McCaw's Wireless ISP Begins Trial Run This Summer

prostoalex writes "Wireless legend and billionaire Craig McCaw is moving into broadband wireless business with his new company. ClearWire will launch the service this summer in Jacksonville, FL and St Cloud, MN. The offerings will include 512 kbps, 786 kbps and 1.5 Mbps plans. Pricing is not revealed yet, but Business Week cites industry insiders claiming it's going to be in $40-50 range. ClearWire will rely on WiMAX (802.16) technology."

Comments

Great way to meet wireless peers?

[number]

I guess I'm missing a problem here, but for every transmitter this guy has there will be (hopefully) more than one person that will be subscribed to it.

If more than one person can access the transmitter, then those multiple clients could just as easily talk to each other, should they take the time to work out a private wireless network for everyone to work on.

If the company had a forum where users could post their area codes, it would be a great way to meet and then privately organise a self-contained network.

Re:Great way to meet wireless peers?

[geekee]

That makes no sense. The tower you communicate with in WiMAX has a large pipe to get the multiple data streams between the internet and the WiMAX subscribers. A grass roots network using this technology would violate FCC regulations since the broadcast range is on the order of a kilometer. There would be too much interference between networks without a entral tower to control things.

McCaw reads Cringely?

[FirstTimeCaller]

Well if I didn't know better, I'd think that Mr. McCaw got his idea from a Robert X. Cringely column. Or maybe it's just Business Week's choice of calling it a disruptive technology.

Too bad he didn't get all the details right. As far as I can tell, it certainly would be disruptive to my wallet. At 40-50 dollars/month this is obviously not aimed at your average consumer. I do a lot of commuting by ferry and would love to be able to spend some of that time online, but I'm not about to double my monthly ISP expenses to do so.

So this appears to be aimed primarily at business users... but that makes me wonder why the choice of Jacksonville and St Cloud as test cities? Is there some high-tech corridors in these cities that I don't know about?

I'd love wireless access everywhere, but it seems like Cringely has the more feasible solution.

Why work so hard at layer 2?

[jonbrewer]

I still haven't figured out why people think L2 switching for wireless is so sexy, especially for fixed wireless installs such as this new McCaw deal.

kid in 32 Oak Road and kid in 35 Oak Road are going to tie up a lot more network resources sharing DivX movies than they would with a mesh-routed layer 3 network, 'cause in WiMax the IP stuff isn't getting routed until it hits the backhaul point.

WiMax

subscriber 1 --(802.16)--> cell site --(802.16)--> cell site --(DMR)--> POP (now do the routing) --(DMR)--> cell site --(802.16)--> cell site --(802.16)--> subscriber 2

WiFi Mesh

subscriber 1 --(802.11)--> subscriber 2

Granted this is the case on WiMax gear I've researched. I wish it'd die a quick, painless death, but I'm afraid it's going to be more like ATM - a great idea, but not worth the costs.

In New Zealand..

[Segway Ninja]

Wireless internet plans such as this are already in place. I'm not sure what technology they use, but they do have most of Auckland covered (entire CBD, most residential).

It is in the $40-$50 USD range (About $70 NZ, $120 for 2mbit - Pretty good when you consider 256kbit ADSL costs you about $70 per month)

Not really wireless

[iamacat]

Customer premise equipment consists of a book-sized indoor transceiver unit that consumers merely plug into power outlets and the Ethernet jacks of their LANs or PCs.

So basically the receiver is stationary and tied to at least one wire - the power line. If you already have cable at home, there is little point to this service. If you don't, then of course it's cool. But it should be still called "reduced wiring" rather than wireless.

Now, give me a notebook card that can connect to this service anywhere in a metropolitan area, and we are talking about something really useful.

Way Ahead of Him..

[dethb0y]

These Guys in East Palestine, Ohio (of all places) are way ahead of him. thier using Motorola Canopy gear as i recollect.

Since i'm in thier coverage area (as is my mother) i had them come and check us out. the results were pretty interesting. They installed something that looked like the reciever part of a Dish Network dish (that rounded-square thing on the front), which they then pointed line-of-sight at the tower.

This wasn't flawless as stuff in the way can easily block it; i imagine a house would totally block it, and the system they were using at the time was having trouble with trees. I was also suprised to discover they were "hopping" the signal all over the place - big long 15 mile jumps from tower to tower.

The throughput at mothers (i coudln't get it due to the trees) is around 50k/s most of the time, spiking way up to around 100k or higher at slack times. There isn't any appreciable lag that i can tell, and it seems a steady throughput.

I have my doubts as to how well it'll scale, though; i'm not sure it could really handle serious traffic. As well, the area i live in (replete with hills and valleys) isn't very good for this sort of technology - cellphones won't even work in some areas, let alone this.

The cost is a smidge over 40$ a month if i'm remembering right, with around 80$ for installation. Considering there are literally no other highbandwidth options in a good part of the serving area, this is actually not unreasonable. I can't see it working in an area with cable/dsl though.