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UK Approves of 5.8GHz For Rural Broadband
Tandoori Haggis writes "BBC News reports a major decision by UK Government to approve the use of 5.8 GHz C-band for use with wireless broadband. A prime consideration is the desire to provide broadband access for rural areas
where broadband cable might be prohibitively expensive to impliment. Previously there had been resistance to freeing up 5.8GHz because it is in an area of the RF spectrum used by C-band radars."
...on the issues involved in deregulating this part of the spectrum can be found here.
The Army reading list
They should read up on hack proofing their networks, in that case.
More info.
This is correct.
This is great, we need to see it here in the States. This would help with Last mile issues out west or in the farmlands. Or, I could use this from my apartment and still get a signal at my favorite bar.... I like that...
Words are only yours until someone else uses them...
A portion of the 5ghz band has already been de-regulated and is used by the 802.11a equipment. The problem is that there needs to be incentive (read profit more than cost) for them to implement it since they are private companies.
From the article:
[i]"The Ministry of Defence had resisted opening up the spectrum because it has radar systems operating in Band C of the 5GHz part of the spectrum."[/i]
Perhaps the UK should stop using C band radars for military purposes, and get with the times by upgrading to L-band or X-band radar.
C-band is acceptabe for weather radar, but even then, you would be more worried about weather radar obstructing broadband connections...not the other way around.
Wouldn't that be line-of-sight communication? This sort of thing would need a big tower to cover a big area. The solar-powered airplane hovering over the area would be a nice solution to that problem.
Anyway, how well would this work if the line-of-sight to the base station was through a neighbor's brick house? Not well I would think.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Five point eight Jiggahertz!
Isn't fixed wireless in the states actually pretty expensive? How are they going to do it cheaply in the UK?
I thought the real selling point of fixed wireless was that these rural areas finally get to have access, and, being deprived of anything near as fast, would pay a relatively high price for it.
crazy to share the band with the military...it realy does seem like licensing without guarantee of service...
The military can shut you down and creat exclusion zones, you have to pay and there is no gurantee of service and they could theoretically raise the licensing fee at a later date. Seems like shaky ground to me.
The newer cordless phones are using 5.8GHz. Won't someone think of them?
what is the max bandwidth for 5.8GHz c-band?
MilkMiruku
Is that some weird Brit misspelling, like flavour or neighbour?
Potatoe? Is our children learning?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
with the wireless service already available in some parts of the country - http://www.pipexcommunications.net/products/wirele ss_broadband/
It started life as tele2, then it became liberty broadband, then gxn networks and now pipex.
The only thing is, will this be a practical solution? In the hills and valleys will the signal be strong enough? Will it reach down into the valleys? I barely get mobile reception when I'm there!
Alex
"There is no beast as dangerous an enemy to mankind as christians are to one another" - Ammianus Marcellinus
If they licensed the C-band in Iraq, it might be hard to tell an AA missile facility from a rural ISP.
Satellite broadband for 19.99 per month
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't know if the rules are similar in the UK, but in the USA, a licensed user has legal protection against interference from unlicensed users.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Does anyone know why they stopped resisting?
TBH with all this I wouldn't be surprised that if licenses were gratned to someone that area would suddenly get ADSL from BT (the main supplier of phone lines in the UK).
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I hope this doesn't carry over to the US.
I just purchased a 5.8 GHz phone because my 2.4 GHz phone was interfering with wireless network.
I don't want to have to drop back to a 900 MHz phone because of networking.
Hooray! I knew that if I kept that 8 foot C-band dish up in the backyard, it'd someday come back into style! All those neighbors who've laughed at my giant dish will again be envious, just like in the 80's...
The reality of the matter is that the war was about spelling. Americans, busily trying to develop their own resources and create a thriving local economy had a great deal of real work to do, and couldn't be bothered with adding all manner of additional letters to easily recognized words, like labor (labour), flavor (flavour), or color (colour), like their British counterparts.
The people of Britain had been around for quite a while, you see, having had hundreds of years to build their cities. Since most of the heavy lifting had already been done, when they say down to write a letter or novel, they had plenty of time to put extra vowels in their words.
The Colonists, on the other hand, they had other important things to do. Subsequently, they dropped the redundant vowels.
This angered the crown to no end, and the King, having had a formal education, and having pretty much all the free time in the world to waste on extra vowels, sent his fleet.
The rest, as they say, is history (Or, histoury, to my British friends).
Because the Colonists prevailed, the question of proper spelling was finally answered, and American English is correct. Because we aren't as petty as King George, there's no need for additional bloodshed or violence, and we allow our English bretheren to continue their ridiculous spelling practices as a historical courtesy.
Now all of you know the *real* story.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Living in the UK, I'm able to distinguish between what is actually said, and what will be done. As with most things over here, it's all good and well in theory. The rollout of Broadband in the UK has been a sham, and the government has done little to help, despite its claims of a "broadband Britain". For such a small (Geographically) country, this should of been a doddle, but the soon to be out-dated technology is what we're sticking to. I reckon it'll be 2005 before wireless access is made commercially available (in already serviced areas), let alone implemented and running. The fact is, rural areas in the UK are too rural to make them profitable to BT. No profit to BT, no broadband.
John, I'm Only Dancing!
Wish they put a sys like that in Seattle
...of speeding in rural areas, anyway...
"Previously there had been resistance to freeing up 5.8GHz because it is in an area of the RF spectrum used by C-band radars."
I spent the last two years doing call-out tech support for companies in rural Cotswolds, UK and I've seen several satellite broadband installations.
Each and every time it has been slower than a modem, let alone ISDN.
The problem isn't bandwidth, it's latency. Satellite ping times are in excess of 1500ms - sometimes as much as 4000ms. That compares to modem pings of 200-300, ISDN 60-150 and ADSL 30-80.
If you intend to download a small number of very, very large files (eg. FTP) then satellite broadband is great.
For anything else - email, web browsing, online games - satellite broadband sucks. Take a web page with 20 images and say your browser downloads four images at a time. That's 5x1500ms = 7.5 seconds delay right there and that's with good latency - it can be double or even slower than that. It all adds up to a genuinely awful browsing experience.
ISDN is the dog's balls for rural broadband right now. It costs 25 quid a month plus another 25 quid for an unmetered 128kbps ISP and with an ISDN bandwidth-on-demand router you'll think you're always on- since ISDN connects calls within 2 seconds, none of this hanging around for a modem.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Changes like this, and wireless POPs are taking away some of the incentives to upgrade to 3G phones (for me, data is more important than video messages - and if I have to find a POP, that's good enough.
Would anyone like to make a comment about the impact that this will have on imaging radar (ie RADARSAT at C-HH). Or conversely the imapct that overpass of the satellite will have on wireless comms?
Some of the 5 Ghz spectrum was allocated for a second set of ILS (instrument landing systems) frequencies and its looking like it will never get used for that. That opens up at least 100 mhz in the band in most countries.
Second is the 4W ERIP limit has its advantages but it means you can't use low cost microwave to do backhaul. The US FCC rules allow much more than 4W ERIP with a very narrow beam. Aparently this won't be allowed the UK so whats the point of cheap last mile if the lines to the base station cost a fortune.
There area number of freqencies allocated for older TV satellite uplinks and they are also in the mid 5 Ghz region that are no longer being used but provide income for island nations that may need to the money to keep from sinking.
The last issue is that the FCC has opened most of 4.8->5.99 Ghz under new conditions which means by July every low cost radio will be designed to work everywhere in that range. That means any radio that is likely to end up in teh UK will can be made to work on frequencies the UK didn't allocate.