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Garage Tinkerers Claim Wireless Last-Mile Solution
BrianWCarver writes: "The NYTimes is reporting that two guys in their garage have designed a low-cost wireless broadband solution that can transmit up to 20 miles. (A previous story described a 7km achievement in Australia.) Their company is called Etherlinx and they use the Wi-Fi 802.11b standard in a repeater antenna that people can attach to the outside of their homes. The technology, which apparently costs under $100, has been operating in a small for-pay trial in Oakland, CA for a year. Is this a solution to the 'last-mile' problem, hope for rural areas, and the death of cable/DSL? Read and be the judge."
How many nodes can you stuff on a single broadband account, and how many favors can you think for your neighbors to do for you, anyway?
I don't think I will be ready to trade in my dsl till they show how fast these puppys can connect at.
username: privatenospam
passwd: privatenospam
I have several friends from the upper midwest (North Dakota and South Dakota). While dialup is available everywhere and DSL within 18K - 30K feet from small towns, there really is no broadband solution for the fairly large number of homes located 15 - 30 miles from a town with any services. Some areas are more than 50 miles from anything modern. Montana and Wyoming are even worse.
What would be *really* helpful would be some solar+battery powered WiFi repeaters located thruout the countryside (perhaps bolted on the side of analog cell towers?) to serve these areas.
By JOHN MARKOFF
UPERTINO, Calif., June 7 -- Anyone looking for the next big thing in Silicon Valley should stop here at Layne Holt's garage.
Mr. Holt and his business partner, John Furrier, both software engineers, have started a company with a shoestring budget and an ambitious target: the cable and phone companies that currently hold a near-monopoly on high-speed access for the "last mile" between the Internet and the home.
At the core of their plan is the inexpensive wireless data standard known as Wi-Fi or 802.11b, which is already shaking up the communications industry, threatening to undermine the business plans of cellular phone companies by offering a much cheaper method for mobile access to the Internet.
The pair's company, known as Etherlinx, has taken the 802.11b standard and used it to build a system that can transmit Internet data up to 20 miles at high speeds -- enough to blanket entire urban regions and make cable or D.S.L. connections obsolete.
Their secret weapon is a technology known as a "software-designed radio," which has permitted them to create an inexpensive repeater antenna that can be attached to the outside of a customer's home. The device, which the Etherlinx executives said they believe can be built in quantity for less than $150 each, would communicate with a central antenna and then convert the signals into the industry-standard Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, signal for reception inside the home.
Because of the staggering costs of wiring the nation's homes for high-speed networking, only 7 percent, or 7.5 million homes, now have high-speed Internet access, according to a February report from the Federal Communications Commission.
The two Etherlinx executives say they have a religious fervor to change that by making broadband available widely and cheaply.
"We're bandwidth junkies, and I can't imagine a world in which people don't have broadband," Mr. Furrier said. "That's our mission."
Without venture capital backing, in a garage just six blocks from the garage where Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak launched Apple Computer 26 years ago, Mr. Holt is making his clever and inexpensive radio repeater by modifying inexpensive Wi-Fi cards, the circuitry that sends and receives the signals.
Although he has partially broken with the Wi-Fi standard, he argues he is doing just what the unlicensed radio spectrum was originally set aside to encourage -- innovative wireless network designs.
Mr. Holt, a 54-year-old software designer and engineer who began his career at the Lockheed Corporation in Sunnyvale, Calif., replaces the software that supports the Wi-Fi 802.11b standard with his own code, thereby dramatically extending the range of the cheap, mass-produced hardware. Each repeater contains two cards -- one that Mr. Holt has enhanced and another that is able to speak the 802.11b standard to a home computer.
Today, while most of the Wi-Fi industry is working on a more complex technology known as "mesh routing," which involves lashing together hundreds or even thousands of short-range transceivers, the Etherlinx developers believe they have found a crude, cost-effective approach that is capable of leapfrogging the last-mile problem.
"A French engineer would say this isn't the most elegant solution," Mr. Furrier said, "but we didn't care about that. We took advantage of these cheap commodity chips and we just wanted to make it work."
In doing so, they say they believe they not only will be able to skate around the cable and phone companies but dodge the growing industry fears of congestion in the unlicensed Wi-Fi radio band, which is also supporting competing uses such as Bluetooth, an alternative, short-range wireless standard, as well as some wireless telephones.
"The Wi-Fi industry is heading for a train wreck," Mr. Furrier said.
The Etherlinx technology has been operating in a small for-pay trial in Oakland, Calif., for a year. The company began trials here last month using an antenna atop a high-rise building in neighboring Campbell, Calif., where the company has its corporate offices.
Etherlinx is already beginning to attract serious attention from both government officials who are interested in last-mile solutions and corporate executives who believe the lack of high-speed Internet connections is the biggest obstacle to growth in the computer industry.
"We have a huge incentive to see the last mile open up," said Graham Wallace, chief executive of Cable and Wireless P.L.C., one of the world's largest Internet backbone companies.
