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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.
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!"
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 $20, well, it appears to be telephone return -- you'd need a modem to connect back to the ISP. It's like the old DirectPC product. Put simply, I don't think there's anyone out there who has ever been truly satisfied by one-way data systems.
I don't see them being able to actually price this out more cheaply than Hughes and Echostar, Hughes and Echostar have availability across the country via just a couple of satellites, and Hughes and Echostar have two-way data as opposed to Northpoint's one-way. It's good to have competition and all, and I can see how the technology could actually work, but they're full of it when they say it's going to be some sort of cheap panacea. It'll be just like satellite, on the ground... if they make it off the ground.
It was called "americast."
:(
-It was cheap (30$ 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
Most of the EMF fears are driven by a need to spawn a legitimate excuse to avoid some insufficiently legitimate harm. Power lines don't cause cancer, but *are* ugly and distasteful. Those who complain loudest about the lines are often pretty heavy power users, so they can't say power overall is bad -- but by claiming a health risk, they get to legitimize their desire for...well...somebody else to get sick. Just not them :-)
Cell phones are about in the same boat. Human social behavior evolved all sorts of methods for a third party to enter a conversation in the immediate geographical vicinity -- the sheer number of entrance rituals through the world's cultures is astonishing. Cell phones block this ritual quite effectively -- the speaker only works well for one listener, and the microphone ain't much better. Three person conversations become impossible; the person with the phone at best may alternate between two semi-independent two person conversatoins. This is really annoying to the third person, who likely has geographic proximity and thus a "greater" right to be talking to the person he *has* to be hearing (but not able to understand entirely, due to the one-way nature of the phone conversation).
Long story short, the third person needs a legitimate way to express his illegitimate complaint -- you're not paying attention to me, you're paying attention to this other, far away person. You should be paying attention to me. But we can't say that, so instead we say "You should stop killing yourself."
It's really not that much different than "Keep touching yourself, and you'll go to hell."
Anyway, once cell phone manufacturers make it trivial for third parties to link phones into geographically linked party lines (over bluetooth ideally, but probably with cell-tower multipoint aggregation for charging purposes), a decent amount of the cell phone angst will dissipate. Not all, of course -- conspicuous outrage is a decent method of gaining attention in and of itself, and those who discovered they could get attention by keeping their immediate neighbors off phones also discovered they got attention for that specific action.
Hell, if nothing else, it's something to talk about.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com