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Earthlink Launches Fixed Wireless ISP Service
rkischuk writes: "As an alternative to cable modem and DSL, Earthlink is launching "High Speed Internet Fixed Wireless Access". You lock a 14" square dish onto your home, and all that comes inside is the network cable that connects directly to your NIC. The connection is transmitted over radio waves, probably to transmitters mounted on local towers. Service seems comparable to DSL in both price ($42.95 / month) and speed (1.5 Mbps downstream, 128 Kbps upstream). No idea on the latency. Service is currently only available for pre-order in the Atlanta area. This seems to finally get the behemoth cable and phone companies from trying to monopolize such services, but brings the wireless providers into the mix (it's probably their cell-phone towers)."
Sprint tried it, in the SF bay area, and it died. Will Earthlink fare any better?
Test your net with Netalyzr
Sprint recently abandoned both it's ION offering as well as it's MMDS (wireless) product.
Given the strong ties between Earthlink and Sprint, I suspect this is the same product, only (perhaps) with a better marketing and support campaign.
Especially for rural 'last miles' MMDS remains the only truly practical alternative to, well, anything else.
probably? try obviously.
me
I swear between DirectTv, my FM antenna, Scanner Antenna, and Ham antenna on my roof one, and planes will start trying to land on my road or the FBI is going to show up and ask some pointed question about the last Bin Ladin Radio Tranmission.
Will Earthlink be liable for the sudden cluster of nine-headed babies in the Atlanta area? Or will these kids be autistic too?
They that would sacrifice their
mho.net, one of the oldest isp's in denver, colorado, has been providing that type of service for close to a year now. Works great for me! I get a pretty well rounded connection, with 1.2mb down and about 512kb up.
just my 2cents
It is really required for the dish to lock to the home? Assuming that the dish was repositioned with each new geographic location in corelation with the satelite and Earthlink provided full coverage, would it not be possible to bring this dish with you? For instance, how about bringing the dish with me when I visit my folks (again assuming the above hypotheticals)?
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
.. and all that comes inside is the network cable that connects directly to your NIC.
Actually, there's a power cable, too. The cell tower doesn't have that much power! From the faq:
Your equipment includes:
* A 14" square dish, which is mounted on the side of your home that best faces the Wireless Internet Tower.
* A receiver, approximately 14" x 10". This small box is mounted outside your home near the dish. This is the device that sends and receives data to and from your PC.
* A cable that runs from the receiver into your home. The cable will connect to an electrical outlet and to your computer's Network Interface Card (NIC)
I wonder how they mount the fairly big receiver box. Even though it has to be weather proofed and operate over an extended temperature range, there are far fewer mistakes that a customer can make with a CAT5 cable than an RF cable.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
So its a dish more DirectPc crap but this is even more expensive than that at 49.95 for only 40 hours a month! I use the net a hell of a lot more than that just reading /. Also if you download a lot will they throttle back your bandwith? For that much money I'd just as well get dual phone lines and get double the speed constantly for less than that.
shortrange wireless ISPs are old news, I thought?
/. is posting old news waaah waaah" I will posit this:
:)
Look.ca has been doing it in Canada for some time, although they've been in rough shape financially - perhaps they're out of business already?
At any rate there seems to be no shortage of 'em in Canada. I can't imagine this is the first in the US, either.
Now, in order to turn this thread / article into something other than another "groan
How long until "real" wireless internet is a reality? I mean not point-this-at-the-antenna-a-block-away, but real iridium-style satellite-driven internet? Those of us stuck on dialup in the middle of nowhere want to know!
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
This is exactly what Sprint got OUT of doing a few short months ago.
Now, given the close relationship between Sprint and Earthlink, it's quite conceivable this is the same service and equipment. It sure sounds like MMDS.
I used to work for at&t worldnet when they were testing their fixed wireless.. there are a ton of inherent problems with it.. first off, there are issues with interference from things from birds to weather / snow, etc.. and of course most people who actually played w/ the units and had all the specs usually said "yeah, it works ok, but i wouldnt install it on my house" (as in - the radiation is enough to leave me w/o any functional sperm) .. so good luck to earthlink .. perhaps they overcame those hurdles :)
This seems to finally get the behemoth cable and phone companies from trying to monopolize such services, but brings the wireless providers into the mix (it's probably their cell-phone towers)."