To attract industry attention, Etherlinx cobbled together a demonstration antenna on the back of a Jeep Cherokee and took it to an industry conference in Southern California last month. Parked in front of the conference hotel, the founders were able to show Intel's chief executive, Craig R. Barrett, that their technology was capable of offering Internet access to the entire hotel as well as to the homes on a ridge behind the conference center.
"I don't think there is a method that has emerged yet as a winner," said Leslie Vadasz, a veteran Intel executive who heads the company's venture arm, "but we are talking to these guys. What they have done is a very smart way of reusing engineering that has been done for other purposes."
Etherlinx began the for-pay trial in Oakland last year after the company failed to get venture capital in Silicon Valley. The company is now selling Internet service commercially to about a dozen customers.
"The V.C.'s are licking their wounds and they don't believe us," said Mr. Furrier, a 36-year-old networking engineer. "That's why we have taken a go-to-market approach."
So far, the company has been run on about $200,000 in private investment -- far less than the tens of millions of dollars that have been poured into other Wi-Fi startups.
Etherlinx is not the only company taking new approaches to sending wireless data over longer distances in the unlicensed portion of the radio spectrum. The communications and computer industry is now at work on a second-generation standard known as 802.16, which is intended to address longer-distance communications challenges.
The latest efforts follow the collapse of an earlier attempt to establish a commercial wireless industry based on line-of-sight technology known as the Multipoint Microwave Distribution System, or M.M.D.S. Giant companies like A T & T, Sprint and WorldCom and startups like Winstar and Teligent all developed M.M.D.S. service, but they have either halted development on their systems or declared bankruptcy.
Industry experts said the M.M.D.S. technology failed in part because it required the receiver to be within sight of the transmitter, but also because it required expensive installation and a huge upfront investment to license the spectrum from the government.
"The cost of the license for the spectrum killed them," Mr. Holt said.
Etherlinx is by no means alone in its approach.
Several other companies are also beginning to explore alternatives not requiring line-of-sight that they believe will be more resistant to interference and will be easy for customers to install without expensive on-site help.
Nokia has a research group in Silicon Valley that has been trying to develop such technologies, and Iospan Wireless Inc. of San Jose, Calif., and Navini Networks in Richardson, Tex., are selling products that are along the lines of the Etherlinx approach.
However, Mr. Furrier said he hoped that speed would outweigh size or capital in determining the success of a business in the market. In addition to the company's Oakland trial, Etherlinx is planning to offer commercial service in Campbell, which is not currently served with D.S.L., and in wealthy surrounding suburbs such as Los Gatos and Saratoga.
He argues that the absence of venture funding has actually been an advantage for his company.
"What we've hit on is a low-cost design point and used our fast design to get to market first," he said.
Well I know the theoretical speed is published in the standard... (and I've conveniently forgotten that too) But are there any realistic published speeds? What about speed vs. distance degredation? And speed vs. subscribers in 20 mile radius ...etc????
You're quite the John Travolta, aren't ya? :-)
The linked site leads with a story by the infamous John Markoff. Hopefully this story has some facts in it.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
What about 'em? Isn't that the more low-cost alternative for broadband access in rural areas? But I have to clue about bandwith and pi(iiiiiiiiiiiii)ng.
So they've been testing it for a year? How come in our dot-com-future that this took so long to hit the streets (or better the rural farmways)?
0 001 11 1
DSL available in small towns? Maybe in the midwest.
I live in Burlington, NJ. It's technically a city, but really more of an overgrown town in the middle of the Philadelphia suburbs. We'll be getting DSL service about the same time hell freezes over.
I live in Iowa, Armstrong to be exact. We got sick of waiting for a for a large company (ie qwest, mediacom, ect.) to come in with broad band, so our town of around 1100 people spoke with our local phone company, cable company, and our current ISP. Our ISP let us use them as a backbone provider, and our phone/cable company became our dsl provider. They even put some of the green boxes in the country, so availability is very wide spread. It's a little bit more expensive than normal, I pay $5=60 for 256k/s (even though I get 1.2 megabits, a resriction of the modem) but it is better than dial up!!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
It's best for people like me - I live only 5kms (3miles) from the city limits - on an acreage. Due to low population
c fm ?selected=250
....
density, the Telco is in no rush to get DSL setup for us!
But there is something similar to this article already offered in Alberta (Canada eh?) :
http://www.oagroup.com/airlink/forbus_Overview.
Don't know if it's the same technology as they haven't (yet) responded to my requests for more
detail
....before They squish it, like the 200 mpg carburetor, Cold Fusion, and the personal levitation device invented in 1956.
I don't think this is a last mile solution for broadband (at least in denser population areas) so long as it uses that stretch of unprotected spectrum. With the growing level of noise as the equipment becomes more commonplace I would really need some type of guaranteed reliability before adopting this. Tho I must admit, it is pretty nifty nontheless.
A large group of FCC agents decended on the town of Cupertino, Ca. today to investigate reports that no cordless phone will work within a 20 mile radius of the town.
Keep Austin Weird!
If this tech really is a viable replacement for DSL then I want it. I only live 20 Miles from Liverpool and we still havn't got cable TV let alone cable internet.
