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Cable Without Cables
dfinney writes "'Wireless cable, which uses a network of land-based antennas to carry signals to and from a small dish at a user's home, is supposed to be cheap -- or at least cheaper than wired cable or wireless satellite service.'" Another possible alternative for high-speed internet is always a good thing.
Wireless cable. Can I get copper wireless, too?
Could that "cable" be a health hazard?
All I get with "wireless cable" is ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, WB, UPN and some spanish station. :(
Rabbit ears and broadcast antenas! :-)
It is strange and ironic how the wheel turns.
Ive had speedchoice Now spring broadband for more than 3 years now.... WHen did this become new technology? OOps more than 4 words..
There's no Freedom like UFP-dom
Does this make anyone else think of "The Emperor's New Clothes"...?!
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
Or MMDS, or whatever they call it...
is it not usually unidirectional?
If wireless cable were so great, don't you think cable companies would be using it?
"This will be the Southwest Airlines of subscription television"
Uh... has anyone else actually flown on Southwest? Talk about your bus of the skies. Frightening. But I suppose that would be the ideal metaphor for a TV/Net technology. Cheap, fast, and everywhere.
Plus, if the network "goes down", it's not quite such a bad thing!
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
No Login, No Hassle.
----
I sig, therefore I was.
Article, linked with the NY Times random account generator...
:) It really is annoying to have to register to read an article...
My first time karma whoring. Woa it feels weird.
Now I can use my scanner to read your email.
Even stranger than "Cable without cables" is the idea that there is an alternative to "wireless satellite service."
Do people actually have "wired satelite service"?
/humor
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
When I signed up with my ISP, they explained that the technology they used was originaly intended for delivering cableless digital cable. I certainly can't complain about it's utility as a pipe to the ISP.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
...competition will. If the winner of the spectrum auction in your area happens to also own the local cable company or satellite provider, then there'll be little incentive for them to pass the savings realized from the cheap infrastructure along to the customer. Blindly handing the spectrum over to Northpoint sounds stupid, but hopefully the spectrum will wind up in the hands of a company that will compete with other providers. If that happens, then consumers might actually see better prices, better service, and better product offerings.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
It's called the dish network.
And we also have satellite internet, too. It's Here.
Old man: I remember back in my day, we had this thing called "broadcasting". Yeah, those were the days.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Also, they don't seem to mention anything about end user equipment, though I imagine the ISPs would give that with the service.
One cool application of this is roaming wireless ethernet (ala Ricochet) for laptops. Imagine if you could get a PCMCIA card that would keep you online anywhere in your city for $40/month!
Ñ'
This is great! Now I can get cable internet from the car. But this does make me wonder, I thought the FCC was running out of bandwidth slots. Where are they going to dig up the huge amount of bandwidth necessary to support this?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
How cheap/expensive is broadband for people around the world? They're always moaning as to how expensive it is here in the U.K. (and wireless broadband is ludicrously expensive). Could everyone write a price in U.S. $ too for comparison?
Video Game cheats, hints a
wireless music? Some sort of internet radio, without ethernet? One can only wish.
--
insert <sig.h>
I tell you I am not paying a dime to watch T.V. or have broadband.
I wan't them to pay me. It's kind of like how I am buying a football stadium for a local multi-millionaire to bring money into our county.
The same logic should apply to the businees I bring to the web and cable t.v. I expect to be paid a minimum of $50.00 a month to participate in these activities.
Until then - now way.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
We implement cable service to our customers that are not wired to directly to our plant via Microwave signals carried from the nearest headend unit beamed to a small Dish Network style dish. We are able to support all the digital services as well as our advanced services like cable internet. These systems work fairly well however weather does play a fairly large roll in the reception, snow being the worst. However, it is much more cost efficient that running fiber optic cable through rural communities that in some cases don't even have basic copper wire laid. We estimate that in order to run a line 1 mile it's about $20,000.
I had this service similar to this for a few years when I lived in Hawaii. One inline conversion box and a splitter could easily run at least 3 televisions, broadband internet was not an option. It was excellent service and was priced about 5 bucks cheaper then the local cable company for roughly the same channels. The topography on Oahu allowed for decent line of sight coverage to many areas (round island with peaks in the center, hell its an old volcano). I do not know what frequency it used but the antenna was not dish shaped, it was an 18in directional pole aimed at the source. It did degrade slightly when it rained but still far more reliable then the wired service that we had. Thier service ended rather quickly though, must have ran out of money or the cable company bought it out. They never even came back to get the ant or the converter and my last months check for service was not cashed.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
We live about 20 miles away from our ISP, so it has good range potential, though admittedly we got lucky because we live on a big hill... If we lived in a valley a mile closer we wouldn't have been able to get it.
