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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 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
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!
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:
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(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."
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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