No patents mentioned, for example, which kind of implies that even if this does play nicely in the contended 2.4Ghz band, it will be assimilated by an incumbent. Perhaps (being cynical or realistic as you prefer) that's the idea though: hype a "new" technology, then sell out to whichever Big Business offers you a cheque to go away and stop generating awkward questions from their customer base.
Kudos for providing a good laugh though:
I take it that's "unhackable" in the Oracle "unbreakable" sense of (soto voce) "Claim is for advertising purposes only, has no basis in reality and should not be inferred to imply a warranty of unhackability or fitness for any particular purpose."
Hey ho. As they themselves say, seeing is believing. I'll believe it when I can either buy it or replicate it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In fact, you were no way near first post, loser, and you will shortly be modded to -1, redundant.
It's well known that WiFi causes cancer and affects peoples brain waves and sleeping patterns. Studies by the Sweedish Public Health authorities have confirmed all of this in detail. The wireless industry has been successfull in surpressing all of this for years, but once the cable providers hear they're about to get cut off, all of it will suddenly become public, causing a flood of testimonials about dead relatives to appear on Oprah. The invisible microwave menace is about to be exposed, and we'll all be able to return to a happier time when radiation induced mental illness was unknown and nobody lived long enough to contract cancer.
The power regulation of the 2.4GHz band in Europe is severely limiting the growth of community access wireless networks[1]. The UK currently has additional regulation[2] which also disallows ISPs from making commercial use of the band.
[1] 100mW EIRP.
[2] Seems to be under review at the moment.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Whatever normal people are inventing cheaper, corporations will find a way to implement it not that cheap...
"Their secret weapon is a technology known as a "software-designed radio," which has permitted them to create an inexpensive repeater antenna that can be attached to the outside of a customer's home. The device, which the Etherlinx executives said they believe can be
built in quantity for less than $150 each, would communicate with a central antenna and then convert the signals into the industry-standard Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, signal for reception
inside the home."
Alan Clegg described pretty much the same thing with off the shelf hardware at Summercon recently. Except his solution was staying inside 802.11b and using a 2.4Ghz amplifier.
Granted, his objective was different and the "new" solution is a couple of bucks cheaper, but there are already off-the-shelf solutions that are there for the picking, without adding another licensing layer to the solution.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
"By the use of innovative software, firmware, and data networking algorithms, EtherLinx can take standard 802.11 hardware components and deliver unprecedented security and speed at a cost structure that is far superior to current wireless and wired methods."
"We have operationally "lit up" the South Bay and Oakland areas with 2MB Ethernet"
Not so hot.
I dunno. How long before the folks in Cali start to get up in arms about being subject to your internet transmission waves. They could cause cancer!
Maybe if they just ban the waves from public places....
After reading through their site, I found no real details of what they are claiming.
They claim 20 mile connections: OK, I can believe that, since I have some running at 26 miles. A guy in British Columbia has some connections running nearly 50 miles. Nothing new here.
Their product acts as a "repeater" from the customer premise: Again, nothing new here. Nokia has a reasonably well designed product called RoofTop that also works at 2mbps.
I would be curious to see how they are addressing the issue of spectrum re-use, since 802.11b only has 3 clear channels to operate on. In a haphazard deployment using customer premise equipment to repeat, RF collision is terrible. What happens during a power outage in a neighborhood? Does the whole area drop out, or is the homeowner required to provide UPS? What happens when the unthinkable happens, and a key repeater/customer terminates his service, and that repeater has to come off the house?
So many questions, so few answers
As someone who has worked with 802.11b outdoors, There are some problems they are going to have to overcome.
1) Outside, you are pretty much limited to line-of-site. Bodys containing water do a great job of blocking the signal. This includes people, trees, cacti, etc.
2) The problem with repeaters is that, if an early one goes down, the rest of the chain looses the connection. When hoping to span great distances, this is a problem.
3) hopping via repeators will cut down on bandwidth, and you are limited to very few hops before you get some severe latency
4) There are limitations to the amount of power you are allowed to use to boost a signal, from the spec:
---- begin copy & paste ----
(3) Except as shown in paragraphs (b)(3) (i), (ii) and (iii) of this section, if transmitting antennas of directional gain greater than 6 dBi are used the peak output power from the intentional radiator shall be reduced below the stated values in paragraphs (b)(1) or (b)(2) of this section, as appropriate, by the amount in dB that the directional gain of the antenna exceeds 6 dBi.
(i) Systems operating in the 2400-2483.5 MHz band that are used exclusively for fixed, point-to-point operations may employ transmitting antennas with directional gain greater than 6 dBi provided the maximum peak output power of the intentional radiator is reduced by 1 dB for every 3 dB that the directional gain of the antenna exceeds 6 dBi."
---- end copy & paste ----
So, while their plan sounds interesting, they have some serious issues to overcome, and I don't see how they are going to do it with off the shelf parts. I'll wait till I see a working prototype before I shell out my VC
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
They're known for:
Meatballs,
Borking,
Saabs
Thanks, but I'll wait until maybe the CUBAN'S come up with something.
