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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.
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.
.. 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)
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
I do fixed wirless in Sioux Falls SD. From home I get ping times of 25-45ms there is really not that much latency. Even folks out 15miles are under 70ms
(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.
I think nonocephaly is incompatable with life, and likely to result in spontaneous miscarriage or a very limited life span.
That said, the medical effects of EM fields are an important consideration. I was really excited about working with 802.11x until somebody mentioned not to look at a high-gain antenna because it would "turn your corneas white like fried egg whites".
OTOH, if there are any real consequences from normal use of such technologies they are minute. I actually feel better about having the antenna on the roof than I do about having a cell phone right next to my head.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"... 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!
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.
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.
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...]
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.
m l? tag=mn_hd
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.
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