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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?"
Here in Ontario there are many wireless 802.11(b) networks poping up that help fill in that large gaping hole in the infrastructure that Rogers and Bell Canada have left. I have been investigating building a repeater.. costs less than $7000CDN for a 96' tower these days (not including equipment) and that can cover a fair community so that line of sight issues aren't as big a concern. Think of the problem like a right angle triangle with the tower the opposite side and tree obsticles perpendicular from adjacent side. The closer and taller the service tower, the less likely the need for an additional tower at the site.
The problem with the freenet concept is what I would consider a fair disadvantage in topology and cost duplication and the fact that it makes more sense to build one large tower and do point to multipoint where possible for both cost and speed. However nothing tops the freenet layout for underserviced areas that are on the fringes of a populated center or that can touch another tower that is close. Just hop through the terain and onto a landline, no worries about planning a big tower.
In Ontario there are both community networks and some independant ISPs starting to role out the services such as Storm Internet (sister to CDSP). Some areas have had wireless for a couple of years now.
--- Delta0.. makes no difference.
Agreed. The idea that deurbanization is something that should be blandly promoted is getting pretty old. I love how off-the-cuff the remark in the original post is; it's almost as if we're all convinced that the cities should be emptied out, and only details remain.
The anti-urban crowd have also popped up for a series of idiotic, tasteless suggestions about the WTC bombing (perhaps if we didn't work in these big downtowns, we'd all be much safer).
Face it, guys. There's a reason that people pay megabucks for downtown office space in big cities: promixity to other real people. We've had Internet access, videoconferencing, Kinkos, etc. in suburbia/exburbia for years and somehow the city centers refuse to empty out.
This not to mention the very real externalities imposed by deurbanization; you know, chewing up green space, the inevitable commute once it turns out that big-screen TV and DSL fail to substitute for a social life and a vibrant work environment, etc. etc.
If you want to live a life as a wired hermit, good for you, but don't expect too many people to join you any time soon.
We already had a great experiment in deurbanization called the suburb. Suddenly, Towns all over the country start to look more and more like orange county! No! Superficiality without the attractiveness! No! We must escape! To where? to the small towns! But wait, I won't be able to check my stocks and The Hun for natalie portman pr0n from there!
I've delved into the silly, but the point is serious. Keep your suburban, SUV-driving, mall-patronizing asses out of the in the damn suburbs where they belong.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
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This and other articles recently about WLAN's have me wondering about how much spectrum there is available for WLAN. If you used nothing but WLAN (no ordinary LAN's) in a downtown office area of a major city, would that cause big problems? What can be done and what have been done to work around this?