This is just what I need for my parents. They have rickety wireless phone (around 10km) and are lucky if they get over 28kbs connection. ISDN will probably never be available there (and I'm not even dreaming about xDSL). Just put up ISDN in some residence in the nearest town, 2 atennas, and voila, decent connection. I do hope that this is for real, I would be ready to try it out.
Go to this url, http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html and paste this address into the form:R E.html&submit :-)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/technology/10WI
Then just press submit. It'll create you an account and log you right in. Nice and simple!!!!
that anyone took this seriously. Doesn't the part about Oprah and the testimonials reveal this as a joke? I was hoping to be moderated up as "Funny" but instead I'm a "Troll!" Boo Hoo!
we've been giving legal opinions even though majority of us saying 'IANAL'. Now you want us to be the judge? IANAJ, but....(here we go)
That is almost exactly identical to my situation. Soon now I will look into getting a T1 and then using 802.11b and letting my neighbours pay for it.
The sales of Pringles shot up 124% this quater. "We can't explain it," says company execs. "Young IT professionals just can't seem to get enough of our chips"
all the history channel ever shows is WWII crap over and over and over...but that's another story
I like to call it the Hitler Channel.
What the heck, why does this justify a NYT article. Basically, they have an 802.11 card, in a small formfactor PC of sorts, with probably some custom built access point software. Their are only a few dozen companies that offer the exact same product, since it is just vanilla 802.11. http://www.musenki.com/ is one, with their M-3 product. 20 Miles? Woopity, anyone can get that with 802.11 and an high gain attenae/amplifer. Their are a multitude of companies offering this service with the same equipment. http://www.techsplanet.com comes to mind. NYT journalist should do their studying before they write lame articles.
Jeff Knox
From the article: "A French engineer would say this isn't the most elegant solution," Mr. Furrier said, "but we didn't care about that. We took advantage of these cheap commodity chips and we just wanted to make it work."
Since when was French Engineering the best? The Eiffel tower is full of holes, they gave the Statue of Liberty to New Your and it's falling apart, they can't even put up a security fence to keep people out of the channel tunnel!
I say "A French engineer would be too busy drinking wine, making love to his mistress and kissing his male work colleagues (possibly at the same time) to even get round to thinking about this device, but we got it working. Now we're done, pass the Buckfast, and does anyone fancy a quick snog?"
This piece shows the hazards of relying on journalism vs. engineering journals for assessing the potential of a company. I had to wonder, why was this company able to get the attention of the NY Times, when it seems as though there are better funded companies using comparable technology.
Details like Etherlinx's garage being a scant six blocks from Jobs' and Wozniak's first garage are cute, but they tell us less than nothing about the company's potential. I couldn't help wondering if Etherlinx hired some media-savvy marketing person, whose job it was to unearth cute little details like that in order to get journalists' attention.
Finishing that article, my main feeling wasn't "Gee...it sounds like these guys have some great technology that might overcome the last mile issue." Instead, I came away thinking, "How was it that these guys got the attention of the NY Times without demonstrating anything substantially new?"
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
has anyone noted how arguments about processors never really win anyone over. AMD's good, Intel's good too, the competition keeps the price down, and the consumer wins. yay.
Now just imagine if there were such competition for a certain software company in Redmond...
This is a great idea, but the NYT article leaves a number of questions unanswered.
;-)
First: It says they used 'software' to extend the range of the system. I don't see how that's possible unless there's some software tweak that increases the transmitter's output power beyond legal limits. Even then, I question whether the transmitter could handle such overdrive for extended periods as a device designed under FCC Part 15.
Now, with that said: It -is- possible to enhance existing WiFi hardware with a better antenna, but the transceiver in question would have to have a connector for an external antenna designed right in. You can't just attach something with a clip-lead, and hope it'll work; Not at 2.4 GHz!
Next up: I've checked Etherlinx's web site as well. It is, if possible, even less detail-rich than the article. I plan to send an E-mail query to try and dig some details out of them.
Another point: Something that the WiFi peddlers are all neglecting to mention is that 2.4 GHz is (among other things) an amateur ('ham') radio band, and that ATV (Amateur Television) on that band is getting to be mighty popular, especially in the Bay Area. Slashdot has already run an article on the issue of low-power interference on 2.4 gigs... I can't help but wonder how well a big WiFi network would deal with the output signal from an ATV repeater when said signal could range anywhere from a couple of watts to the amateur max limit of a thousand watts.
And no, there is no regulation protecting Part 15 devices from interference. Quite the opposite. Read the label on any such device, and you will find that it is 'required to accept any interference, including that which may cause undesired operation.'
Just as one example, Carnegie Mellon University has, apparently, already taken this problem into account. Note this article from their Computing Services folk. They don't even want other 2.4 gig devices in operation on campus because of their own WiFi network.
Finally, the issue of security on WiFi has already been beat to death, but I'll mention it again anyway. I don't believe it's possible right now, outside of using some heavy-hitting 3rd party encryption hardware at each end of a link, to get security that's as good as that available on hardwire networks (One word: AirSnort). If anyone can prove me wrong on that point, please do so and I will cheerfully shut up about it!
