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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)."
.. 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
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)
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 :)
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?
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I have sprint's fixed wireless service and I live in San Jose.
,etc) to maybe two or three a week.
The service was pretty horrible a few months ago, but they sent out an e-mail to all the clients saying they would be upgrading the network soon and things would get better, and they actually (*GASP*) came through on their promise. The mini-outages dropped from 10/15 a day (by mini outage, I mean a 30 second - 5 minute period where the service didn't transmit or recieve any data, kicking you off IRC, stalling HTTP
The latency is still questionable, you get the same performance in online games as you would from a 56k, sometimes worse, and the upload speed is particularly sucky (about 10kB/s) but the download speed is unquestionably better than DSL and comparable to cable. I can usually pull 300kB/s from kernel.org on off peak hours, 200kB/s on heavy use times.
This service is particularly good for me because I'm out of range of both cable and DSL in my area. In its current state, I'd recommend it to anyone who cares more about download speed than latency, or those who can't get DSL or cable to begin with.
Another interesting quirk is Sprint provides the hardware and earthlink supplies the bandwidth and backbone connection, so I have the creeping feeling that earthlink's service will be exactly the same as Sprint's, except under a different name.
Can you imagine a MOSIX cluster of these?
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.
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.
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.
- 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
Sprint is still providing service to their existing customer base, however, they have suspended all new install orders.
It seems pretty easy to understand to me: they tried to expand too much too quickly, and their network's limitations started being painfully obvious. I actually had the service for a while in Arizona, as did some of my friends, and they had started to notice pretty high latency on their connections.
Let's hope this doesn't happen with the new wave of wireless companies that are venturing (bravely, I might add, in light of all that's happened) into the market.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
"... 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/
...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 live out in the boonies in Utah (Syracuse). I also have Sprint wireless, which happens to run over Earthlink's networks IIRC. It works excellently. I live 30 miles from the tower, and I get up to 600 or 700 KB/s download from fast or multiple sites, and 19KB upload. On a pget (see man lftp) from kernel.org, speeds are usually around 500KB during any time of day. There used to be occasional problems (500ms+ latency during peak hours once every few days), but now they are solved. My ping time to time-nw.nist.gov (which is hosted in Redmond, Washington, by you know who) is 41ms average in the middle of the night, and 50ms average during peak hours. Sourceforge is 61ms average. It sounds like they're using the same antenna system Sprint is, except that Sprint had a box in the house. Fixed wireless has been really great for me because I'm too far away to get DSL, Cable, ISDN, or even a 56k modem connection (26.4k is my max), and you can be up to 35 miles from the tower.
So, in summary, Sprint fixed wireless rocks (for me) in the bandwidth, tech support (they have live operators in the middle of the night with short wait times during outages), and latency arenas, and Earthlink probably will as well.
A solution to the problem with music today
> "... 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"
My wireless ISP (Comwavz - not recommended, unless it's your only option) installed a lightning arrestor in line with the antenna, and did some fairly serious grounding of it. They acted as if they -always- install one.
I'm not worried. Much more bothersome is the utility pole in front, which I've seen get hit, twice. No trouble to report there, either - except for a few seconds of darkness...
The installation, for the curious, consisted of hanging a plastic antenna, resembling a white Pringles can with the lid on, on the outside wall of the (attached) garage. Large (~1/2") coax connects to this, which then enters a plastic box -- also outside.
Inside this box is the lightning arrestor, which is in series with the antenna, and a splice for the two ground wires.
One ground wire sneaks down the siding to an 8' ground rod directly below - the other, across the garage attic, down the garage wall, under the house, and then to the main electrical ground. This is fairly stout wire - perhaps 6AWG - and solid.
The antenna wire, after the lightning arrestor, heads through the wall to a Cisco 802.11b access point just inside.
The Cisco box plugs into an RJ45 directly beside it, which I nailed up and wired prior to the installers' (there were two of them) appearance. I simply plugged this into the hub along with my computers.
With the hardware done, I helped them set up the Windows box to talk to the world. They didn't ask about my other machines, and I'm glad - they were scarcely qualified to handle Win98SE, let alone FreeBSD.
After they left, I removed the extra NIC from said windows box, and slammed it into my FreeBSD firewall. Set up dhcp (god bless the ports collection!), changed natd.conf, and was running.
I then collected the flashlight, hardhat, and bag of fasteners that they left behind, and put them outside in the rain - in case they felt like returning to get them. They eventually did, I think - or someone stole them.
802.11b, in this arrangement, seems to work quite well. Things are synced at 11mbps, and I never have any trouble with rain fade - even with near-zero visibility. Latencies are consistantly 3-4ms across the wireless link, and packet loss appears to be about nonexistant in all weather I've experienced since it's been here.
Of course, the tower is several hundred feet high, and only 2.2 miles away. I suspect others might have more difficulty, at greater distances.
Of course, things aren't all green. While the service is good (occasional router trouble on their end, plus one time when they called to tell us it would be down for awhile), I'm stuck NATted behind some firewall over there due to what they claim is a shortage of IP addresses. So, my IP is currently 10.3.3.53 or somesuch.
With PPP over SSH to a T1-hosted Linux box that I control, this isn't much of a problem for me, but it could be for others who are accustomed to having a real IP address.
Sometimes, I wish I still had the solid 24x7 static IP dialup I had before, but then I download a big file at a few hundred K per second, and those wishes vanish.
-
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
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.
Something that a lot of potential customers have discovered is that getting a landlord to agree to a 'satellite dish' is easier than mentioning wireless Internet at all. :(
I used this approach for my own install, but they'd still only let me put the dish on my balcony which faces completely the opposite direction