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Flat-Rate Wireless Where The Sun Don't Shine (Much)
Tantus writes: "Something I've been drooling for for years has finally started to see the light of day... and it's not even close to where I am! I work for a company that does help desk outsourcing for a small startup in the ND, SD, and MN area called Monet Mobile http://www.monetmobile.com, which hopefully will hopefully start a wireless trend that will spread beyond Fargo, ND... Up to twice modem speeds and a $49 flat fee for your laptop or home. Sigh ..." This service sounds much like Ricochet's, for those lucky enough to live in range. Nice to see a wireless option starting up rather than shutting down
I believe both of these services are available throughout the eastern US.
I wouldn't really recommend Ntelos, though. I've had some bad experiences with them in the past.
Isn't the Ricochet network being restarted by its new owner? Here is a C|Net article on it.
forma3
Unfortunately, it will take AGES for something similar show up here (Brazil). The ability to be online in motion rocks. Ive heard on a similar thing around here, but it was limited to one town, and the bandwidth sucked.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
But seems like bound to fail like the rest of the high-speed wireless services. The service area is small (low demand), high speed (lots of money). It's another dead end if they chage for a hourly rate, would be way to expensive for anyone to get it. The government needs to support these companies in order for them to reach profitability
kawai
ahead in mobile comms we have nothing like this, nor are we likely to see anything like it for about 5 years.
The infrastructure to do this has been in place for several years now, and It's just up to cellular service providers to adopt a flat pricing plan and go from there. In fact, there are already several providers my locality who are offering unlimited usage for around $50/month.
The US has taken a lot of flak from critics about being slow to adopt cellular technologies, and I think this is a definite step in the right direction. We may not have Bluetooth or 3G yet, but nobody really needs those bells and whistles anyway. I want a cheap cell phone that will work just like my regular landline phone, and hopefully that's what flat rate pricing will allow. In some third world countries like Britain and Japan, their regular phones don't even have unlimited usage. You make a local call in a less industrialized nation like Britain, and you're going to be paying by the minute.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
The site is really thin on tech info. I appears to work only on Windows and Pocket PCs however.
Does anybody know if they are using any sort of standard below the IP level?
[boast]
;-)
Just got it installed this week:
My Internet Connection
I got tired of my cable modem losing signal everytime it rained, and DirecTV-DSL (Telocity) was dissapointing, so I got me a dedicated 1.54Mb microwave wireless connection from MCI Worldcomm about 2 hops off UUNets's backbone.
Ok, so its about $340.00 a month, but I can write it off
While I'm bragging, also check out my Tower O' Power
[/boast]
There's no scale on the coverage maps, and I don't know the region, but it looks like the signal is only on the order of miles in range.
Twice modem speed, limited roaming and ~$50/month?
It's in an urban area that is probably already going to have some sort of higher speed connection (though perhaps not...). This would make more sense to me in a rural area, but the range isn't great enough.
I suppose if the cost of the individual cell was low enough that you could put them everywhere it might work (economically speaking) - but from reading the website, it looks more like this is just sort of a cool "Looky - I can check stocks at lunch!" sort of thing.
(I use a my cell phone and a cable to my laptop if I really really need that sort of thing - it's not as fast, but I don't use it all that often. I'm sure not interested in paying that much more.)
In illa quae ultra sunt
http://www.wirelessinitiative.net/
In Duluth, my friend used to work for Superior Broadband, where fixed wireless is available throughout the city and neighboring towns.
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
This isn't the only option for wireless access here in the north country... Also check out http://www.ruralaccess.net/wireless/Default.htm
One more thing, almost all cities here greater than a few thousand in population have access to DSl &/or cable, it is the rural areas (basically everywhere) that are driving the need for wireless. (Remember, North Dakota has 4 cities greater than 30,000 popultion, with a total state population of 500,000)
And finally, if you want to see what else we do here since "the sun don't shine much", check out the recent aurora!