The 'death' of cable or DSL? Not bloody likely. Not until it can offer the same security as hardwire, be interference-free in both transmission and reception, offer the same SPEED as you can get from hardwire, and can do so for a price that won't run us all into the poorhouse.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
They provide broadband over the air. It's simply DOCSIS piped over the airwaves. The bonus is that these guys are actually using FCC regulated space, so they won't have cordless phones and microwave ovens interfering with their service. These guys are able to transmit 30 miles, and their installation is up and running in two locations right now.
Now just imagine if there were such competition for a certain software company in Redmond...
What do you want? OS's? There is Mac OS, flavors of Unix and Linux, Palm, etc etc etc.
Office suites? Star, Corel, etc.
Browsers? Netscape, Mozilla, Opera
Media players? Well, ever hear of Real
Your dancing should be classed as an offensive weapon. I think it's given me post traumatic stress disorder.
That was classic intercourse!
Starband, one of the satellite broadband providers, filed for bankruptcy recently, as late as last week I believe.
The latency issue is killing all of the satellite services, as is the cost of providing it.
As long as major companies like AT&T are gobbling up smaller companies, and Congress is removing all semblance of competition, these companies will continue to gobble up all the bandwidth until just a few companies own it all.
And as long as that is the case, they are going to purposely keep supply short so bandwidth prices remain high which renders broadband-to-the-home just about as useless or expensive as it is today.
If these companies would open up their pipes, or at least 10% of the bandwidth they're holding back, the prices would plummit and having a 10mbps 2-way connection to the house would be cheap.
These companies are actively resisting commoditizing bandwidth. That's the major reason Enron collapsed. Enron was known for commoditizing non-traditional markets. They bet the whole company on trading bandwidth as a commodity and all the big telcos shut them down.
Apparently AT&T and the like prefer colluding with their "competitors" to reduce supply and keep prices rediculously high.
We are a WISP (wireless ISP) outside of Philadelphia. While our area does not lend itself to 20 mile shots, we have been doing shorter range service. Our service is just starting up and more information is available at gambitwireless.com. I know of other WISPs doing the 20 mile shots with amps and within FCC regs.
--derek
gambitwireless.com
With the financial difficulties that the cable and telco's are having, they will fight tooth and nail to keep this new flavor of broadband access in obscurity. Broadband and related services are one of the few parts of their companies that have potential for future revenue growth. Where else are they going to be able to expand their revenue base....? Digital cable? Not likely. Too many people don't want to pay the premium over standard cable service. Long distance? Hardly. There is no real margin in that anymore. Cellular phone service? Possibly, but almost everyone already has a cell phone of some kind. The companies that get more maket share will be the ones who can package better deals. The telecom/ISP industry is very weak right now and will remain so until demand increases and after some more consolidation in the industry.
"That is almost exactly identical to my situation. Soon now I will look into getting a T1 and then using 802.11b and letting my neighbours pay for it. "
I looked into a satellite transceiver for the same purpose : http://www.c-comsat.com/english/default.asp
But the linux implmentation needed a custom ($$$) router from Helius (http://www.helius.com/)....
Two software guys designing hardware - uhh... I smell disaster!
Until they hire a guy who knows how to use a spectrum analyzer, I can guarentee you they won't pass any certifications and are probably interfering with aircraft and satellite users...
Damn, we're reeling them in today, aren't we!
YHBT.
YHL.
HAND.
I think we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, here. Wireless is not a secure solution out of the box. I'm sticking to wires. After all, my desktop using ain't that portable... nor do I want it to be. :-)
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
The old 700 mhz frequency is coming open with the FCC soon. Why not set that aside for data transmission?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I hope this gives the high speed providers some healthy competition. We've been push around by high speed providers for long enough. I think it's time to push back.
How secure is the Linksys Powerline product in an apartment complex?
Also, how well does it scale if everyone in the apartment decides to "plug in"?
Great idea! I can see it now:
Tripping through the countryside, taking your trusty cutters, collecting solar-powered WiFi repeaters as we go.
Wide open areas are notoriously hard to patrol regularly.
I'm in Fargo, grew up in Bismarck. This kind of stuff would be perfect up here. We actually can get wireless at T1 speeds for fairly cheap, around 50 bucks a month. It is so flat that there are no obstacles to worry about.
I work for a dial-up company now and most of our customers are actually from out of the towns, within local calling range. We tried wireless but it was just too unreliable.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
like the Magic Box hoax?
SCO to Hell
why are people so cought up on the "last-mile" problem when even more people have the "I live 50 miles from town problem"
A 802.11b based wireless repeater at does 20 miles for less then $100? How are they going to eat all those pringles chips? Does bbq have a better range then sour cream and onion? Seriously, this sounds like what wardrivers (www.wardriving.com) have been doing for a while now. An empty pringles can and $25 in odd parts and you can create your own antenna with a 10 mile range. Guess this just makes it that much easier to "explore" a few networks in the next town.
