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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
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
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.
[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
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
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.
Japan has 3G if you consider a small part of Tokyo Japan. Japan is very high-tech when it comes to cell phones, but in the dark ages when it comes to pricing. For example, I have a JSH-03 cell phone. It has a built in digital camera which I can use to take and send pictures to my friends. This is a fun feature, especially in a cell phone that only cost me 50 bucks US. However, paying for the cell phone is a pain in the ass. I was on a plan that cost 5600 yen a month and gave me 2600 yen in free calls at the cost of 30 yen a minute. So esentially I got 86 minutes. But it also cost me 2 yen for each message I sent with my phone, and more money for using the phone to view websites. I was also charged for a full minute if I only used the phone for a fraction of a minute. For a country that has a population density greater than just about everywhere in the world, why should I be paying so much money to use my phone. When I lived in America I had 250 minutes for 30 bucks a month. I didn't even have to worry about running out of free minutes, and if I ever were to run out of minutes I could spend another 10 bucks and get a whole bunch more minutes. The thing that bothers me most is that 3G is going to be a failure, and the cost of that failure is going to be passed on to the users of regular cell phones. What cell phone companies should do is incorporate 802.11b into their phones and allow people to use their own private networks as well as public(In train stations/convinience stores and the like) base stations to download videos/music on to their cell phones to be viewed whenever they feel like it. Although the idea of having a fast internet connection on the go seems like a great idea, the idea of paying for every packet you send/recieve is a very painful idea.
> and you're going to be paying by the minute.
:)
Well, as much as I dislike paying per minute, doesn't it make sense?
Of course, one could say once the infrastructure is build, it doesn't differ how much I telephone.
But it does differ.
The infrastructure is build to serve only a small percentage of the subscribed users users simultanously (Usually about 1%, IRC.)
This applies for land-lines and even more so for radio.
You can only supply a certain percentage of the population simultanously. This becomes most obvious on certain events. Ever tried to use your mobile on new year 24:00?
That's where demand and supply comes into play.
Even if it didn't make a difference, don't you think, that those, who use a service more intensive, should pay more?
Well, I shouldn't speak so loud... someone may get on the idea and meter my internet-access
There are several things one doesn't like, but that doesn't have to mean that they don't make sense.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
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.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
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.
They also had a higher-speed fixed service. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/221240
;) Similar service from Verizon is slightly cheaper, but it's also not available (at least in the flat-rate plan) all that far ... this is cheaper, for more speed, but of course, does mean living in places that most people don't want to live. (They don't look bad to me, necessarily -- I like cold, but not sure if I like it *quite* that much.)
Bird in hand, two in bush
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
Bluetooth is a personal area network technology, so the US already has it - just buy a Bluetooth phone and PC/CF card and you have a Bluetooth network...
...
Japan is way more advanced in its use of wireless and many other technologies than Europe and the US. They've had packet-oriented (2.5G) wireless phones for over 2 years with i-mode, and have just deployed 3G. Britain is also way ahead of the US in its use of mobile phones - something like 75% of the population has a mobile phone, and we can use the same phones throughout Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa. Not bad for a 'less industrialised nation'
One reason why the US doesn't have widespread use of mobile phones is that it has free local calls from wired phones, and that it didn't allocate new area codes for mobile phones - the result is that when calling from a wired phone to a mobile phone in the local calling area, it would be unreasonable to charge the caller extra for calling a mobile. Hence, mobile phone users have to pay for incoming calls, which doesn't happen anywhere outside North America, and they are understandably reluctant to give out their mobile numbers.
Near flat rate billing (i.e. huge number of bundled minutes) is the way US consumers seem to like things. Strangely enough, the same model applies to European mobile phones - you just buy bundled minutes. If you are really concerned about price, there are some very low cost options, down to a few US cents per minute for national calls.
Hint to the troll: your clueless xenophobia is showing - countries that do things differently from the US are not necessarily 'third world'.
Your $50 phone was clearly subsidised - a typical high-end phone in the UK or Scandinavia costs about $600, and your model with built-in digital camera might have been more than that without subsidy. Your US phone was probably quite basic, costing far less, so your comparison of tariffs is fairly useless - you need to look at the total cost over a fixed time, including handset costs as well as subscription costs and call charges.
Assuming $1 = 100 yen roughly, 2 yen (i.e. 2 cents) per message seems quite reasonable. Even if you send 100 messages a month, that's only $2... Paying for packets is obviously not as nice as flat rate, but wireless operators need to make money or go the way of flat-rate operators like Metricom/Ricochet. GPRS operators in Europe work on a packet-charging basis, but you can get a monthly 'Bundled Kbytes' for a flat fee. As long as you use a PDA or phone as the GPRS client, you won't run up a huge bill.
802.11b is a great technology for laptops and higher-end PDAs, but it's quite battery hungry, and it's not designed for wide coverage - it would be a pain to have this draining batteries very fast in a cell phone and still have very incomplete coverage. GPRS (packet mode GSM) is a lot slower than 802.11b, but it works well with a mobile phone (I still get 2 days battery life on my Ericsson T68 phone, even with colour screen, Bluetooth, and lots of game playing).
Bluetooth is a really key technology as it decouples your PDA, laptop or whatever from the wireless wide-area technology - in Europe, use a GPRS or 3G phone as your 'router' most of the time, then switch to a CDMA2000 phone in the US, and use an 802.11b device where you have coverage (e.g. turn your PDA with an 802.11b Compact Flash card into a Bluetooth to 802.11b router, and use your phone via your PDA/router).
Bluetooth is going to be in lots of devices, and is best viewed as the basic glue between these devices - 802.11b, GPRS, 3G, and so on are longer distance technologies that complement Bluetooth pretty well.
Because, if they don't meter the access, the bandwidth usage rises. This can usually attributed to a small percentage of the users (to whom I count myself)
The rise has to be compensated with another DS3 trunk, which leads to increased costs.
These costs are equally distributed on the subscribers.
Is that fair?
How about your connection to your ISP?
Modems and ISDN adaptors aren't connected directly with the DS3. Usually, they have some kind of modem-rack which provide access to a certain amount of users simultanously.
Now assume everyone is permantly online, this means that there have to be as many dial-in ports aviable as there are users. This leads to another increase in costs.
Usually, the costs for ISPs are reduced by resource-sharing.
If I'm only half a day online, I'll give someone else the chance to use the same hardware. This reduces costs. If I do not download the newest distribution/music track just for fun, I'll save bandwith and give someone else the chance to use it.
How do I achieve a sensible use of (usually limited) resources? I'd say by fees.
As I said, I wouldn't like it as it would be to my disadvantage, nonetheless it'd make sense.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
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
I think 3G will happen in some form (it's essential in Japan because their 2G cellular network has reached capacity). I agree that it's much more cost effective to download data in advance than to stream packets - the former just requires memory, which is cheap, and software, which is coming (Java phones will help). However, there will always be a demand for instant browsing, and wireless operators will need to charge for packets until technology improves a lot - you just can't get a lot of capacity per cell, even with 3G.
I suspect that non-videoconferencing applications will take off first, e.g. sending pictures in email, multiplayer gaming, etc.
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 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.