell down less than 2 weeks after official completion.
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In addition, the speeds you get are more analogous to cable in that the more users there are, the slower your connection is.
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
The highest points on the Sears tower, the tops of the decoratively-enhanced dual antennae, are higher than the purely decorative spires atop the Petronas towers. If they served no purpose whatsoever, the Sears tower would take the prize. If you look at scale pictures of them together, the Sears tower looks much taller; any layman would pick it as the taller building without hesitation.
Of course, the CN tower easily has them both beat, though it doesn't have usable floor-space for most of its height (so it's apparently not officially a "building"!). The KTHI-TV broadcasting tower in North Dakota is even taller, though I believe it is supported by guy-wires (which disqualifies it as a "free standing structure" -- the CN tower's claim to fame).
More info here.
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It just isn't Sprint. BeyonDSL and LanWaves both offer it, both have packages somewhere near consumer level. Same concept, don't know the details but it will at least get you connected. And bug me in the next few days, I should be able to get details on what Ricochet is doing here.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
All I see here is discussions about 'line of sight' and 'tallest tower' & 'sprint cell phone'.
can I see some comments about the 'actual internet experience' please?
I know this is offered in BayArea (I have recieved a flyer from Sprint). how is the service around San Francisco city area? I have DSL with covad. Is it worth a move. I specially liked the 'no contract' clause (it is month to month)
LinuxLover
Uh no.
ELF Extremely Low Frequency 3 - 30 Hz 100,000 - 10,000 km
SLF Super Low Frequency 30 - 300 Hz 10,000 - 1,000 km
ULF Ultra Low Frequency 300 - 3000 Hz 1,000 - 100 km
VLF Very Low Frequency 3 - 30 kHz 100 - 10 km
LF Low Frequency 30 - 300 kHz 10 - 1 km
MF Medium Frequency 300 - 3000 kHz 1 km - 100 m
HF High Frequency 3 - 30 MHz 100 - 10 m
VHF Very High Frequency 30 - 300 MHz 10 - 1 m
UHF Ultra High Frequency 300 - 3000 MHz 1 m - 10 cm
SHF Super High Frequency 3 - 30 GHz 10 - 1 cm
EHF Extremely High Frequency 30 - 300 GHz 1 cm - 1 mm
And if it is some sort of marketing BS that made up "XHF", shame on you for perverting science with marketspeak.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
ANY problem can be solved with the appropriate application of sufficient high explosive.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I just wondered: how much bandwidth do most US DSL providers deliver (and at what cost)?
I know that in The Netherlands you can choose between 512Kbit down/64Kbit up and 1024Kbit down/256 Kbit up. The first will cost you about 45 euro's (thats around $40 I guess) and the second costs 80 euro's (around $70).
At this moment my cable provider (UPC/Chello) delivers me an uplink speed of 14KB/s (128Kbit ~ double ISDN) and a max. downlink of 160KB/s. Thats more than the cheapest ADSL connection can deliver, at a slightly lower price...
Although I trust the KPN and their ADSL technology more than UPC/Chello (lots of downtime, very restrictive EULAs and uneducated technicians)
not that you'll be reading this reply, but for the hell of it...
if you take note of the comment id number on my post, you'll see that i was probably one of, if not the, first person to mention that it's not the tallest. i posted it when there were no posts showing.
so nyah nyah to you, grumpy pants.
matt
if or when they finish this building. It will be 1200 meters tall, and have 300 floors.
The broadcasting of digital signals using Pulse Code Modulation on an FM carrier is quite old tech, very highly developed, and for all practical purposes, including gaming, happens instantly.
Look for your latency elsewhere.
KFG
And this probably has nothing to do with DSL, and everything to do with MMDS or something...
It is entirely possible to use the modulation techniques of DSL over RF.... you simply modulate a different carrier. I know we've looked at using DSL chipsets to do wireless before.. I believe the spectrum required or something was just not feasible..
Nowhere does it say that this is 'wireless DSL'. The article mentions Sprint rolling out wireless (sounds like MMDS) and then goes on to talk about the DSL situation, two separate issues.