Just like all other last-mile broadband solutions it has some major disadvantages. Such as: 1) snow and heavy rain = no link, 2) limited to line of sight only (most cities are semi-flat so this is a real problem), 3) infrastructure needs to be built. Unless there is some better way to do the antennae at both ends, especially at the upstream link, this is not even remotely a viable solution. Right now every connection would require it's own medium gain antenna (even if it is only an inexpensive can) which needs to be mounted with a line of sight to the home / biz and needs to be connected to the POP. As in the bad old days of the telephone when each line required its own wire you can see that this kind of situation rapidly deteriorates into insanity (imagine the necessary thousands or tens of thousands of antennae on the roof of the ISP). Other methods might be possible, but then you move away from the "off the shelf cheap solution".
--
He lied to us through song. I hate when people do that!
I'm sure these guys'll be found face-down, dead, in a ditch within the next year. The telcos are never going to go for this. Probably won't change anything though. Wires are dead!
For all those who are boasting 10 miles with PRINGLES Cans. Please tell me where your located. And I'll fly down to witness this spectacle. I've been working with pringles antennas and theres no way you can generate enough dbi to get that far with a 9 inch pringles can.
so we're discussing 20 mile links here?? I'd hope people who boast these figures could prove it theoretically and not waste everyones time!
WiFi rocks!
iStumble
They don't have to fight tooth and nail, they've got monopoly superpower, they own the backbone and they keep it expensive through totally deceptive, yet absoultely legal means. You learn about this when you go to buy a piece to start your wireless ethernet network and their eyes roll back like a shark preparing to eat and they start rolling off these new car salesman stories about how the backbone was built with these future services in mind like video conferencing and various voice telephone service add ons that nobody in their right mind would buy for the prices they're talking about. As a prospective ISP you wonder if they're totally insane. They must realize the market isn't like they think it is, but then you realize they don't really think it's like that. It's all just an excuse to keep the backbone costs high. If you think about it you realize that these overpriced gimmicks that are never going to fly the vastly overpriced way the incumbents have it laid out can at least easily be explained to a seventy year old senator or courtroom judge. After all, that's where the game gets played. If you can win in the courts, fuck the technical stuff. You own them bitchez. And if you've already got the money, all you have to do is play dumb and wait. That's what they're doing and you'd probably do the same if you had more money and power than was good for you.
It's really just about adding costs to the backbone in any possible way to keep the small players out. ATM/Sonet add vast costs to the backbone infrastructure when you compare them to today's ethernet, but low cost is not desireable for the monopolies. They come up with any excuse not to use straight ethernet switches in place of outdated and expensive ATM/Sonet and tell you that it has to be this way for Quality of Service and anything else would be irresponsible. Arguing the other way is easy on Slashdot and very difficult in Congress or the courts.
Too bad FCC rules state 2.4 GHz SS equipment is limited to a maximum range of 5 miles, 1 watt power output and 36 dBm (4 watts ) effective radiated power. Or that in practice, the ERP requred to get said 20 miles is above FCC rules as well.
How do I know? I worked for a wireless ISP that did this 2 years ago. Old news.
Too bad that these for profit networks must accept all interference with no legal recourse or rememdy since they operate under Part 15 guidlines. Or that I could fire up an amatuer radio transmitter in that band (with much higher power output levels), put the smack down on their throughput and I would have priority; the company would have to take it where the sun don't shine.
The exact scenerio happened where I worked and the clueless Prez of engineering told the amateur to buzz off. Then said amateur brought the FCC and ARRL down on his has with much speed and voracity.
Read the fine print of the FCC code. The info's buried in there.
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
No where in Part 15 is this defined.
1 watt power output and 36 dBm (4 watts ) effective radiated power.
This is defined for point-to-multipoint. Point to point you can do 20 miles. In fact we are doing this on a 22 mile link across the San Francisco Bay with 1/4 watt amps and 24 dBi antennas. Legal under Part 15.247.
Tim
Hurn de Flee der verda hoon de biggen do zu--
Bork bork bork!
Note - parent was troll...
not line of sight. Part of the whole point is that the infrastructure is cheap, it isn't a million dollar base station, it's a few hundred dollars. And where does it say that each connection requires it's own anntenea ? No mention of "inexpensive can" is there, just because slashdot used to run a pringles can / free broadband story every day, doesn't mean every 802.11 story has a pringles can in it.
Do you work for a telco or cable company ?
You can't increase the gain of the system in Europe. If you use a high gain, directional antenna, you have to *lower* the power output top remain within the law.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
And what's the recent Slashdot fascination with New York Times articles? Is VA Whatever planning to sell Slashdot to the NYT, or what?
Will we not rest until every each of the earth is blanketed with radio waves from our technology? Is it too much to not be "connected" all of the time, everywhere? Enough
Cringely says 802.11b is in trouble, and no one seems to care.
No shit dumbasses, stick a bigger antenna on anything and of course you get farther range. I've had a ad-hoc 802.11b setup going across town (about 15 miles) to a friends house for sometime now. This is why slashdot sucks, people don't have a clue.
One word: ipsec
I omitted the important fact that the 5 mile radius is for point to multipoint only. Find one manufacturer that states a radius greater than 5 miles for their P to MP systems. Who said Part 15 is the only part of the CFR that has bearing on this type of operation?