Earthlink *is* a behemoth cable provider...
The last thing I want to do is run a hunk
of Cat 5 from a lightning rod into my machine..
Forbes has an article on Fixed Wireless Internet Access services. Fixed wireless ISPs utilize Multipoint Multichannel Distribution Services (MMDS). Interesting read, although the article only covers Sprint's service.
What do you think of MusicCity now?
If this has better latency than the lousy mini satellite dishes who do I have to beg to get it here now?
I've been waiting forever for my cable company to give me broadband. Originally I was promised by the end of this year. Last month they promised it would be the end of next year. My phone lines are so bad I can only connect at 19.2k and I still get disconnects regularly. Its very difficult being a professional web developer working from home when my internet connection is so miserable. I WANT MY BROADBAND.
Dozings.com -- Its kinda funny... If you're as crazy as me.
This seems to finally get the behemoth cable and phone companies from trying to monopolize such services, but brings the wireless providers into the mix (it's probably their cell-phone towers)."
what the hell is he talking about?
as someone who just had their fixed wireless equipment removed, I was not too pleased with the way that AT&T did fixed wireless, and I don't see earthlink doing it any better.
In Vegas, AT&T was able to generate a good-sized customer base pretty quickly, and they deployed the equipment fast. But, they went bankrupt. I was paying $35/month for 512/128kbs (same price as cable modem in town if you own the modem). If AT&T couldn't make money doing it, I don't see how earthlink could do it.
The infastructure costs are very low compared to cable or dsl, but the equipment cost per user is greater.
Just wondering how users would be authenticated
Would they be using pppoe or some other system..
The latency you get from wireless...Well at least with my home ISP is excellent. I gamed alot, and i could connect to a server in florida at 40 ms.
Although the area for the wireless was limited(reached about 8 miles from the towers), they did have options if you had a laptop and wanted to be mobile. It was very easy acutaly. Small dish(not sure how small but it is small) or if you were within about 2 miles a small(2inch) intenna that you could attack and be mobile.
The idea sounds great, but if the service is given by radio waves. One would have to guess that the strength would be something like a Digital Cell phone signal. If this were the case, wouldn't DSL or Cable already be in the area. Making this a technology that may be "Betamaxed" by cable and DSL?
You know who I think is crazy? All my ex-girlfriends!
I might buy one for my neighbor... when he's out.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Tons of small ISP's have turned to fixed wireless using DSSS or FHSS 802.11b as a way to route around their local telephone companies and the cable monopolies. Most people will tell you that wireless service is better than DSL and Cable. The only limitations with it really are interference in highly suburban areas and line-of-sight. But even in heavily populated areas FHSS is pretty reliable.
i ves/
The most popular mailing list for these types of small wireless ISP's is here:
http://isp-lists.isp-planet.com/isp-wireless/arch
An organization created by alot of these wireless ISP is here:
http://www.wispa.org/
and you can find wireless ISP's in your area here:
http://www.bbwexchange.com/wisps/ Some of these WISP's have thier systems attached to Grain towers with their equipment covered in bird shit, but they're doing somethings the big boys aren't, like making money.
The latency is still going to be high and it will remain constant for the forseable future. Round trip time is about 250ms for statellite communications and until we can increase c or make our atmosphere smaller, there isn't a technolgical solution that will make the latency problem go away.
I think it'll fare pretty well considering all the people PO'd with ATT and @home right now.
Good luck to this project, because heavens knows that I'd get it if it was avaliable to me.
Okay so mabye that is a bit of an exageration but this is something we have had in oregon for over a year and a half (fireserve.net). and it's cheaper! not to mention that it is a bidirectional 256kbps link. It works fine in snow too (which we have a lot of on the ground). I guess the big difference is that we have nice tall mountains close enough to put the towers on.
Mabye it's like everything else that oregon does first that takes everyone else to catch on.... Bottle refund law.... Assisted suicide law...