It's a good service, especially considering our only options here are "wireless cable", and crappy dialup service through the phone company.
IIRC, Bellsouth did this with its Americast TV service years ago when I lived in New Orleans.
Not a sattelite dish, it was more of a... horizontal bar on a pole with a tiny reflector. Looked kinda like a microwave antenna.
They were always horizontal pointed towards the same area of the city.. led me to believe it was local, not space based.
Anyone else know more?
The latency problem with satellite based internet is almost entirely due to the distance the signal has to travel to the satellite and back. Look up how far out the geostationary orbit is and you'll find the speed of light takes several hundred milliseconds to complete the roundtrip.
There is no similar reason that these signals should be delayed, so unless they screw up the implementation, it should be as fast as any other broadband technology.
I just signed up for this yesterday. your isp sends out uni-directional from some high point in the area and your directional antenna picks it up. all 802.11, so you can get up to 11Mbps(i get that ten miles out) and any bottlenecks would be due to your isp's connect. latency is good, but you need Line of Sight to the tower or your just screwed. if you have that many obstructions, you can probably get cable or dsl anyhow.
man i wish i was you
Not trying to be redundant here, but has anyone ever brought up anything about the risks involved with wireless _anything_?
I've always thought about moving my big clusterfuck of a network in my apartment to wireless. While it would cut down on the wires, which I always manage to trip over even though I know they're there, I've wondered what the health-related implications were.
Anyone care to elaborate who knows?
"wireles cable" isn't that an oxymoron?
If its wireless why even have the cable?
How is this cheaper than existing cable system, which alredy have infrastructure in place and paid for?
Customer premise equipment is cheap compared the head end server/transmission equipment.
Maybe this would be cheaper in an area that does not already have cable lines buried under every street.
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
My local ISP in New Zealand uses this type of land based system for more than 3 years.
It is a good solution for sparsely populated country. In cities, they set up land based stations. For rural area, users point their disk to the satellite...
But, it has its own catches. First of all, it is unidierctional. You still need to use your dialup modem for upload. They claimed that they were testing the bidirectional option 2 years ago. But, there is no progress since then... Second, dependent on the terrain, reception of the signal can be tricky... The land based tower should remain line-of-sight for the user. Hard to manage for hilly terrain or cities with lots of high-rise bldg...
Latency is an issue with satellite because of the huge distances involved
in going from the ground to the satellite. With a nearby (within a few miles)
antenna, latency should be no worse than with a landline.
A friend of mine had Sprint's wireless service for awhile, and it was pretty nice,
faster than my DSL line most of the time.
However, rain or snow can negatively affect microwave signal reception, so
your network may go out or get really slow at times.
As for equipment, chances are you'd rent it, maybe with the option to buy.
It's usually pretty spendy gear ($500+) so rental would prolly be the norm.
As for a mobile service, I'd guess it'd be pretty unlikely, since the antennas
have to be aimed fairly precisely, much like with satellite.
:wq
One ring to rule them all. The (_O_) in Goatse.cx
Too bad my first experience with it was less than rosy.
If you want to see a losing business strategy, check out lookTV.
These doofuses seemed to think that the best way to make money is to stop gaining customers. I would say the best way to make money is not to have such a losing busines plan.
They don't list their wireles service on their website anymore, but I remember this quote from heart (it still gives me a chuckle today):
"Due to increasing demand, we can no longer offer the look ultrafast wireless internet service to new customers".
LOL
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
This new digital wireless cable technology poses a grave threat to intellectual property rights. According to the article, this new infrstructure will be built within two years. By then, most Americans will have broadband internet access. Digital convergence of television makes it all the easier for people to pirate from the media. This will subesequently hurt the consumer in the long run. So, if we're going to spend the time and effort to set up a new nationwide communication infrastructure, we must also implement a digital rights managment scheme to accompany it.
-Linux was for the masses, who spoke, and everything was crystal clear.
It's called People's Choice there, though it (was) a 36 channel analog service that used ITFS and MDS channels in the 2500 MHZ range. One by one, the channels were being removed to be used by Sprint Broadband Direct, a high speed wireless Internet service. This stopped late last year, when Sprint discontinued allowing new customers to sign up for Broadband Direct (though existing subs still have the service). To my knowlege, People's Choice still exists with about 20 or so channels, though I have no idea how many subscribe to its service. It's my understanding that 10 or more digital channels can exist in the space of one analog channel, so this means that if people's Choice went digital then 200 channels wouldn't be out of the question....
I guess I'm privilaged or something because I nearly choked on a life saver when I read that some people were paying anywhere from 80 to 100 bucks for cable internet. I pay about 30$ a month for Charter. My pipe my not be a John Holmes but it ain't bad, no one who uses it seems to complain.