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Read the bios of the two guys running this company, and you'll see that one of them used to be an exec at RealNames, that lame company that got ticked off at Microsoft for not using their stupid scheme. I smell something fishy here...
You probably know this, but the full Adams quote is:
Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!" But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell.
-- John Adams, quoted from Charles Francis Adams, ed., Works of John Adams (1856), vol. X, p. 254
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
when reality dictates that there is an easier or more effective way to accomplish a goal than to follow standards, the hack wins in my book.
this sig is deprecated
As you know from growing up in Bismarck, not all of North Dakota is either flat or as populous as the Fargo area, which isn't saying much. I'm presently 17 miles from Watford City, ND, and only have line of sight to any part of said town because I'm 100ft of elevation higher and most of the intervening hills are lower than that. I've been thinking about some kind of wireless solution for a while, as it is possible in Watford to get T1 and now, thanks to a spinoff by 3 companies (one in Watford, one in Dickinson, and one in Bismarck), DSL. The service really sucks, even within the city limits, but unreliable 512k is still better than the 24k that my phone line is letting me get today (I got about 50k once), which isn't reliable anyhow as it's also through the same ISP as the DSL.
There is an initiative to deliver wireless to all of North Dakota's rural areas, not just the 50% of our population that lives between I-29 and the Red River (of the North, for those of you Suthroners reading), but it's a long ways off and some of the people in charge aren't ambitious enough to pull it off.
Someone else mentioned the possibility of putting repeaters or transmitters on the cell phone antennas across the countryside. That would work great, IF said cell phone antennas were even capable with their much-greater-than-wireless-networking range of covering the entire state, but they're not. With a high-power bag phone, on a clear night, I can get enough 'service' to make a call, maybe understand the incoming side of it, etc. The nearest digital tower is circa 60 miles from me, in Williston, and is so weak that digital service doesn't become available until you come over Indian Hill about 10 miles from Williston. Granted that service in Minot, Grand Forks, Fargo, and Bismarck (and marginally so, Dickinson) is better, but there are still a lot of people, the real heart of North Dakota, that aren't included among those that live in our 'cities'.
There needs to be a statewide solution, and we've not had much luck finding one yet. Any ideas?
BFD - Get the Lucent/Orinoco "outdoor router". Been doing that for years.
I helped to found an ISP that offers 802.11 broadband. We have "towers" around the city that are basically repeaters aiming back to the CO. I believe our longest hop from a tower to the CO is 6 miles (not KM). And then our futhest customer is at least that far away from the tower - you do the math.
One problem we have had is that over 10 miles or more than one repeater you start to have latency issues on that link. Nothing like Satellite, but it's there.
Lots of tricks in the interference and power limit areas. This is where our "trade secrets" reside and keep us the #1 provider in our area. My advice - talk to an actual RF engineer or at least a ham that plays with sattelite and microwave modes...
"Smile, listen, agree, and then do whatever the fuck you wanted to do anyway." ~Robert Downey Jr.
(4) They don't use 802.11b, they've hacked it with a p2p solution to the home.
Their secret weapon is a technology known as a "software-designed radio," which has permitted them to create an inexpensive repeater antenna that can be attached to the outside of a customer's home. The device, which the Etherlinx executives said they believe can be built in quantity for less than $150 each, would communicate with a central antenna and then convert the signals into the industry-standard Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, signal for reception inside the home.
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(2-3) They don't use repeaters, (see above comment).
Today, while most of the Wi-Fi industry is working on a more complex technology known as "mesh routing," which involves lashing together hundreds or even thousands of short-range transceivers, the Etherlinx developers believe they have found a crude, cost-effective approach that is capable of leapfrogging the last-mile problem.
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(1) They don't require line of sight.
Etherlinx is by no means alone in its approach. Several other companies are also beginning to explore alternatives not requiring line-of-sight that they believe will be more resistant to interference and will be easy for customers to install without expensive on-site help.
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I believe they've already overcome all the problems you claim they need to.
-k
yours,
kbs
What I meant by "not using repeaters" was that they don't use multiple repeaters. The implication from the article seems to say that they have a single repeater that goes to the home, connected to a central office within 20 miles of the house.
-k
yours,
kbs
...that you are bankrupt. You do not have the cash available to pay required debts (i.e. you're insolvent).
r uptcy.html
"A bankruptcy is a legal proceeding that occurs when the liabilities or debts of an individual or firm exceed their assets or revenues over an extended period of time. When individuals or firms declare bankruptcy, their assets are taken and allocated to various creditors, and courts may impose restrictions on their future borrowing capacities." - http://canadianeconomy.gc.ca/english/economy/bank
Being bankrupt does not preclude a firm from continuing to operate. If a firms becomes insolvent, then they can voluntarily declare bankruptcy, or a creditor can petition them to be declared bankrupt. Any firm that applies for bankruptcy protection is, by definition, bankrupt.
- Consult the dictionary frequently to avoid mispelling
And the winner in the "strangest link ever" competition is a link from the word "round" to http://www.expressvu.ca/ WTF?