Most wireless is either MMDS, or 2.4Ghz ISM band stuff (I know there is some 2.4Ghz ISM stuff going on in central IL, http://www.illicom.net)
But having worked with a lot of 2.4 Ghz stuff.. I wouldn't imagine the properties of 2.5Ghz are much different.
You certainly cannot go through 'lots of trees'. 2.4 scatters like mad.. it doesn't penetrate worth crap.
Is it just the power levels this operates at that make it work through obstacles?
I think line-of-sight still means unobstructed view, though perhaps the odd tree or something will be okay.. but if you are underground, behind a hill, or something, you're probably out of luck.
I have had the same service via AirBand in Dallas for about 9 months now. The first 3 months was pretty bad, but since then it's been great. Almost no down time (except whent the receiver got struck by lightning). I don't have latency problems. Upstream/Downstream speeds are constant. We buy 1.5 MB/s, but can go up to 10 MB/s. We are across the street from the main antenna though, so that might have something to the good performance.
Not too many happy campers there. The biggest problem is the oversubscription. The fixed wireless technology is certainly viable, but not when you have 1,000 subscribers on a fractional 3-6Mbps DS3.
Here - Guiness has a different opinion:
from www.guinessworldrecords.com
"The CN Tower was completed in 1975, and took the title of world's tallest building from the Moscow TV Ostankino Tower. The 185-story, reinforced concrete building was designed by Australian architect John Andrews, and reaches a height of 553.34 m. (1,815 ft. 5 in.). Its record-breaking status was a by-product of its main function, to send and receive microwave signals without blockage from Toronto's existing skyscrapers. Two million people visit the CN Tower annually."
The Sears tower is "1,454 feet high - 1,707 feet including twin antenna towers," according to www.sears_tower.com.... and CN's 1,815 ft. obviousbly beats it.
We're planning to deploy Breeze's unlicensed BAII and have been hearing of their 802.11a offering which will offer up to 54Mbps in the 5.8GHz frequency by the end of this summer.
FHSS gear also plays well in densely populated areas over DSSS gear since there are about 79 channels to hop through vs. DSSS' three channels.
It's inexpensive because it doesn't require a license; just a ruling from the FCC stating that all sharing the spectrum must "play nice."
Thx much for the input! :-)
Why do you see in that Michael Douglas character? Don't you want to be seen with a future hip-hop superstar? I can give you a baby (I hope)
I love you!! =steve
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
On the KTHI tower --
When I lived in North Dakota, I read that the KTHI tower was the tallest man-made structure in the world. I never made it out to see it, though.
I also heard something about it falling down in a storm. Not sure if that's true.
I alerdy got it at my house using it for dayz! The antana for my area is located on Peak of world unfamaus Mission Peak!. Its the biggest antana on that hill. Those Mwave antana are huge look like a Y. I also have pizza box sized antana installed on my roof and I can clearly see the Color on the antana from my roof. I got some pictures but if I get /.ed I'll be kicked off the hosting server so i won't.
Download speed are great I recorded 550,000 BYTES PER SEC SUSTAINED ALL NIGHT but its not true every day.. :), lantancy suck, Streaming good sometime, upload are capped like DSL or @home. Technology is still new and bug are being work out as i raise hell on their customer service.
Every time those kids next door get on their trampoline my DSL goes out!
boing... boing... boing...
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
I get 20% packet loss durring peak times and average about 9-10%. Max average pings (100 pings) of 551ms and average of 250ms. I get dowloads of 2.5Mbits/s to about 200Kbits/s (from one min to the next). My uploads are max of 90Kbits/s to about 50Kbits/s. I graph everything in mrtg so I am not guessing on these numbers.
I play games and do unix admin, so this kinda service sucks for me. If you surf the web or download files from Napster then you will like it.
MRTG Graphs:
packet loss
ping times
We had frequent outages.
We had problems during bad weather, but becuase of the frequent outages we couldn't be sure if the two were related.
We ended up with 2 optical T1's.
Hopefully its all been figured out, but given my experience with sprint's cell phone service, I wouldn't be using wireless IP for anything important.
PS: The reason sprint phones run the battery down on standby so fast is that the coverage sucks, so they program the phones to transmit constantly looking for new cells!