I think it is actually a good idea for the FCC to auction off rights to wireless cable to local operators, it will only provide due competition to the incumbant cable operators. There's a wireless company around here that while isn't terribly popular does have enough of a presense in town to keep Charter on their toes in terms of pricing and availability. Widespread situations like that will on the whole be good for consumers, they'll have more options than AOLTW, Adelphia, and COX for pay programming and broadband internet services.
However I do foresee a problem which is sort of inevitable with auctioning off so many small markets. There will be two generations of wireless "cable" availability. The first generation will happen in the next couple years after the spectrum is auctioned off. A huge number of small companies will be providing cheap(er) pay television and broadband internet initially. Logic will follow that because the material cost is so low since they don't have to run hundreds of miles of fiber or coax they will have a higher margin and can charge lower prices. THis will keep up until reality sets in and the debt from the spectrum allocation catches up with them. They'll go under and be forced to sell their aquisitions at a far far lower price than they originally paid, along with their subscribers and equipment. Who will buy this? The local cable and telcom companies who already have a veritable monopoly on those services anyways. Hughes and EchoStar combined have the market penetration of a small cable company. Local wireless operators hooking up with them to provide local television and broadband internet won't be able to provide service cheap enough (in my estimation) to keep themselves afloat and their assets will be passed on. The DBS guys could always aquire the wireless assets in order to grab a huge market for a pretty low cost.
Either way the first generation of companies will band together or get aquired by bigger players in the industry. Sound familiar though? It is what happened to most of the DSL and cable internet companies in the past year or two. The cost of aquiring customers and overhead from their debts was far higher than the money they raked in from subscriptions and selling information to direct marketing companies. They were then aquired by the big boys. Hopefully this doesn't happen but unfortunately it is likely. I would be happy if I were proved wrong though. Being able to get DirecTV and cheap broadband access would be badass.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
And there still won't be anything worth watching.
details: http://www.northpointtechnology.com/Spectrum%20Eff iciency%20White%20Paper.pdf
the Integrated Terrestrial Platform (ITP) proposed by Northpoint looks to be an optimal way to juice the wireless spectrum currently used only by satellite:
- logically aggregate pre-downlink traffic
- route national or regional broadcasts to satellite via feeder links
- route more narrowly focused content (local TV, video on demand, Internet downloads) to individual cells of the terrestrial network
what I find most incredible is that DBS (satellite) proliferated before terrestrial cell-based wirelss did as a TV/Internet distribution technology, especially given that radio relay towers have been around since 1951.
The infrastructure may be cheaper, but putting content on the air opens them to being hacked as the Dish folks are already painfully aware of.
If not i wonder how many channels you can snag~
If it IS encrypted~ I wonder how long it will be before someone breaks it.
You mean I could get wireless TV? Wow. What if this service were based on some kind of advertising system and not subscriptions... And you numbered the stations from ... oh wait a second.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Whe have something like this in sweden. basically we attatch a little box to the bottom of our tv antenna (the roof mounted one) with a cable leading to a set top box. we point it at the transmitter (which is on top of the water tower here) and we get about 20 different cable channels. What is the most interesting part is that you can also hook up a modem or ethernet to the back, and interact with other people also watching the same programs (specific interactive shows only). there was a game you play with the remote control, trying to touch people's asses. (the pointer was a hand) You connect with the box, play around, and try to win. you can still play without connecting the modem/ethernet, but you can't compete.
Anyway, for more info on this stuff, check out boxer.se but be warned, it's all in swedish.
Here in the Virgin Islands we've had high speed wireless internet for quite a few years about three...Here's a link it works really well. They've recently added MMDS digital cable with around 30 channels. This is pretty much the only option down here since the telco/cable co has a lock on all the copper on all three islands. For $100 a month i get 3MBits sdsl and 30 channels of digital cable it's great..I'm not sure of the brand of digital cable boxes the use Genstar? but the 802.11b radios for the internet are made by breezecom and are pretty sturdy hardware.
Just Limin' Mon
Considering free tv (aka boradcast) is made free with the use of commercials, why does pay TV (aka cable/satelite) still have them?
...that's it...i'm buying a tivo....
Is crapflooding Off-topic for slashdot?!?!?
Get THE FUCK over yourselves you spunk luving g00b3r.
We have this. We used to be paying around $60/mo for our 144k DSL (with additional IPs for all of our computers). This was the best we were able to have for a long time, because the phone lines on our hill are too old (think Oakland hills, and built in the early 60s). But now with Wireless DSL, we get insanely fast connections at something close to this price. I can get almost T1 bandwidth, on a good day.
:)
The antenna is small and round, and is so invisible on our roof that I had to look for where it was installed.
