Wireless along the Maine Coast

eggboard writes: "The coast of Maine started getting lit up by wireless over long distance back in 1997. Now hundreds of users, some of them dozens of miles from the connecting ISP's HQ, use plain old 802.11, 802.11b's predecessor, to hit nearly 2 Mbps of throughput. Cable Internet is broken out there; DSL unreachable; ISDN expensive. Other communities are also adopting tower-based point-to-point, bridge and repeater wireless to bring broadband to rural and small towns. Is this the way to drag lesser-populated areas into the modern economy, and promote deurbanization?"

Comments

In answer to the question..

[delta0]

Yes! I think 802.11b is what we all need in the rural areas that are say at the most 15-30 miles from town but still can't get service even if there is a CO only 5-10 km away. Also providers are building backbones from downtown areas to remote communities by installing biger pipes than the standard maximum (stress max) 11Mbps stuff like the Cisco Aironet 340/350 or Lucent stuff. They are using 45Mbps or greater as a cheap alternative to service areas where fiber doesn't go, Ma Bell wants too much money for, or to areas that have dark fiber just lying there, that cost a fortune to install, that no one -- wants to (due to lack of money) -- or is smart enough (even if they have the money) to light up and connect people to.

If Cisco, Lucent and Nortel want any type of increased demands in their core fiber products on the home front (to help them out in returning to better times) they should consider wireless 2.4GHz and the last mile their good friend. They need more people demanding more bandwidth in more locations, doing more, for longer. That is what will allow us all to be modern and do such advanced things as download large email attachments, get our repulsive Flash animations sooner, or CVSup in less time [windows equivalent: get patches and chunky bloated shareware quicker] (-- wow, the future is here). But what it will really do is get people downloading more pr0n and mp3z, so then the need for bandwidth will sky-rocket and the backbones will need to be upgraded at ever more frequent rates not to mention HD sales will triple.

Seriously, part of the problem of why the Internet companies are doing so bad, is cause they didn't get it to enough people soon enough, at a low enough cost, fast enough and that even if they did most people don't care and consider it an expensive luxury. And the reason so many .com companies are doing so bad, was that not enough people take the Internet seriously because it's either too slow or still considered a luxury. The masses are in need of some education about the Internet *still*. It's a tool to me, not some entertainment service that should be rapidly commercialized or be ruled by the economics of media!

Well, as you can tell I'm frustrated that things aren't moving forward for the better for everyone yet. The tech "overcapacity" is really an underlying "undercapacity" with regards to actual implementation!!