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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.
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.
"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
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.
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 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
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!