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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?"
My uncles who live in Iowa have talked frequently about this sort of thing being done there. However, the companies are using old unused silos and other structures that are already standing to reduce costs and make it easier to get the network up and running more quickly. :)
That's ecology - you fix one thing and break another.
Especially in Maine, one of the last states 'wilderness' states and here we are going to decentralize everything and put wireless network towers up in the mountains.
It's not as refreshing when you hike to the top of a remote mountain and find a cel tower at the top. At least you can take the service drive back to the bottom, but it takes away something from the serenity. Maybe it's the phone call from your girlfriend wondering why you aren't spending the afternoon with her. You wouldn't have recieved it if the tower wasn't there.
Keeping
Instead of hoping Jack Ryan would understand he was defecting, and instead of goofing around with morse code messages and sonar pings in the middle of nowhere in the sea, Cpt. Ramius could have simply popped the periscope in Maine's coastal waters, connected to the local 802.11 network and emailed jack@cia.gov "huh, we're just defectors really, just you guys don't get your blood pressure up now ..."
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Apologies for the title ripoff.
I currently live in a city called Calais, a hop-skip-and-underage-drinker-puke from the Canadian border. Our internet access solutions are a few small ISPs, a couple large ISPs, and a maximum connection speed of 56,666 bps. Here in the 'Downeast' region of Maine, we've got a very odd situation where we're surrounded by native american tribal communities with the ability to get some form of high-speed access, while the normal cities and towns stagger along on standard POS POTS. It's great to see these kinds of service available in the state, but by looking at the map in the article, it looks like it's only the southern parts of Maine that are being wired in. There's a lot more to Maine above Belfast, with a lot more economic need.
Economically, Downeast Maine is pretty much a wasteland. Some companies are relocating here, but most of the region's major employers have bugged out long ago. The prices quoted for the 802.11 setup are quite high to start, seeming priced more for the already-wealthy, not for any possible benefit to those with true economic needs. Around here, a popular bumper sticker is ''I live in the other state of Maine: Washington County''. When a service like this comes to Calais with the ability to afford it with some kind of state subsidy, or with a lower starting cost, that's when it might really help.
And no, this isn't just all about me wanting the access. Even though I've got a modem at home, I've got a laptop and root on the local community college network systems. I've got all the net access I need.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Sprint Broadband provides the same kind of service in major metropolitan areas. You get up to 5 Mbps at costs comparable to DSL or cable. In the SF Bay Area, Sprint Broadband actually started out as a small, local company.
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.
.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!
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
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!!
--- 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.
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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?