Realistically, though, I don't think there's a real market for it. Deploying 844 satellites (or whatever it is) is prohibitively expensive for covering that 1% of the population of people that can afford this stuff.
- It's lightning fast. They only have a handful of subscribers in my area though, so it is unclear how well they will deal with demand.
- It is very reliable. We have had maybe three outages, two of which were caused by the crappy openbsd router panicking for no apparent reason.
- Rain fade is an issue. It doesn't cut out completely, but it is noticably slower when the weather is bad. Same goes for snow; it caused us some packet loss.
- They haven't completely figured out how to do billing accurately. We have gotten about two months for free because of their mistakes. Oh well, they are a big faceless corporation so they can afford it.
- Installation was a snap. Compared to pointing a DirecTV dish, this was *very* easy to set up.
- Latency is sometimes not cool. But I don't have the time to piss away on games and it's good enough for telnet/ssh.
Many of my friends are just itching to replace their overpriced DSL/cable modems with this. I wish Earthlink the best of luck in expanding this service everywhere; the demand is there.freebsd guy
Should that be must-be-in-@lanta dept? *Slaps self with wet fish*
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
That there's a phone connection needed for that
128kb uplink.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...with a local ISP using 802.11(b?) equipment and parabolic antennas. They've been doing it for quite a while (relatively speaking) and apparently have been having good luck with their setups. At $48.95 for 500/500k it's comperable with cable and DSL ($50 each at 768/128 and 1500/128 respectively). 500k incoming isn't very exciting these days but 500k out is faster than any other consumer system available in the area.
Latency should be decent and I don't have to deal with the fools at SBC PacSmell. Those jokers took a week to tell me it would be a month before I could get a phone when I moved into my current house. My roommate's moving out and they say they're "required by law" to shut down the DSL service, turn off the line, then turn the line back on and set up DSL service again. Only 5-6 weeks. Can't say I'll miss dealing with them. Our cable company is still sticking to their moronic "no servers" policy so they're out of the running, too, despite their excellent startup time of 2-3 days.
One of these days, the Bells and the cable companies will figure out that alternative connections are showing up all the time.
and mindspring.
;-)
This is old hat for us in the Phoenix metro area. Our uplink is provided via South Mountain, and the fact that Phoenix really is a big valley.
The download rate is nice most of the time, however latency can hit and hit with a vengeance. Continuous ping will yield anywhere from 80ms to 420ms which can get real irritating.
Interesting thing, my provider is sprint, my e-mail is earthlink, my start page is mindspring and my network is speedchoice.
Yes you too can have the security through obscurity, that is wireless!
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
I've been on the verge of getting a similar service that StarnetWx just started in Chicago but that offers 2 Mbps both up and down for $40-50/mo. They seem to have a smaller dish (12" square) than the one mentioned in the story but otherwise seems to be the same technology.
.. so far his best offer is to put the antenna in the balcony but Starnet isn't sure if I'll get enough signal there.
I'm still working on convincing my landlord to let me install it in my apt
First, Sprint didn't create the service, they bought it. Second, it hasn't died; in fact, I'm using it right now. It has worked flawlessly since I got it about a year ago. Throughput and latency are both as good or better as any wired connection I have ever had.
This looks to me very very much like a setup using 802.11.16 or the like. judging from the upload and download speed. It is easily conceivable that one could set up several transmitters in only a few locations around Atlanta (since 802.11b's optimal range is 16 miles) and cover the whole city.
C =2 90425
When the transmitter is less than 20 miles away, matters such as latency aren't so much a problem as things such as air collision.
However I doubt everyone will be able to obtain the download speeds advertised, since any amount of interference, like bad weather or anything else on the 2.4ghz band, will cause the speed to drop in half.
If anyone would like to read up on this you can see the antennas at:
http://www.netnimble.com/antennas.html
And of course the orinco wireless router at:
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.asp?ED
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Linksys, D-Link, Netgear and several others make them. They're called Cable/DSL routers w/ Wireless Access Points. They all work on the same principle of outbound WAN port on one side, smal hub/WAP on the other.
Avery Zero
Exactly how is an analog phone uplink going to achieve 128k?