There needs to be a statewide solution, and we've not had much luck finding one yet. Any ideas?
You may want to email Colin Anderson (colin at beyondboxes dot com), he's my former roommate and seems to be on top of many ND broadband deployments. At one point he became so fed up that he had a T1 installed to his rural farmhouse for several different projects!
I'm going to zip him an email too, letting him know about this thread. Not sure what he's up to these days, but it's worth a shot.
we all know that any company that started in a garage - and is realted to cool technology will fail ultimately. just look at HP.
oh... wait...
I can't remember where I saw the write-up on this (Wired maybe), but some folks from Colorado setup a COOP to do something like this... http://www.rric.net/
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Probably 300+ miles from the border. Possibly 500 miles or more.
Not much of East Texas is that close to Mexico. The border is out west. (unless you're counting the border with Louisiana) From what I've heard, generally when people use the term "Rural East Texas" , they mean somewhere in the northeastern part of the state near Longview or Tyler. That's about 500 miles from the border.
So...I'd bet the station that is bleeding over is U.S. based and withing the FCC's jurisdiction.
Might sir suggest that sir browse at -1, nested rather than whatever ungodly configuration you use at the moment which confuses you so?
I await apology in the form of being removed from your freaks list. Only special people go there. thx n advnce!
...the beginning of the century was last year ;)
1. Software engineer with a soldering iron.
2. Hardware engineer with a patch.
3. Manager with an idea.
That's because WWII is both the last popular war with enough footage to fill a cable channel. The Gulf War had good footage, just not enough.
Reuters - In a stunning example of the dangers of high-frequency communication technology, two garage thinkers were baked crispy gold by microwaves.
Warning: Contents of Garage may be hot!
- undoware.ca
You have no excuse for ignorance. Maybe you should read the U.S. Code to which you linked.
- Consult the dictionary frequently to avoid mispelling
http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/bankruptcy.html
Since you are probably too busy to actually *read* the links that you cite to back up your arguments.
- Consult the dictionary frequently to avoid mispelling
My parents still live about 25 miles from Dickinson, and they have dialup, but they would love to see some sort of high speed internet out there. While they are not exactly computer whizes, they can still apreciate instant web browsing. Each time they visit me in school, (Golden, Colorado) we try to figure out some way of getting them high speed as well. All of the solutions available, and they do exist, are far too expensive. The current wireless solution requires a $1000 dollar transmitter, and going through the DirectTV system is also pretty expensive. Someday, perhaps.
Not at 2GHz. But a modular design with different components in the grunt stage (ie `switch' with an SMD iron). Also, a 10W 2GHz-capable RF power transistor is going to run you a little, so don't blow the sucker up! If you're throwing that many watts, have you considered a phased array of Milo tins? You could probably get near 40dB...
We have 35km to cover, so will probably need carefully-adjusted tins at both ends or a relay hop.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Go for RoadRunner. You should thank your lucky stars you are in Time Warner territory rather than Adelphia territory. Adelphia cable modem in the East San Fernando Valley blows chunks.
What counts is distance between you and your Central Office. It doesn't matter whether you are 900 feet from CSUN or 900 feet from Vivid Video's world headquarters or 900 feet from wherever, if you are more than a few miles from your Central Office, you are screwed until SBC puts in a DSL repeater in your neighborhood. (nomenclature check: what's the real name of those little boxes the telco installs to enhance DSL range?)
Anyway, I'm sorry to hear that you can't get DSL at this moment. Again, RoadRunner is great, despite their moving to bandwidth caps. You will prolly get more speed from RoadRunner than from SBC DSL anyway.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The 'last mile' system in Australia, being run by the division of TIP at CSIRO, is already up and running and into the testing phase.
FCC Part 15 rules are a function of power density (microvolts/meter) NOT distance. You don't have a clue about what you're talking about.
"FCC Part 15 rules are a function of power density (microvolts/meter) NOT distance"
Thanks for proving my point so clearly!
Part 15 is not the only set of rules that governs the operation of above mentioned equipment. 18 comes to mind.... Hmm, ya think there might be others as well? You'd do well to search for all relevent regulations for Spread Spectrum devices operating in the ISM band.
Perhaps you should search a bit deeper, since there ARE regulatory differences between point to point, point to multipoint (sector) and point to multipoint (omni) systems. If they're not mentioned in 15 (duh), maybe they're enumerated elswere? Ya think?
Toot, toot! That's the sound of the clue train leaving you behind.
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
I was in Desert Storm, I don't need footage. As for WWII...hell, screw that. The point is that there is a LOT more to history than a couple wars. I don't want to see a buch of Vietnam stuff either. I want Minoa, ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the ancient Egyptian empire, the Middle Ages, the Celts...real good history. Enough WWII, Vietnam, Desert Storm, etc. Done to death. Do HISTORY (and quit with the _Blacksheep Squadron_. What crap. Give me _Connections_ (a GREAT series that spans real history) instead.
"The History Channel" should be renamed the "WWII Channel", or as another poster referred...call it "The Hitler Channel". It sure as hell isn't any longer a REAL history channel.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.