If you're thinking wireless, and you're considering college, check out Virginia Tech. They just bought four OC-12's, and are supposedly putting up wireless thru the entire campus this winter, or spring. Its already available in some parts of campus. I don't go there, but I've heard good things. Georgie Tech and Bucknell also are pursuing (and using, to some extent) 802.11b.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
At first I was excited to see this as I live in Fargo, but now that I've looked into it I can see that this Monet Mobile is not for me (I'm writing this from FreeBSD-5.0-CURRENT).
Strike 1:
The site www.monetmobile.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
Strike 2:
They don't enough details, it's all a big fluffy sales pitch.
Strike 3:
Monet wireless modem supported PC platforms: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT and Windows 2000.
What we need is some geeks with capital.
My ISP offers shared bandwidth up to full T1 speeds, with minimal 128k for $49.95/mo. We meter how much you use, you get 10GB of xfer for the 49.95 base price.
Why would you want wireless where travelling with your laptop can involve snowshoes and other winter paraphenalia? ;-)
The weather here is less likely to quarantine me to my computer(s) at home, making wireless seem more sensible in a climate like mine
(I live in Phoenix, AZ, the Sun City)
How about a solar-powered 802.11b repeater? I need to span the space between a couple of houses, with no power/network access for hundreds of meters. An integrated solarcell-battery-transponder would keep it safer from weather and curious onlookers. Anybody seen one?
It's 'cause all those /. geeks went to Hope College, so everything they do is done hopefully, which when you think about it is better than hopelessly.
As someone who has worked for a struggling fixed wireless company for the last two years, I can see that this company is extremely optimistic about what this technology can do. A quick check at Mapquest shows that their coverage area is about 4 miles radius. I assume that they are using the 2.4 GHz frequency since these are the most widely available pcmcia cards. The problems we have found on a fixed wireless network is that there is no way 2.4 GHz will transmit these kinds of distances without external directional antennas. Add to that shadows from buildings, terrian features and trees and you're going to see many lost packets and retransmits which will bring the network to it's knees. Plus, as you add more customers, you will see the ambient signal levels rise due to scattering from all those antennas which will lower the signal to noise ratios. Hopefully they have found ways to combat these problems and I'm wrong but it sure looks like deja-vu to me. snoig
The midwest is a wireless imlementor's dream. There's no hills, no trees, no mountains, and few cities. Any line-of-sight wireless system will thrive there because initially when the customer base is small, they can still cover a large service area with a small number of towers, and then ass they fill up decrease transmitter power and increase density of towers.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
The US is truly the third world country when it comes to celluar technology. (Compared to the Nordic countries and even Britain ie.)
Your coverage sucks big time, roaming charges is out of this world and your selection of celluar phones are laughable. When I go into a cell phone shop here in the US, it's like going back 5 years in time.
And what is it with you merkins and the flat rate and "free" minutes stupidity. Is it such a strange concept that the users that actually use the service pay for it.
No, give us GPRS and some competition, that'll take care of my communication needs on-the-road for years. In GPRS you pay per MB transferred, you can be online all day. Perfect for SSH terminals and such.
Storm does it... the setup price last I checked was about $450 ($3.00 USD) but it seemed to be very good service and speed. (comparable to @Home)
I just never checked it out, but it seems that here in Canada, Ottawa is 'wire-less' too.
Well, having lived in the Dakotas for 22 years, I'll toss in my two cents.
1. It's flat - a moderate power FM station with a 150 foot tower will broadcast 150 miles. There are no terran features outside of the Black Hills in Southwestern South Dakota. There are few trees in the Dakotas outside of the Black Hills.
2. On farms/ranches most people already have a CB or two-way radio tower. Alot of people have been getting thier own cell towers over the last 13 years.