Daniel J. Kelly
I have two of these, one at home and one at work. Due to their creative billing capabilities, I only pay for one of them. :-) The high cost of end-user equipment is offset by a one-time payment (non-refundable) of ~600 USD. This gives you 5 or 10 meters of high-gain RF cable, a choice of three antenna sizes (medium, large and Mr T), a Breezenet SA-10 Station Adapter and some clamps to put the antenna on your TV antenna pole, chimney, wherever. The monthly fee is $30 for up to 3 Mbps (this is the maximum radiolink bandwidth, you have to be pretty colse to a tower to get that, I typically get 2 at work and 1 at home (longer and there's a tree in the way. Now, where did I put that chainsaw?).
Authentication is done by logging in to a webpage (DNS and traffic within their network works when logged out, but port 80 is basically blocked without the login. This means that I can ssh or do a Terminal Server login from home to work even if both networks are logged out). They log you out for inactivity, but a ping -i 600 wherever.com seems to keep it alive. The DHCP lease is for 24 hours and I have lost my (public) IP three times in a year, all of them due to major maintenance of the login servers.
This all works beautifully, except for Telenordia's inability to manage 24/7 server capabilities. I get some rain fade and snow issues (especially with the large, wet flaky, kind) but no fried sparrows and no other major issues - both my kids have just one head each. :-)
Standard disclaimer: Your bandwidth may vary.
Money for nothing, pix for free
I'm fine with DSL for now, but I can't wait till I can lock a transceiver onto a litte tripod inside my window and get a gigabit connection over infrared laser to a satellite.
(1.5 Mbps downstream, 128 Kbps upstream).
I don't know about YOUR DSL service, but MINE offers a 256k upstream. (The web-site only promises a 128k though, so apparently not everybody is so lucky...)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Earthlink and Sprint have been partners for a while. It seems more likely that they're just using the Sprint Broadband service.
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
Come on. Bring it to the place that counts, silicon valley and the rest of the bay area.
snowulf.com
EarthLink High Speed Internet Fixed Wireless Access offers downloads at speeds up to 1.5 Mbps, which is equivalent to DSL and slightly superior to cable at its fastest. This service offers upload speeds of 128 Kbps, which is equivalent to DSL's maximum upload speed.
Ummm... My cable modem says: Both of which are considerably faster than 1.5Mbps
"... but brings the wireless providers into the mix (it's probably their cell-phone towers)."
Not really... most of the towers are owned by companies like American Tower, SBA, Signal One, and others who just lease the space to anyone who can pony up enough $$$.
http://kf4lhp.net/telweb/
Can you moderators be more clueless.
That was not a troll....you wouldn't know a troll if it crawled out of your Daisy Duke [update:www.YEO.com] lunchbox and ran off with your 30 day old plastic fork.
...but Earthlink isn't.
.zip files from Sprint's 1-hop FTP servers at 6 Megs a second.
If this is the same technology as Sprint Broadband just got out of the business of selling (as posited in an above posting), then yes, this is a "Lightning Fast" connection. I can download
But. As soon as the hopcount hits Earthlink on it's to the internet, things slooooooow doooooown. I can top out at 150kps, but only on the best of days, and it's usually more like 50kps.
Also, latency isn't bad until you hit Earthlink. It's about 50ms for the 1st 3 hops or so. It ramps up to 200-300ms once it hits Earthlink.
Bah weep granah, weep ninny bong!
I find it amusing when people worry about the radiation "danger" from using a wireless radio network point.
Here's news for you -- the radiation from the tower is already reaching you! If anything, stand behind the receiver, it'll reflect some of the incoming photons...
And since the antenna you install on your house is fairly directional, I doubt signal leakage produced by outgoing radiation is going to be causing you trips to the oncologist...
goatsex
Availability To get EarthLink High Speed Internet Fixed Wireless Access, you need a clear, unobstructed view of the nearest tower in your area
Does that mean if I cant look out a window from the top story of my building and SEE one of thier towers, I am out of luck?
