Slashdot Mirror
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
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
There's already one cellular company that does this, at least for local phone calls. They seem to be playing in secondary markets, though, and there's no roaming.
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
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.