Our reception is super good, so other's mileage may vary. We live behind wirless DSL antennas (which are on top of our neighbours house), so we get good reception no matter what direction our antenna is pointing.
Yeah, this'll be secure, and I bet the ping times will rock my socks, too.
On the one hand, it will be nice for extending reasonable (ie, better than StarBand or something) broadband and cable TV services into rural areas where cabling is annoying at best. On the other hand, even Cisco Aironet wireless gear has frequent hiccups (and by hiccups I mean 4ms pings jumping to 600ms for a couple seconds every 5-10 minutes).
Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am, but every wireless option I've ever seen leaves a lot to be desired in terms of both security and latency.
Cabled Wireless???
"Bishops and Bookies live off the irrational hopes of mankind." Bertrand Russell
I'm paying $400 a month for dual channel ISDN with static IP. There has to be a better way. SBC adds more money each month to my bill. Its costing more than my house payment.
I'm really looking into some kind of wireless option. I may even get a T1 and supply the town.
The above is not worth reading.
Basically, all Northpoint is doing is DSS from land-based antennas. They're using the same frequency spectrum (ku-band), just broadcasting from a land-based transmitter. They're aiming the signal, essentially, at the "back" of the existing DSS dishes (which are all facing south) to avoid interference.
There's no way this would work in urban areas. DSS is line of sight whether the transmitter is in space or closer to the ground, and the fact is that for most people in urban or developed areas, the northern view towards the land-based transmitter is likely to be blocked. It's hard enough to get a clear shot of the southern sky in many areas, it'll be even harder with a target at a much lower elevation.
Will it be cheaper? Not from a client gear standpoint. It'll use the same gear as existing DSS systems, which is very heavily subsidized. You'll still need not only the dish, but also the converter boxes. Again, same deal, different target.
The big question is: will the cost of going out and putting up thousands of community DSS transmitters really be less than the cost of leasing time on one of the birds in the sky? In the long run, possibly, but certainly not in the short term. The provider will also have to pay the content providers, the HBOs of the world, the same prices for their content. There's no way that they can do it for the $20 price -- especially, if as the article states, they're going to have to bid for the local ku bandwidth as well as build out the transmitters.
As for the "high-speed access" for $20, well, it appears to be telephone return -- you'd need a modem to connect back to the ISP. It's like the old DirectPC product. Put simply, I don't think there's anyone out there who has ever been truly satisfied by one-way data systems.
I don't see them being able to actually price this out more cheaply than Hughes and Echostar, Hughes and Echostar have availability across the country via just a couple of satellites, and Hughes and Echostar have two-way data as opposed to Northpoint's one-way. It's good to have competition and all, and I can see how the technology could actually work, but they're full of it when they say it's going to be some sort of cheap panacea. It'll be just like satellite, on the ground... if they make it off the ground.
A Company called Warp-one.net in Jackson, MS (although their page seems to be down right now???) has been providing wireless internet service here for atleast 5 years. It is not as cheap as you would think...about $150/month for ISDN speeds. It did use equipment very similar to wireless TV and they also provided Wireless cable through their other company Wireless One. They also served many apartment compleses in the area with a wireless T1 and then used 802.11B to connect to an access point that was fed from the T1 for about $40 a month but you were restricted to 30kB up and down, and the server was always up and down (cheap equipment?, I was told they used non-cisco routers to save money and that caused a lot of their problems).
The service wasn't that great in the apartments, but was good with the home use because it used different equipment. But it was slow and not any better priced then today's cable and DSL. The range on home equipment was 30 miles, so this would be good technology for rural areas, but I don't see rural areas being that profitable because of the limited users for the distance and equipment costs.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
It was called "americast."
:(
-It was cheap (30$ a month for everything but hbo/etc).
-It was amazing quality (better than my digital cable by a mile)
-It had TONS of channels
-It was canned, due to limited possible penetration.
You have to have line-of-site from your antenna to the transmitter, and if you don't, you CANT get it.
You have to have a very specific geograpy for this to work. They got like 10% penetration in atlanta, ga, then gave up (number made up off the top of my head, i'm sure someone will correct me).
People's Choice TV did this in Detroit and Phoenix. Then they adapted it to do broadband Internet, and changed their name to SpeedChoice.
Brilliant stuff. 10-mbit performance over a microwave link direct to my house.
Then Sprint bought SpeedChoice, because they wanted the bandwidth to start Sprint ION service, which was to be business telephone over wireless link. Sprint ION went bust, and afaik the original television service was ended (I never had it).
The internet service (Sprint Broadband Direct) still works great, and was even improved a few weeks ago by the replacement of some hinky equipment up on the mountain. I'm getting 400KB+ download rates, which translates to a really well-performing 10-mbit Ethernet link mediating TCP/IP traffic.