Another article on that
If this is anything like Sprint's wireless service, it's not a short-range wireless, unless 35 miles is considered short. Whatever protocol they're using, it seems quite resilient to load (as many as a third of the houses around here might be using it) and interference (the dish was covered in snow for a few days, and I didn't notice any problems, although I have a perfect line of sight to the tower 30 miles from here -- that's right, a perfect 30 mile long line of sight).
As for the possibility of satellite internet, there's no way to do it and have latency lower than 500ms (as pointed out by someone else), until we can transmit using subspace or torsion fields or something like that...
A solution to the problem with music today
Read my plight before you hurt me moderators.
Around january or so I was looking for a good deal on DSL. I called around everywhere, pacbell kept insisting that I wasn't in a coverage area for POTS service DSL. I kept calling every ISP I could until I got in touch with sprint...
Now here is where it get's hazy.
The sales rep at sprint told me THIS WAS DSL. I repeadedly asked him because I knew about the sprint wireless service and he assured me that it was DSL. I asked him 7 or 8 times at least. I went ahead and authorized the service tech to come out and install it. My retired neighbor was gonna let him into the house to do the work.
When I got home that night a small crowd of about 4 or 5 neighbors were out in front of my house pointing at my roof and talking about something. I got out of the car and low and behold THERE WAS A FRIGGEN 15FOOT TOWER ON MY ROOF!!! The sales guy had obviously lied to me, I was really ticked off.
I figured I would give it a try before I canceled it. It sucked horribly compared to a real wired connection. I called my salesguy back and ripped on him, then I asked to be transferred to his manager and ripped on him for a while. I reminded them that the winter season was approaching and if there was a single leak in my roof I would sue for something, let the lawer figure out what it is.
That night, around 8pm they had another tech on the roof removing the equipment. A week later pacbell changed their tune and I got my DSL self install kit and was up and running.
Considering sprint's track record with long distance slamming, this did not surprise me in the slightest. If I controlled every geek on slashdot I would make them NOT buy anything sprint because they basically slammed me, and falsely represented their product. Since I don't control the geeks, maybe they'll just read what I just said and make their own good choice.
> "... brings the wireless providers into the mix (it's probably their cell-phone towers)."
Why bother with cell towers... the power company owns more towers, is much less likely to worry about future competition when fixing lease rates etc... and most of them are already leasing space on their towers to lots of other companies for traditional radio relays etc. The power co I used to work for even has wan connectivity to a lot of local towers for that very reason... truck radios etc, broadcast only as far as the local tower, any relaying is then done over land line.
"42"
The wireless is being provided by a company called Broadlink. Due to my employment with Earthlink I can't go into much detail (damn NDA), but here's the skinny. Customer Joe Bob has the install, he gets the receiver and a cpe. Broadlink has both routing and bridged cpe's, but for the consumer account Earthlink is going with the bridged configuration, and yes that means PPPoE. The receiver connects to a Wireless Access Point (WAP) by microwave of which several are located in a city, and the WAP connects to a "exchange", and from their onto Earthlink's network and then the Internet (sorry for the lack of detail but I like working). Installation time has yet to be seen yet since we're just coming out of beta testing, however it is a full install so I suspect it should As far as the performance goes, we've testing here in the office for about two months now and it has worked flawlessly, ping times range between 8ms and 15ms (the drool on my face was quite noticeable after seeing this since most other "broadband" services have really crappy latency). The speed is set for 1.5 megabits but I have seen it burst up 2 megabits. The Broadlink people seem really cool and have a lot of knowledge on the tech involved unlike like most of the ILECs and CLECs I deal with on a daily basis **cough** **cough** **Verizon**. As far as Sprints involvement in all of this it is non-existent.
In Germany almost a dozen companies started rolling out this technology (since late 2000).
Almost all (but one) have either ramped-down / ceased operations, and several have gone bust. A lot of this was due to the market downturn = financing slashed, but it shows that this stuff ain't that easy to make money with.
From personal experience I can say the technologies are reliable and powerful when implemented right, but it's expensive stuff and not exactly "plug-n-play".
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
Almost forgot to point out, that if Earthlink wireless does use 802.11b, it is possible that it will interfere with bluetooth devices, since they both use the same 2.4ghz band. I would be sure to call and find out if you happen to already be using bluetooth stuff.