This is on anecdotal evidence, so take it for what it is worth.
At the time I ordered and had installed Cox@Home (I know, I know - it sucks, but I can't get DSL where I am at, last I checked), I firewalled it, as recommended by just about every sane individual on the planet.
When I had it installed, due to a couple of reasons I had to set up the firewall on a Windows 95 box. This box was also my GF's box, so I was a little nervous running both user apps and a firewall, but at the time I didn't have a choice.
The firewall I chose was ZoneAlarm - simple to install, admin, and best of all, free. Today I would probably choose Tiny, but that wasn't available then (and I only recently learned about it). I searched for some kind of NAT solution (the box runs 95, not 98), but came up empty handed, so I opted for a proxy server: AnalogX's Proxy. This solution worked well for quite some time, and I never had many problems (occasionally the Win95 box would freak, and I would have to reboot), except for one thing - it seemed "slow", compared to my GF's box. All the apps on my GF's box ran through the firewall, while my box ran through the proxy, then the firewall. It was all still faster than a modem, to be sure, so I lived with it, figuring that I would be using a regular firewall later, and besides, what more should I expect from a free solution...?
I always intended to set up a "real" firewall at a later point. I had thought about a Linksys router/NAT box, or possibly building it myself. Things dragged on, then recently I gained the oppourtunity to do what I wanted. I chose to build a box - to get the experience, number one, and because it was overall cheaper, plus I could expand it (unlike the Linksys router).
I chose Freesco (which is based off of LRP), because it is easy to admin, has remote admin capability (telnet and web), good documentation, and support for a ton of NICs. After getting it setup, and running it, I found out a very good thing:
Your speed is only as good as your routing software (or hardware, as the case may be)!
I guess I should've known this - it is a good lesson to learn. The majority of people don't have to worry about this on a cable modem or DSL: they only run one machine, or a wide open network (the latter can be a risky situation, IMO). I run (or attempt to) a secure home network, so having the routing capability is a must.
The speed improvement is incredible - I don't have hard numbers - but I know web page loads, mail downloads, everything is faster - much faster. So, if you are having speed issues (or you think you are), look into changing your routing/firewall software or hardware system - you may be surprised.
Now, if I could only get rid of this upload cap (can anybody point me in a good direction - heck, I would even be willing to try to spoof being the BOOTP server for the cable modem, if it would work)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I tried to get their Sprint Broadband services which is being broadcasted from South Mountain.
The problem I ran into is no line of sight because of a condo in front of me.
Don't you think that a company like Sprint could afford to put neighbourhood relays where they have one central antenna pointing to their main one?
Does anybody have more information on what Sprint is going to do about the big market piece they don't have "line of sight" to?
OK, so the CN Tower is 1815 feet high. It's the tallest man made thing in the world. Does anyone know why it's been disqualified as the tallest building in the world?
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
The CN Tower in Toronto, Canada is the worlds tallest building and free standing structure.
It's 553.33m (1815ft) total, the observation deck is at 346m (1136ft), the 360 restaurant is at 351m (1150ft), and the Sky Pod observation deck is at 447m (1465ft, and higher than the top floor of either the sears tower or petronas).
The CN tower was built in 1976 and has held the titles of tallest building and free standing structure ever since.
I think I've met one american ever who got this question right. What's with you people?
I can only get IDSL, so I got sprintBB as an additional service to my IDSL circuit.
Until sprint pulls it's head out of its ass, avoid this service. I have MASSIVE problems with outages that have not been resolved in 4 months so far. Upload speed can be WORSE than a modem, best case about IDSL speeds (144kb) and is usually on the slow end.
The thing craps out about every ten minutes for about a minute at a time. WORTHLESS.
In San Jose this past weekend, service was totally out from Friday to Monday.
Their AUP also really sucks...
Buyer beware... It it is your only connection, you are better off with a modem.
Actually the tallest building is the one seen
in the movie "Entrapment" with Sean Connery. I
think it is located in Kuala Lampur. The rating
for tallest building status is done by usable
floor/office space. No one ever counts the towers on top of the roofs anymore or a couple of floors beneath due to radio frequency saturation (supposedly it causes cancer....).
