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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."
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.