, 41 61,2470132,00.html
1 in ter.pdf
See:
http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~wireless/papers/bt_8021
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Slashdotters bitch about a lack of last mile broadband and then when someone rolls out yet another broadband scheme and people still bitch. I spent a year in an apartment with shitty phone lines which got me a whole 24kbit dial-up connection. Now I've moved back into an area covered by Charter which means I once again have a cable modem. I haven't had any complaints about it yet. Fixed wireless I don't think will replace DSL or cable but it will definitely augment it. Even in a decent sized city it can be tough to have everywhere covered by either DSL or cable. My apartment for instance didn't have cable and PacBell fucked up DSL here so bad it is ridiculous. There's plenty of places here in town that either don't have coax to splice onto and are too far from a CO or DSLAM to get DSL service. Most parts of town probably have a direct line of sight to at least one radio tower (well when the smog isn't so thick that your visibility is cut to about four feet).
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So the dish plugs into the receiver box, and the receiver box is mounted outside - it would make more sense to have the dish outside and the box on the inside - now it doesn't have to be ruggedised (which can be a considerable cost) hailstones are a bitch, and the receiver box now provides some isolation between the outside environment and your internal LAN.
Maybe I'm being overly worrisome, but i can't help thinking of buildings that have been connected via wire with no isolation from each other and the potential difference between each other frying some electronics.
Look Communications has been providing line-of-sight dish-based wireless Internet service in eastern Canada for over two years now.
This is nothing new.
my friend in Ok. has wireless access from his friend's uncle's ISP, he has a max speed of 2mb/s up and down...although he only get's about 1.5 both ways. His latency is almost nil...getting 7ms to the towers..and and avg of 55ms to yahoo (that's right now) - so ping isn't real too bad, although I get 24ms to Yahoo on my Verizon DSL account. His avg ping to me is 88ms and vise verca is 79....but...there are a lot of factors with his, such as I'm running the pings on his Sparc...which could slow things down..I'll see if he can't run them from his NAT machine. But, as I was saying..I host a website off it, an internet radio station too: http://madc0w.shacknet.nu
Well I guess this is why they are trying to charge me multi-system access to my single dialup account for which I cannot possibly have more then one system connected (1 modem and a hard switch between 2 systems). I wonder how many other people they are trying to do this to, you know, to subsidize this wireless deal..
My ISP is Dash (www.dashfast.com), which operates a wireless system using Breezecom hardware in the Pittsburgh area. Dash is a subsidiary of AES. The antenna is all but invisible compared to satellite systems. Cost is @ $50/month and the service/support is rock-solid (so far). The best part about Dash is there is no AUP or FAP, etc., you can run a network with no extra charges and they even provide "how to network" information on their website.
I hope Dash makes it long term, as our cable provider has announced that it won't even consider Internet service in my neighborhood for at least 3 years and DSL is also unavailable.
I have a user in my office who is dying for any kind of high speed access to his home to use for VPN back to the office. Was wondering if anyone has had any luck using a VPN over this at all?
This sort-of sounds like Sprint BroadBand direct, except they're not trying to claim it will be as fast. When I got Sprint BBD, they claimed 5MBit down, 256kbit up. And I still can get ~5MBit down (apt-get'ing from http.us and non-us), but I've never gotten more than 10kB/s upload.
Your comment about crap phone lines in apartment buildings made me think... I was recently in a hotel in Mumbai (India), where they had ADSL from the hotel room to a comms room in the hotel (i.e. re-using the existing phone wiring), and then a leased line to an ISP.
This is a great model for apartment buildings where there is no prospect of re-cabling with 100baseT or fibre - you can justify a high-bandwidth connection across a range of guests (the leased line was too small for the size of hotel, but bandwidth in India is expensive until deregulation hits the monopoly telco a bit harder), and of course you get what looks like an ADSL service to the end user. The same model would also work for older multi-tenant office buildings where there is no Ethernet cabling pre-installed. xDSL is a great way of getting decent bandwidth out of legacy copper, whether it's in-building or (more commonly) the last mile of the public phone network.
