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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."
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.
My bad. It's suppossed to be
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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
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
This is in many ways similair to the advent of telephones nearly a century ago. Originally AT&T was only intrested in selling telephones and the service to buisnesses located in urban areas. It was independent companies which moved to connect rural homes, seeing that a housewife stuck on a farm might be willing to pay for the ability to talk with the neighbors without a long walk.
Competition from these rural carriers is one of the reaons AT&T to really pushed into uniform residential service accross the entire country.
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.
This is from etherlinx.com: "We have operationally "lit up" the South Bay and Oakland areas with 2MB Ethernet " If they're getting 2MB in their test, I'm guessing a full fledged service can do even more than that.
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
This will change soon. Star Choice in Canada is sending up a new satellite that will allow both upstream and downstream through the dish.
Plus, since their satellite TV sercvice was launched with elliptical as opposed to round dishes, it is possible for the dish to receive signals for 2 satellites at once.
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
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.
>Star Choice in Canada is sending up a new satellite that will allow both upstream and downstream through the dish.
:-(
Starchoice has been saying they'll offer high-speed internet via satellite since '99 (I've asked them yearly after that -- I figure some Canadian company has to be able to provide satellite internet at less than $100/gig). I don't expect their tune to change...
Besides, two way satellite internet has even worse latency problems than one way, worse rain fade problems, slower than modem upload speeds once there's enough users on the service, and most all places require you to have it installed professionally.
The only benefit? Its always on (except during a storm). But you can usually cut a deal with an ISP that will cost less to have an always-on modem connection + one-way service than two-way (unless you can get two-way for under $120-$130 US a month)...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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
Cringely says 802.11b is in trouble, and no one seems to care.