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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'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?
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.
- 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
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.
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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.