To make this slightly on-topic, the uplink to the ISP from such a building could of course be fixed wireless, which is good for rural areas or suburban areas with poor cable/xDSL coverage.
Where I live, DSL is out of reach, and SWBell has no timetable to extend it. Cable modem is being "tested" in our area, but not in wide use. And the quality of the phone lines themselves is such that I was lucky to get much above 28.8. SO, in steps Nucentrix, a wireless microwave ISP here in the Austin area. For about $70/month, I get a 354Kb/s download (actually bursts well above that) and a 128Kb/s upload. If I wanted it, for about $230/month I could have T1 speeds.
Upside: Latency is tiny (nothing like those satellite wireless solutions) and the speed is great. Works fine in good weather and bad, and I'm even a good 20 miles from the tower.
Downside: more expensive than DSL/Cable, is only available if you have line of site to their antennas, and requires installation of a truly ugly antenna on/near your house (in my case, 30 feet tall). It's hideous. It looks like we're aiming a deathray at Austin.
Nucentrix was originally providing cable TV via microwave to rural areas for years, and have now added what is basically a cable modem to the end of a microwave antenna. The product is going to be a niche... I don't see these deathray antennas popping up on every house. But for folks with my combination of problems, Nucentrix makes a great solution.
[this is kind of a repost of comments when we discussed this last Dec 6...]
"Sure, he can surf the web. But his experience using our VPN is, to say the least, unpleasant."
Dang. I owe you.
I have a user doing the same thing and he's been bugging me about the speed - indicating that it was the database he was in or our firewall or...well *us*, not him. "Why does every keystroke take so long?"
Welllll...now I have the answer. Unfortunately, he spent a wad of money for his satellite connection. He won't be happy.
As always, the bearer of bad news.
here in kamloops, bc, canada our rates are
$39cdn/m for cable 1-2Mbps down, 512Kbps up
$39cdn/m for dsl 1.5Mbps down, 512Kbps up
$39cdn/m for wireless 1.5Mbps down, 1.5Mbps up
no waiting list for either, hell they give you irst two months free and a free webcam. no contract.
thats $25usa/m for your choice. why so expensive in the usa ?
Chris Lee
lee@mediawaveonline.com
I tried to get the Sprint wireless service a while back. It would work if I put a 40' pole on top of my house, to see over the trees. Not exactly allowed by the homeowners association. :(
Microwave has severe limitations if you have any reasonable amount of vegetation in the direction of the antenna.
- Necron69
Those of us lucky to live in Northern Ohio were the first to have cable modems, back in 96 with Road Runner and we were also the first to have wireless internet access (too bad I was living in Silicon Valley at the time) http://www.windcastbroadband.com/ has been here for over 2 years providing wireless internet for the town I grew up in, and moved back to; Norwalk, Ohio and surriunding cities. Supposedly it isn't affected by rain or heavy snow, which is something I'd like to see in action. But as they insanely charge $750 for the install (they give you a wireless router and some other things) I haven't even considered switching to it. No idea how they stay in business, but they do.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
A DSL company I supported was trying to break into this market when their sole DSL supplier (Northpoint) bit the big one. It would have really changed things, not having to be at the mercy of both Northpoint and Verizon installers who constantly pointed fingers at each other when installations didn't go well.
They had a running demo and the latency was pretty minimal. They had the potential for 11 Mbit transfer rates to individuals at the time (mid summer). It woulda been nice, but their VC (remember those guys?) chose to sit for 6 months before making a decision. Unfortunately, the company couldn't wait that long, and when they heard, they folded pretty much the next day.
Pity, really.
The problem with Sprint is that they are a large company that tries to solve problems by spending large amounts of money and not using common sense. To see what is going on with the broadband wrieless industry, people should look to see what the smaller ISPs are doing with wireless technology.
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I actually worked for SpeedChoice, the company that Sprint bought for its new two-way wireless technology that had been launched in Phoenix before SpeedChoice was bought out.
The first mistake Sprint made was running off the engineering team that invented the two-way wireless system. Sprint's managment team figured their PCS wireless guys knew enough about MMDS to do the same job as the existing engineering team and besides they all had MBAs and were much younger and wiser than the experienced MMDS engineers.
