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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.
Rabbit ears and broadcast antenas! :-)
It is strange and ironic how the wheel turns.
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?
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
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'
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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