But Sprint refuses to add new customers. So attrition will mean that eventually--and this is likely their plan--the Corporation Commission will let them pull the plug on it, and they'll sell the band, and leave me quenched until I can get something else.
What's apropos here is, anyone doing terrestrial wireless "cable television" will need to find the RF bandwidth in which to implement it. Not easy to do, especially when Evil Empires want to take it over to implement their own nefarious and ill-planned escapades.
--Blair
> This is great! Now I can get cable internet from the car. But this does make me wonder, I thought the FCC was running out of bandwidth slots. Where are they going to dig up the huge amount of bandwidth necessary to support this?
well, if you take a look at the northpoint site (http://www.northpointtechnology.com), you'll see that the clever thing about it is that the south-pointing transmissions to the north-pointing receivers don't interfere with the north-pointing geostatic satellite transmissions in the northern hemisphere, allowing reuse of the current satellite spectrum.
in other words, Northpoint transmissions don't register on satellite receivers due in large part to directionality, so they can use the same spectrum used by DBS -- voila! -- new spectrum created out of thin air.
The slashdot administrator known as "Michael" was responsible for bringing down
censorware.org
I advise you not to pay attention to his words. They are lies.
I bet the next big thing will be wireless TV with cables...
Am I the only one who finds the name wireless cable humorous? Damn, are they trying to confuse people with blatent oxymorons?
What signature defines me as a person?
Back in the early 80's we used to have a "wireless cable service" in Puerto Rico.
;)
granted, it was one way and analog, but the
same principle applies.
It got shut down cus the guy who ran the whole show rented movies, and played them on a VCR and never paid any royalties to the studios
This sounds like LMDS, a technology that I actually wrote propagation prediction software for about 6 years ago when they were just talking about LMDS. If that's the case, then there has been a test system up in NYC for quite some time.
It does offer high bandwidth for internet and Cable TV. The only real problem with it is that, like Satellite, it requires line of site to the transmitter. Unlike satellite, unfortunately, the transmitter isn't in orbit, meaning local topology can have a big effect on who can and can't get it.
I can almost guarantee that I'd be out of the running. I'm in a bit of a valley and no line of sight to anything but trees and a tiny bit of sky. When I say line of sight, it's real line of sight. No trees (except maybe in fall, after the leaves have fallen), nothing can be in the way between you and the transmitter.
Hope it works for other people, though. It should be able to provide excellent downstream bandwidth and close to what most cable providers are giving for upstream.
and so is your picture or internet service. As anyone with DirecTV can attest, Ku-band is horribly affected by bad weather.
Would this situation be improved with the transmitter on the ground instead of in space?
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
There's some whitepapers, patents, and other PR info available on their website, http://www.northpointtechnology.com/
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I live in a rural area where they refuse to bring cable or DSL to my house. The absolute best I can do is ISDN, and even that doesn't work very well. I've been anxiously waiting for 4 years for something, ANYTHING to replace my ISDN. I expect 4 years from now I'll still be waiting. Note to broadband suppliers: I pay $70/month for ISDN internet connectivity. Bring a wireless service to Portland, OR, at equal or less price and I WILL BUY IT!!!
basically figured out a way to reuse spectrum already in use (for DBS -- DirecTV and Echostar/Dish) by having customer antennas face north instead of south as the dishes do.
Anyway...the idea of wireless cable is nothing new. Many if not most old MMDS wireless cable systems have been adapted for broadband by a combination of new technology and looser FCC restrictions (i.e., allowing two-way transmission.) Sprint (Broadband Direct) and WorldCom (who, in typical Bernie fashion, offers only business-class service via MMDS) have bought most of the small analog wireless cable companies (Wireless One, Heartland, etc.); BellSouth and PacBell had digital MMDS TV-only systems but they've shut them down. The Northpoint idea just opens up more bandwidth...
-SC
I donno, I mean with the fear from everyone and their mother that communication signals cause cancer (mostly cell-phones), would people actually want that much more radiation being beamed toward them 24/7? Anyone with half a brain could probably see that its harmless low-level, but the public generally lacks that half. I wonder if they can guarantee safety with this system, I doubt they can get the backing of the populous without it.
I work in a machine and welding shop. There are only 6 workers in the shop and three were gone. In our little lunch room is a candy box full of treats. Every week or two an old man comes in and fills it back up and takes the money. No one really ever sees him, only glimpses as he leaves.
On that day with just the three of us guys, the candyman came. We knew he was there but didn't really care to notice anything else. After he had left,I went into the bathroom to pee. As I am going, I glance down to notice that on the wall only about 4 or 5 inches above the floor between the potty and the wall is a big piece of poop stuck right to the wall.
