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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 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.
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
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!
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.
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.
"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
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
Satellites SUCK. For broadband, they are the only option I have besides dialup so I am sticking with dialup. Satellites are EXPENSIVE. To get more than 3 TV channels, I've had to go satellite TV. That costs ~$40/month and isn't worth it so it turns out. 155 channels and STILL nothing on worth watching (all the history channel ever shows is WWII crap over and over and over...but that's another story). Anyway, I am already shelling out ~$40/month on sat-TV. For sat-internet, it costs ~$70/month! Bullsh*t I'll EVER pay that much for high-latency, sub-DSL quality internet connectivity. If you have to choose between satellite or dialup, as I do, it is better to stick with dialup. Really.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
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.
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"
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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!