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.

Comments

Had in Hawaii

[nolife]

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.

Re:Had in Hawaii

[$pacemold]

It was MMDS one-way system by GTE Americast using Zenith settop boxes.

I have this.

[DamonCanine]

I live in a rural area and we've had this kind of service for a couple months now. Our service is advertised as 256Kb down/64Kb up, though we have been able to get faster speeds under certain conditions. And it uses a standard cable modem.

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.

Yes, since it's earthbound

[Gorimek]

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.

Hooray for timeliness

[kidterra]

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.