I ran out of there and told the others to come see. We had all been working together all morning and no one was in there. It had to be the candyman.
In addition to the great tasting sweets and cookies he left in the candybox, that kind old candyman had left us a big slimy turd stuck to our bathroom wall. Who knows how many candy wrappers have minute traces of that feces on them.
First Golem Post!
I am the Golem! This is my fifth dimension! I will send you the fifth dimension constitution. From this day on, I WILL BE RIDING AND SURFING ON YOUR CYBERWIND!
Why don't we all get to the punch on this wireless stuff, and get laser networks going? Aim a laser at your neighbour on the network, have a pulser 'modulate' the signal, and have a readout system sensitive to the level of light.
:-) And the signal would be very directional avoiding all sorts of interference. CON: A hefty lawsuit if you aim it into someone's eyes.
No more band allocation troubles!
Experiment!
So we've gone from TV broadcast by radio (or micro) waves, to Cable,Satellite, etc., back to TV broadcast by radio waves? Only difference is it's not local. This is good?
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Nokia is making a go at building wireless broadband solutions. OK, so the original article was about wireless cable distribution with data as a bonus. The "business plan" of going head to head with the cable companies just on price seems unlikely to work, especially with the FCC deciding the spectrum would be auctioned off.
When I was younger (8-10 or so - I'm 23 now) my family operated a small community cable television system. One of the options available to us then was wireless distribution. It certainly wasn't economically feasable for our small user base, but it definately existed.
Maybe this is new technology, but the description sounds identicle.
University - a box of academia nuts.
In addition, if the satellite supports 2-way internet (as DirectPC keeps promising), then the return path to the satellite is due south, directly into your northpoint receiver!
Conclusion: Only services with broadcast-only models (like television) can share frequencies using this technology. Data services, which are inherently 2-way, can not share frequencies with this technology.
So, long lines, no reserved place, crappy service, lousy food if any is provided at all, the worst lounges and the farthest gates... And I'm supposed to want this why?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We've had that here where I live for years and years. It's the gimmick (not that it's bad) of a local cable co. called SkyView.
In fact the ISP I work for uses their transmitters for our wireless broadband product.
The only trouble is: when the wind really blows, as it does a lot here, customers' antennae get blown off pointing at the transmitter, and the calls to tech support come rolling in.
This technology is unidirectional, needs line-of-sight, etc.
let's see:
-terrestrial wireless network
-line of sight from nearest repeater tower to customer receiver
-same downlink bandwidth as satellite
a satellite uplink is impractical for a large Internet subscriber base.
with terrestrial, on the other hand, why not have a transmitter at the customer dish to uplink back to the nearest tower, which in turn uplinks to its parent tower, and so on back through the cell to the head end tower, which has an Internet link?
the uplink radio transmission would be geographically restricted to the cell (thus not clogging a distribution point as central as a satellite). true, the uplink would need a radio band that:
-is different from the downlink band
-doesn't interfere with the satellite transmissions when it hits a DSS dish
it might not, however, need to be as big a spectrum slice as for downlink. besides, it seems as though it would be worth taking a slice just to have true uplink-ability instead of the phone line uplinks required for most satellite Net service.
Here in Southern California there was a company called Cross Country Wireless Cable that was around since ATLEAST 1994(I searched desperately for a link). They'd come out to your house and mount a little microwave antenna on your roof that would point to their broadcast antenna and as long as you had a good line of sight the reception was great and had just as many channels as regular cable. Pricing was also very competitive. It just wasn't digital. It seems the company was bought by someone else though and I'm not sure as to what became of the service. It seems to have happened a while ago too which is why I'm unable to find a decent link. The technology is definatly quite old though, now they're just converting it over to digital.
The 1 second ping times and frequent data accelearator downtimes renders it little more than a partial connection with occasional bursts of download speed, and with almost non existant upload speeds. Expect large data transfers over a single TCP connection to be corrupted. (e.g. large downloads over the web).
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Currently a starband customer. I made the leap because of no other alternative. Massive cost, not reliable. . .
:-(
I have been using WLL (256Kbps) for over a year in Venezuela and can honestly say it sucks. The technology is way too fragile for reliable always-on internet access. Granted, it can be that the morons running the service (Telcel Bellsouth) are just that, morons. But they have to continuously tweak the power levels in my antenna that is in a line of sight with their repeater and well within the distances allowed by the technology. Expensive (as everything in this country), slow, badly-supported. I have to live with it as its the only option in this place. Run, not walk away from wireless high speed internet.
