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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.
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?
...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
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!
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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 $50.00 a month to participate in these activities.
Until then - now way.
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It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
How is this cheaper than existing cable system, which alredy have infrastructure in place and paid for?
Customer premise equipment is cheap compared the head end server/transmission equipment.
Maybe this would be cheaper in an area that does not already have cable lines buried under every street.
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
I guess I'm privilaged or something because I nearly choked on a life saver when I read that some people were paying anywhere from 80 to 100 bucks for cable internet. I pay about 30$ 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.
For the same reason people in Ontario say "hydro" when they are talking about electricity.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
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.