The second mistake was selling the service at a price point that was too low. During SpeedChoice's initial launch in Phoenix, we went after business customers that could afford $150+ per month. This was a great deal compared to a $1,000 per month for a T-1 that these customers would usually buy and this price point would cover the cost of the expensive CPE equipment and the truck roll necessary to install the equipment. But instead of serving 500 customers at $200 a month, they decided to serve 20,000 customers at $50 a month. Providing customer service to 500 customers would have been a much easier and responsive scenario than 20,000.
If you are interested in the broadband wireless industry, the companies to watch are the smaller guys that are real entrepreneurs that have very little money to work with and that are very cautious on how they spend it. They are quitely building out broadband wireless networks across America one cell at a time. This has been going on for several years, but since they are smaller companies, they don't have a PR or marketing staff to churn out press releases on the progress they are making.
As the editor of the Braodband Wireless Exchange, we have been tracking this market for a long time. There are well over 1,200 companies in this space serving over 1,400 small, medium and large cities with fixed wireless service. To prove this point, please check out our nationwide directory at http://www.bbwexchange.com/wisps/
There was also a story on Cnet recently that might be worth a read.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-8179971.ht
The BWE web site is basically a giant electronic press kit for anyone who wants to learn more about the fixed wireless industry and track our progress. The site has everything an entreprenuer needs to research, plan, build and manage a wireless ISP. There are tutorials, white papers, research, magazines articles, directories of vendors, system integrators, consultants, etc. Basically everything you need to build out a wireless ISP.
It is worth a look if your neighborhood or business park cannot get access to DSL, cable modem or fiber optic access. The wireless technology is inexpensive, mature and fairly easy to implement compared to working through another carrier to build out or resell another carrier's network infrastructure. Wireless connnections let the ISP own the broadband connection all the way to the customer and they have to pay no one for the right to reach the customer. There is a tremendous benefit to this approach.
Broadband Wireless will keep growing and may eventually gain the same respect and recognition as other larger broadband competitors.
If this was 'around january', wouldn't the winter season already be upon you, not just approaching?
As far as sprint's quality goes at the consumer level, I wouldnt know since I live in VerizonLand, but they've always been good at the enterprise level. We had a great experience with a bundle of sprint T1s until politics forced me to drop them for AT&T. I guess I'm biased because our sprint account rep was this hottie blonde ("You want to set up a 3 hour meeting to talk about SLAs? certainly!"), and the AT&T guy that replaced her was a speed-induced ex-car salesman who laughed through his nose.
So I wouldn't dog them too hard -- Sprint for the business and Sprint for the consumer are two very different worlds.
My experience (in Phoenix) was exactly the opposite. The sales guy was knowledgeable, and the installer friendly and somewhat knowledgeable. He spent most of his time pounding an 8 foot ground rod into hard clay, so I kind of felt sorry for hime anyway. My antenna barely sticks up over the roof, and I get download speeds close to what was promised. Latency is not bad, but I'm not a gamer. It will be 2 years before we get a required cable upgrade, and we'll probably never have DSL (thanks to qworst). I'm very, very happy with this solution.
Use the spatula, Luke
I've already got this. Not Earthlink's version, but the same thing provided by another company. I get 1Mbps in both directions, unlimited usage and a static IP for $120 a month after tax. Damn slick.
There is no latency. The antenna itself is a direct 10Mbps link to/from their equipment located on a mountain, roughly ~5-7 miles away (line of sight).
Other than the fact that they've had problems with their upstream providers (they've switched a couple of times and bandwidth has suffered), it works great. A little expensive, but I run all of my servers over it with no problems.
Maybe Earthlink will buy these guys out and put a real backbone behind it. It would be nice to get my full 1Mbps (most of the time I get 500-800Kb), assuming they'll offer a faster return path - 128k doesn't cut it when you're hosting web sites.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
In the Norther California area BroadLink is a well known provider of wireless internet. We can choose for a whole list of ISPs(Sonic.net is my favourite www.sonic.net) I haven't had it installed yet(scheduled for thursday installation) but their people were nice, knowlegable, and easy to contact. I'm thrilled thus far.