MMDS and LMDS were originally designed to allow remote locations receive cable television years ago. The idea failed as the equipment cost and technical requirements were exhaustive. Sprint brought it back with their Broadband direct which is a MMDS implementation using 18" square panels for tranmission. A base station (usually on the tallest building in an area) costs about $600,000 plus the FCC license (plus kickback moneys). The base station can cover about a 35 mile range with bidrectional bandwidth in the 10 megabit range (it can scale MUCH higher). These cost are miniscule compared to a cellular or cable broadband network (which can run into the $10 million range for the same area). Why Sprint got out of it I have no idea. For dense urban areas like NYC it is a godsend where running cable underground can run into the millions for less than a mile.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
When I was living in Phoenix Sprint (I think it was) offered wireless internet access. They used the radio towers around the valley to give you access.
Let's hope they use WEP :D
Linux has given up its usefulness for graphical installers and Windowesque gimmicks. The code bloat is unbelievable. Unless you roll out your own distribution or use a minimalist distribution like Slackware, the default installs for RedHat, Mandrake, etc are huge, Windows-like monstrosities.
So what?, I hear you say. Linux is stable and secure. Wrong again. The Lion worm proved that Linux is not as secure as one might believe. The fact that VMs get changed in the middle of a stable release branch (2.4.x) shows bad organization.
It took Linux years to overcome its awful filesystem problems, and now journalling filesystems are available. But speedwise, compared to the FreeBSD FFS, they are slow and cumbersome, and have yet to prove as reliable. FFS Softlinks are a few generations ahead of any journalling filesystem on the market.
FreeBSD is far better organized, the ports and packages collections are better synced and more reliable, the system is more stable and easier to understand.
The firewall included with FreeBSD has been proven and has a far better track record than ipchains or iptables, the latter having security problems in its first week or release, the former having no stately inspection and being a complete mess due to its shell-script bound layout.
But Linux has more software than FreeBSD!, scream the Linux die-hards. What they fail to realize is that 99% of Linux software runs under FreeBSD. I haven't encountered a Linux program that didn't run under FreeBSD. Sure, I've heard reports by trolls that certain software doesn't work, but all the software I've tried works, in fact, even faster than the native Linux versions in most cases. To the VMWare troll: Yes, VMWare does work under FreeBSD.
FreeBSD vs Linux is a debate that won't ever be settled, but people who have used both generally prefer FreeBSD for mission-critical tasks. Those who claim that FreeBSD performs worse than Linux either haven't used FreeBSD or are trolls.
I won't say that FreeBSD is the best Unix variant on the market, but the best open source Unix variant? Yes. Solaris is still tops, but in terms of Free (Open Source) systems, FreeBSD is probably the best all-rounder. NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have their respective places, but overall, FreeBSD will probably take over most of the open source server market, at least in organizations with serious management.
Wireless cable uses the 2.7 GHz frequency. It was supposed to compete with regular cable until the satellite providers came in and provided superior programming at a much lower per-subscriber cost of transmission. (It's like the Iridium story backwards; their downfall was the proliferation of cell networks globally that deprecated their sats.)
Here in Chicago, we have those frequencies for use as "Wireless DSL" by Sprint. Maybe you remember that article?
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
I spent some time in the caribbean and this is how we received our "cable" TV. It worked, through all the weather we had, and was very good quality (considering the source of a lot of the programming was south american.) There was no internet broadband option. My impression of this technology is that it is most useful in limited physical spaces (like an island or dense urban area) and in markets where wired infrastructure doesn't exist, and is impractical to add. I suspect that this technology will not go mainstream. The general feeling on the island where I was visiting and knew several local IT people was that the government would not license private companies to provide internet access at a reasonable cost because it would compete with their governement monopoly on telecommunications. It was also the general feeling that given the limited coverage area and the geographic layout of the island, that with enough civilian interest, a renegade 802.11 network could be set up using fixed directional antennae and could cover the entire island at a reasonable cost, and that some neighborhoods already had local wireless networks.
With all the infrastructure we have in the US, I just don't see the need or use for this. The places that need alternate access (like rural plains states and remote wooded areas) probably wont be able to receive it anyway, so what's the point? Theres nothing new this tecchnology brings, it just delivers it via wireless instead of wires, and pretty much delivers it mostly to people who could obtain all the same services via wire at similar costs. I doubt this is the wave of the future.
This too shall pass.
Not to belittle the concept, but the term "wireless cable" reminds me of a mysterious product I once saw advertised on the side of a bus: "Oil-free Oil of Olay."
What are the chances of a hobbyist-initiate open standard network like this? I've got a decent antenna on my roof. What would it take for me to allow anonymous gateway access with 802.11b? I'm right on the edge of the coverage area for the local wireless providers, so why not extend it? If lots of people started doing this, we would soon cover the globe with a giant user-owned network. It would be possible for a truly free internet.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
"Wireless cable." An oxymoron with emphasis on "moron."
