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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."
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.
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????
"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.
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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
My microwave oven kills my home 802.11a network every time I turn it on, and my cordless phone frequently kills it, depending on what channel it happens to be using. It also dies from time to time for no reason I can detect, possibly from my neighbors' microwaves or cordless phones. I've replaced my wireless links with a few of Linksys's new powerline bridges. So far, they work perfectly.
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.
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?
There are several ways to use software I quickly thought of that could increase the range.
By have several antennas in an array and use software to control the power output and phase to each antenna, you can create a highly directional and steerable beam. A similar aproach can be used to control the sensativity of the array in different directions. This could be used to make a very effective attenna that could automattically align itself to the strongest signal, hence reducing install costs.
By adding additional error correction you can trade bandwidth for reliability and therefor use a less reliable channel. Since as the range increase reliability of the channel decreases, this can effectively be used to extend the distance at which the devices operate.
That was with about 5 minutes of thought. I could probably (as could most decent comm. engineers) come up with several more if I spent 1/2 an hour thinking about the problem.
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The journalist new exactly what he was doing. He wrote an article that would get attention.
Attention = Advertising revenue
Elijah Chancey www.elijahsadventure.com nomadic IT consultant, bicycling across america "all that you touch / and all
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?