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Wheat Field Wi-Fi
An anonymous reader writes "The world's largest wireless network is not the proposed network in Philadelphia. It's in Walla Wall, Washington. Built by the Columbia Rural Electric Association, the network covers an area larger than the state Rhode Island. The network is already operational in the rural Washington State farming community of Walla Walla."
Why put it in the middle of a wheat field...?
The cost of the service ranges from $39.95 per month for 256 kilobits per second to $259.95 per month for 1.5 megabits per second, speeds that are five times to 30 times faster than dial-up connections. Husted, who plans to start marketing the service this month, expects 200 more customers by the end of the year.
Are they charging so much money because of lack of a userbase (100 people or so) or because of the amount of land covered? Chaska, MN has wireless coverage bursting to 3mbs bi-directional for $15.99 (residential) or $24.95 (commercial). I don't exactly see how $39.95 a month for 256k is all that fantastic. At that point you might be better off just staying with a $9.95 cheapo-ISP. YMMV I suppose.
Becaused anything proposed is automatically in existence?
ah nevermind.
Why? Networked tractors of course!
Even blind squirrels find nuts now and then.
Wireless is probably the only connection available in these areas; Dialup degrades as your distance increases from your core phone system, and dialup speeds in the middle of a corn field are probably not too hot (14.4k anyone?). The only other suggestion for high speed internet for these people would be satelite (read: expensive), or dedicated cable of any kind (read: even more expensive).
I would be more than willing to pay 40$ a month for 256kbps in the middle of nowhere, instead of paying 30$ a month for 14.4kbps AOL or 4-500$ a month for a dedicated T1 or something like that.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
A T1 isn't much more than this. If I were a local business, I would just buy the T1 and share it out with a few others to defray the costs.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Seen on new packges of wonder bread! (NOW ENRICHED WITH WI-FI)
Is that really that hard to do?
The following statement is false.
The previous statement is true.
Welcome to my world.
Exactly how can the Chaska service provide such cheap service? I am trying to calculate the costs necessary to do a WISP and I simply can't see how that would work unless it is rediculously oversold, as in the 3mbps is the entire internet connection. Chaska also only covers subdivisions.
I'd say the $40 service for 256k is still a good price because the area probably doesn't get 28k modem service.
Selling Wheat-field Wi-fi in Walla-walla, Washington and a googly-eyed Elmer Fudd dreaming of all the wonderful possibilities of using the information superhighway
Enter Road Runner with a bleump-bluemp, and Wile E. C.... Oh wait, that's the competition
I'm pretty sure that's Walla Walla, not Walla Wall. You know, the place with the onions.
It's good to see the Vivato phased array packet steering technology get a serious deployment. I've been pushing some smaller metro areas around the PNW to look at deploying that but the wireless mesh technology has been easier to justify since it is more incremental with fewer single points of failure. I'm glad the guys out east took the plunge so the rest of us can learn if this is really going to be as much of a revolution as it potentially could be.
Seastead this.
A T1 isn't much more than this. If I were a local business, I would just buy the T1 and share it out with a few others to defray the costs.
Have you priced out local telco loops for a t1 in a rural area before? It's surprisingly non-economical.
Big deal. Most of my closets meet that description. Now if only I could get one of those walk-in models...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I haven't seen a T1 cost less than $400 in my area, typical prices often go to $600. But you could split the bill between two businesses and only pay $200 each of two businesses, assuming you can set up a stable link
This project sounds like a boon for nobody.
I know one of the guys who installed it. The network was actually put in place for the local municipal offices to connect up to each other. The residential access is secondary, but nonetheless is (obviously) being used to help defray the cost of implementation and maintenance - extreme weather conditions lead to a high replacement rate on some of the equipment.
In rural areas, T1's can still run up to $1000/mo, and that's just for the fiber, that doesn't include traffic.
Especially when you realize that the telco has to lay the T1 directly to you for you to get it, and that you'll be paying for that too.
In my past experience working for an ISP in rural SD, most customers do get at least 28.8. Getting more than 28.8 becomes difficult but often a good modem will get you higher speeds on a crappy phone line. Personally I had a line with some static and went from around 32 to 53.3 just from buying a really good US Robotics external modem. I am talking about actually telneting into the portmaster at the ISP and checking the connection speed. We always recommended customers do this, and it often worked ery well.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
i thought they made that name up for old bugs bunny cartoons!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Actually, rural highspeed broadband is good for a number of things:
1. Farmers are bigger "international businessman" than you might think. As such, cheap high-speed broadband is another tool they can use to expand US farm exports!
2. Rural areas tend to have a lot cheaper cost of living. Rural broadband can make it possible for IT jobs that might otherwise go to India/China to instead move to rural USA. That can save or even expand American IT jobs. Not to mention provide better quality of life!
