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Alternative Wireless Broadband for your Neighborhood
An anonymous reader writes "TelephonyOnline reports Motorola has announced a new line of 5GHz *unlicensed* Wireless Broadband point to multi-point solution with a 2 mile range called Canopy.
Pricing may allow neighborhoods to gang up and be their own ISP."
None of the links in the base topic is actually to the article.
This is line of sight technology, kids. Interference and suceptibility to hacking is far less with LOS, however you lose the cool factor of not having to see the tower.
This stuff is obviously geared up to people wanting to start an ISP on quite possibly the last frontier of Internet access that is yet to be dominated. I have no idea why the submitter geared this up towards homebrew geek communities. (Editors plz!)
The hardware sounds great until you realize that unless your customers want to pay at least a $500 start-up fee for their CPE they'll be using, you're going to get killed in hardware costs. Mostly user-end. You expect the APs to cost alot!
As for the people whining about how this offers no advantage over 802.11a/b, I disagree. Namely, it doesn't use weak WEP encryption, but instead some unnamed encryption (hey, anything is better than WEP!). The range is much more significant.. 2 miles radio out-of-the-box, that's bad ass.
So the moral of the story, stick to your 802.11 for your home networks kids and stop pretending that every submission about Internet access is geared to you.
I still do think the Nokia wireless stuff was far more interesting though. Being NLOS and meshed are two big advantages (with equal disadvantages but still) however, the $700 per CPE is another killer. Yay for 802.16
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Two problems:
(1) Everyone shares the same encryption key, just like 802.11b. This means that your data isn't secure from other customers of the service. You could put a bridge-level encryptor on both ends, but that would cost even more.
(2) Backbone connections to the internet are not inexpensive. If you do the math, you'll find it very difficult to make money selling T1-class service for less than $300/month without oversubscribing. And that's not even including the wireless hardware costs.