If you count *Base-to-Peak* however, Mt. McKinley in Denali Nat'l Park, Alaska, defeats them all. Everest & K2 start well above sea-level, on a plateau...
well if you count that way the island of Hawaii beats everything. It's 30-something thousand feet above the point in the sea floor it starts from.
The problem with that reasoning is that if you are going to measure starting from the sea floor, then what's to stop you from calling an entire continent a "mountain"? Then Everest is the "peak" of a very wide mountain known as "Asia".
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
> c / freq == 300Mm/s / 2.2GHz == .136 m / Hz.
:-)
This is the worst, stupidest nitpick in the world, and I know it, so just shut up, mod me down, and get it over with.
Hz is cycles per second. m/s divided by cycles/sec is meter-seconds per cycle-seconds, or, reducing, meters per cycle. Not, as you have it, meters per Hz which would be meter-cycles per second, which doesn't make any sense.
Lame attempt to justify this stupid piece of drivel: when I'm trying to work out a problem involving units, and I'm not 100% sure if my method is correct, following the units through to the end of the algebra often tells me if I've made a mistake - if I'm expecting the result to be a distance and instead of meters I get meter-farads per pascal-kilogram, something is obviously funky with the method.
My apologies to anyone who actually read this.
They are used, the thing is that the top floors of the Petronas towers are not as high as the top floors of the Sears tower. PT has a claim at the record due to a large spire that rises from the top of each tower. It's not necessarily a cheap shot at the record, though; the spires really do match the look of the towers which were fashioned after local cultural architecture.
IIRC, I saw an interview with one of the architects of the Petronas Towers; apparently they weren't shooting for the record but when they found out they were so close they tacked a few extra floors (I think?) onto the design.
I was writing the above response on-the-fly on a less-than-reliable netfeed. (I use a laptop with a 14.4 modem. Heavy sites like slashdot, in addition to having other windows filled with graphics-heavy marketdroid drek, in addition to a few times getting kicked offline without getting my two cents worth in get to ya.
So... AFA the units: Sorry to have offended you. Perhaps you can clarify if the SI unit is "cycle".
And AFA the XHF notation:
The way I've experienced the radio spectrum, and according to my ARRL Handbook, you can split the RF into three discrete parts. Note that the top and of each range overlap in characteristics at times with the bottom of the range of the next type; ex. a 60 MHz transmission is more likely to act like a VHF wave and duct tropospherically rather than get ionospheric bounce.
Less than 60 MHz: These are long waves. These waves bounce off the ionosphere, which is between 50 and 650 clicks up. Some of the layers only work during daylight hours, and these higher levels bounce the higher frequencies. (You can listen to the BBS arounf 17500 kHz during the day and have to settle for somewhere in the 6000 kHz range at night.)
Antennas are LARGE. From wire dipoles meters long to huge yagis and quads, the antennas need to be very large for any reasonable gain.
60 - 1000 MHz: These can be 'ducted' in the troposhpere, which extends from where you are now to about cruising altitude, 10 clicks up. Ducting is pretty tough and pretty tricky unless you're either damn lucky or damn skilled. It's a really funky process.. these signals are weird that way. You can miss a friend's call from across town, but you can hear people from thousands of miles away on a lark. These signals, though, can be directed (useful in moonbounce communications) or broadcast in a spherical pattern (look at your TV or radio).
Antennas for these frequencies are considerably smaller. Any kind of antenna can work, with the exception of bullhorn antennas (used for microwave work.. read on). Huge dishes, yagis, quads, hell, walkie-talkies use rubber-ducks!
Above 1 GHz: These freqs are increasingly limited to LOS. You can get some propagation on the lower end, but the higher you go in freq, the smaller the stuff that conflicts with the signal. (Above 10 GHz, water vapor and O2 can affect the signal!)
Bouncing off airplanes is possible, and done by some to, ex. communicate over a mountain.
Directionality becomes important here. This increases the beam's focus, and you don't accidentally fry yourself with microwaves. That's why dishes and bullhorns are used with these signals.
OK? Lather, rinse, repeat, chill!
Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
:)
We saw, we conquered, we came.
Cute.
--
Curious.