3. When you are talking about the Dakotas and urban centers, you are talking about a town of about 2-900 with one story buildings and a scattering of 1-400 more people living within 5 miles of the town in single family houses. The "big" urban areas are 5-15 thousand (Pierre, Bismarck, Aberdeen, Watertown, etc) and the cities are 25-100 thousand (Fargo/Morehead, Sioux Falls, Rapid City). The big cities already have modern Internet services. The majority of people live on farms or ranches at least a quarter mile from the next house.
The Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming are unlike anyother place in the US and while the poster above has the insight from working for a wireless company...the Dakotas are just different and I'm not sure that one can make a general judgement call on them unless you've lived there.
in the grand forks, nd (15 mile range) and crookston, mn (15 miles as well) there is wireless (up to 3Mbps, i've used it from ~6 miles out, it's sweeeet). the only problem is that it's kind of spendy.
farther north there is a company called ruralaccess (i think), but i really don't know much about that.
Yours was, by far, the more accurate with the exception of needing 2 jobs.
yes, high murder, abortion, and criminal rates.
Executions Like you would not believe. Just go to Illinois or Texas.
And I totally agree with the religious fundamentalist. I am convinced that it is the christian group that did the Anthrax. Not Bin ladin.
Thanks for the 2 cents, but just so you know, the company I work for has/had towers in Nebraska and Montana among others. Your points are well taken and terrian features are much less of a problem there than where I am (Colorado mountians) but your points about FM and CB's are comparing apples to oranges. I'm not sure what the FCC FM power limits are in the Dakotas but they are several orders of magnitude larger than what can be broadcast from a pcmcia device and power is proportional to distance. Remember, we are talking about digital packet switching here, not analog transmission. As I said before, people trying to communicate from fringe areas will generate packet retransmits which can flood the network bringing it to it's knees. Also, most of my points have to do with the mobile aspect of the service, well designed fixed wireless networks will work great in that part of the country. Hopefully, they have found ways to combat these problems but when I was testing all this stuff, the basic conclusion was that it worked great when you had just a few subscribers but as you added nodes, things degraded.
I hate to tell you, but AT&T had flat-rate wireless CDPD access 3 years ago. It was only 19.2, but it was about $55/month, all you could eat. Handy for downloading email in the bakground on my laptop.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
Check out the Faq, first. They are not using 802.11. They are using cdma (cell Phone technology). Do note they are on somebody elses spectrum as they are at 1.9GHz. They will suffer the same problems as CellPhone.
t .a sp?catID=8
While they don't describe the data rate, it should be 128K.
They do mention that login is 6-10 secs. What is interesting is that you will suffer the same problems that Cellphones users suffer. That is, if not enough towers with low power, then it will quickly saturate. But in doing so, they will limit what they cover.
http://www.monetmobile.com/support/displayFaqCa
Just out of curiosity, you mention the colorado mountains. What company and do you also do the front range?
I'm using Xtratyme wireless in Minnesota. Their strategy is to partner with local businesses (mosty farm co-ops and grain elevators) to provide service. For the most part, their access points are located on grain elevators and water towers in small towns. Here is a coverage map. I'm paying $39.99 a month, I'm allowed to run servers (if I'm respectful of bandwidth), and I'm getting a /29 network routed to me.
http://www.netbeam.net
For the Fargo map, the larger circle has about a 10 mile radius. Perhaps slighly less. Just about everything in Fargo/West Fargo/Moorhead is covered. I think that some of the newest developments are going to be right on the edge.
Fargo gives a big advantage for line-of-sligh propigation of the RF waves: it's flat. There are very few tall buildings and virtually no hills in Fargo. About the only thing that prevents someone from having line-of-sight communication, is the curvature of the earth.
I made the point about the CBs to make a point that people will put up towers for connectivity.
Cool rack, who makes it and where'd you get it?
See Here
My sister lives about 80 miles northwest of Yankton and they receive their 'cable tv' via a little directional antenna that looks a bit like a DSS dish, but smaller. The signal is broadcast from the cable operator in the town about 10-15 miles away. They've had that for several years before DSS became widely available.