Hm. What's next? Seedless corn? Genuine baby oil?
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Australian Air
Move faster
Prairie iNet (www.prairieinet.com) came through the town I was living near last year (in central Iowa). They have a lot of transceivers in rural Midwestern towns; the antennae go on the water tower or grain elevator and cover a line-of-sight area within the town & surrounding countryside.
As I lived on a farm and the fastest access I had was a modem through miles of dirty telephone wire (24k baud on good days) I was excited about the service, but unfortunately:
- It has about a 4-mile range (I was farther out than that).
- It's expensive ($50/mo. + equipment rental, service fees, etc.)
- You need a crapload of hardware (cables, roof mount, PC connector cards or whatever) and you have to pay for the professional installation.
- It's slow. The absolute maximum speed is 256kbps. Residential service is 128kpbs.
It's a nice idea and I guess it's a good option (a lot of smaller towns have few or no broadband options, and in the un-cabled boonies it's a lost cause), but I couldn't afford to pay that much for packet radio setup that wasn't much faster than modem service.
Pacer
It is provided by a company called "SkyCable" (which also gives you wireless line-of-sight cable tv). You have to have line-of-sight to a tall building in the centre of town. It's super flat in Winnipeg, so that's not really too much of a problem.
There was a system like this in the UK for a while, it was called Ionica but it was fucked my nortel. It was a short life.
I have a friend, in arizona, who uses wireless broadband very similar to that described here
However, in bad weather conditions, it becomes completely unusable - especially during storms.
if it wasnt for the 12 month contract, she would have switched to cable ages ago due to the unreliable service
My sister and her husband have wireless cable, its kinda neat! They also have a cable modem on it!
My question is though, doesn't the bandwidth of the radio system not only limit the number of channels, but also the bandwidth reserved for the cable modem? What frequencies do these things run at?
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
Wireless Cable is not that bad as many suggest.
Here is Nigeria, it's a wonderful way of gaining high speed access to the Internet. The country is not well connected in terms of cable and so wireless options are really a great option; providing high speed Internet access that cannot be obtained using high speed modems over the PSTN.
Some say that it's easy to sniff the network, but it is not that easy because the information sent over the airwaves are encrypted. The devices used on the network (Cable modems) encrypt and decrypt information they send and receive over the wireless network. Even if it were possible to get a cable modem into promiscuous mode, you would still not be able to read other subscribers data easily without decrypting them first.
I would not argue that the cables are better than the wireless network schemes; however, they are still very good options in areas where it is not easy to lay cables.
Timba
There have been some nice advances on optical networks and now a few different people are doing optical mesh networks and a few people are working on optical point to multipoint systems. Since the optical systems work at 600THz they have a theoretical limit of about 3.6petabites/second based on all the current R&D lab stuff working well in production systems over the next few decades.
I used to work for one of these "Wireless Cable Companies", Wireless Broadcasting (based out of Denver, CO).
In order to overcome problems of terrains vs microwave signals we installed 40-60ft guy-wired masts on homes regularly or installed antennas/dish's in trees up to 150 high with long runs of aerial cable to the house.
And as if that isn't enough of an eyesore, "wireless cable internet" isn't wireless at all. The microwave signals are NOT 2-way but instead use your 56k modem and phone line for "upstream" communications.
Wonderful alternative. Glad I don't work for them any more. I'll stick with my DSL even if it is from Verizon.
And I want Laetita Casta to deliver my new Ferrari to me naked, so I guess we are both going to be disappointed.
Only in America would someone expect to get paid to sit on their ass and do nothing.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
There was a service in Minneapolis in the very early 80s called, I think, "Spectrum TV" that was a LOS DBS service that transmitted from downtown on the top of the tallest building.
I think you could get a very small, maybe even only 1, movie/sports channel(s), and it might have been HBO, too. It was before CATV was done in Minneapolis, so if you wanted movies you did this, put in a big dish or moved.
It wasn't encrypted and there was controversy about people pirating the signal, either by putting dishes on the roof and just not paying and/or hiding the dishes in attics -- most of the houses in Minneapolis are built facing east and have steep peaked roofs with attic windows facing north and south, and for lots of people that was facing the transmit point perfectly.
Of course it died as more people moved to the suburbs and when Minneapolis got its "advanced" two-cable CATV system. Every once in a while you can still see someone who still has a dish and hasn't taken it down -- mounted on a mast, connected to the chimney to clear obstructions.
I mean in truth it is, it's just being broadcast with a direction antena, we've had it here in canada with "look" for awhile. The speeds suck something horrible though.
Om, nomnomnom...