Most of the little towns have two story buildings along their main streets, but the major obstacles would probably be the grain elevators and storage silos. Those and water towers are usually the only things one sees poking above the trees.
That area is great. I'd like to find a *nix job there and move back.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Remember all the hype about Bevnet? Blacksburg was going to be the most wired town in the country. Well, a few apartment buildings and offices do have incredibly cheap ethernet, but the rest of the town can't get any broadband at all, except for the horribly oversold cable company, and a smidgen of DSL. Also, even if they did buy 4 OC-12s, what are they connected to? The backbone through the whole area isn't even that big.
VA Tech's "wiredness" is just a bunch of hype- and always has been.
They are using CDMA2000, not 802.11b - initially 1x, with later upgrade to 1xEV-DO (2 Mbps). They are not doing fixed wireless - they are called Monet *Mobile* Networks. CDMA2000 is likely to be in existing licensed spectrum.
I would bet that a neighbourhood network would be the fastest way to get wireless access on the go here in Brasil, given the penchant for community efforts here (e.g., community "radios" comprised o a network of loudspeakers, and mass construction efforts, known as "mutirões", where the material is supplied by local government and the labour by the beneficiaries). Since daily access to private computers is limited to the higher middle class and above, I believe that a possible implementation woudl perhaps spread out from university areas (given their higher bandwidth links), although there would probably be legal and regulatory restrictions to that (as well as security issues).
Just my 2 bits (well, a bit more (several) than that).
BTW, I would be interested in more material pertaining to the wireless experiment mentioned in the originating email. Thanks.
ma2oliveira
I am the only user of Monet in Sioux Falls SD. All I have to say about the service is, can't deliver. They claim the the 2x modem speed yet repeated trips to dslreports.com and their speed test reveal 20-50 kps about the same as dial in the area. Also I have a desktop computer and the pcmcia card reader they gave me is serial and if I remember correctly that has a bandwidth of 112kps so I will never get their claimed speed of 153kps.
So far the only thing that has impressed is the 30 trial period, of which I have 14 days left.
I think that you underestimate the size of our larger cities here in the Dakotas. The first part about small towns is quite accurate. However, I don't think anyone really considers the 5,000-15,000 person cities to be "'big' urban areas". The objection I have to your comments is that you classed Bismarck in the less than 15,00 range, when in fact it has more than FIFTY thousand people. This is in fact around the size of Rapid City South Dakota as well. The Fargo/Moorhead metro area is almost twice the size that you have quoted, coming in around 175,000. I understand that you may have lived here, but get your facts right and don't make our cities look smaller than they actually are!
"You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve or the ones you create." Mike Murdock
Let's check out the geographical area covered in the US. We have metro areas as big as some european countries. We probably have 10 times the geographical coverage of Japan - we're just a whole lot bigger. We have several different technologies because we did it first, growing and advancing with the improvements. Other countries waited until the technology matured and then built their systems. Being a pioneer sometimes has disadvantages.
You ignorant little flag waving anonymous patriot you.
No, you were not at all first when it comes to celluar phone technology. This is not the same story that we saw with TV and NTSC vs. PAL. You are not "advancing with the improvements", you are still struggeling with your pathetic backwards cell phone systems that you developed in the '90. Now I see big ad campains for text messages on the tv here, hello! If your cell phone companies got their head out of their ass 10 years ago and headed for GSM, your country would be closer to industrialized nation by now.
Talk about coverage, take a look at Norway with 4.5 million people living in a relatively large country. (Average population density is less than half of the US, one 1/7 of the density of Illinois) The coverage there is almost complete, in every little fjord, by two different companies with GSM. For the very few that are not covered by GSM you have an analog alternative, NMT-450, introduced in 1980 and covered the whole country already by 1985.
I am afraid I have to disappoint you, the US is the followers in this game, not leaders.