I was specifically thinking of a friend who did this in rural Iowa. I think he got his T1 loop with internet for a little over $300, and then shared it out with some Cisco aironet equipment to his neighboors. I could be wrong on the numbers as it has been a while since I have spoken with him about it. I know that he got it down to a low enough price so it was economical, and set up a little squid proxy so his neighboors didn't use up all the bandwidth surfing.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Rhode Island: 1,045 square miles
Is saying "big as Rhode Island" supposed to be more impressive than 1000 square miles or so? 33.3 miles by 33.3 miles?
Pretty big, but not so thrilling if you use numbers rather than impressive sounding fake measurements. Especially over mostly flat land.
A "library of congress" isn't as big as you think it is, either. Impress me with measurements in terabytes and petabytes, not "library of congresses".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
HOLY CRAP! Walla Walla made it to Slashdot. I suppose next we'll have President CowboyNeal.
This is probably the biggest thing to happen to this valley since, oh, the Ice Age.
Wouldn't have made more sense to implement a Wi-Max (802.16) based network than installing all the Wi-Fi access points?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Krusty: OK, memorize these funny place names: Walla Walla. Keokuk. Cucamonga. Seattle --
Homer: [laughs] Stop it, you're killing me! [laughs more] Seattle.
Krusty: [groans]
-- The trials of teaching Homer, "Homer the Clown"
He either got a fractional (fractal?) T1 or the infrastructure was already there and they didn't have to run new cable to him.
For the curious, the State of Rhode Island is 1,045 Sq Mi. with about 1,000 persons per Sq. Mi. Rumor has it the state has another 500 Sq. Mi covered by water. It has 408,424 Households with a 1999 per household income of ~42K. With a 2003 estimated population of 1,076,164. For the really curious check out RI Census page http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/44000.html
The area is certainly larger than RI. But I would venture to guess that the topology of RI is also very different than Walla Walla. For example, I think RI ranges from 0-800 feet above sea level. Not sure, but I would guess Walla Walla is fairly flat.
Households in that part of the country are likely less dense than one per square mile. You gotta cover the value of all that equipment to cover the area. This is the part of the world that might not have had dial up available (if they did it was likely not 56k) and certainly didn't have a local number for a $9.99 ISP.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Dr. M. Shamalanian had this to say:
Of course, I have to bring-up warfarming, the practice of farming while discovering wireless networks. Impressive that it's larger than the area of RI. People used to tell me I was nuts when I would bring-up wireless networks, now even wheat-fields are getting 'em! Anybody wardriven this area?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
They can no longer afford the last "a" in their name.
Tractors have been computerized for quite some time. Check out NASA's Precision Ag site.
The Tao that can be spoken is not the one eternal Tao
What's the latency like on a mesh like this?
Satellite isn't that expensive, but the latency is awful, making it useless for online gaming, etc.
Also, what kind of usage policies are in place? I'd imagine since everyone has to "share", I'd eat up my share of the pie pretty quickly.
In a neighbourhood like mine, where Comcast has a bit of a struggle providing enough bandwidth on the cable to keep us all online, how well would a wireless mesh like this work?
In a 1000 square mile area where I live, I could easily see 1000 people online at once, dragging everyone down to sub-dialup speeds.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
A field of dreams...if you build it, nerds will come...
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
$39.99 for 256Kbs...? Satelitte Internet is $59.95 and its (I believe) a hell of a lot faster than 256Kbs. Why wouldn't they just use satelitte instead of a whole new infustructure, etc...?
Do they also track their herds with GPS devices in Walla Walla?
Simpy
I'd like to pay $4-500 a month for a T1!
The latter is quite possible. I think I remember him mentioning that there had been a nearby circuit in place that he was able to talk them into using.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Walla walla - eh? Tell me more, tell me more.
Etc etc
Rural areas tend to have a lot cheaper cost of living. Rural broadband can make it possible for IT jobs that might otherwise go to India/China to instead move to rural USA.
The cost of living, no matter how low in parts of the US, will always be MUCH higher than that of India. There is no way that we can compete with that outsourcing wave w/o government intervention. To say that this is a viable option is just silly. Such a move might cut the costs of IT jobs in half, or so. Moving them to India cuts them by a factor of 10.
Also, where are they supposed to live in rural America? Just because there are not a lot of houses does not mean the land isnt being used. Are they just supposed to crash with farmers??
33.3 ^2 = 1108.89
(1000) ^ (1/2) = 31.62.
If you are going to quote numbers, at least pretend to do the math...
Rush Limbaugh and his chauffeur were out driving in the country and accidentally hit and killed a pig that had wandered out on a country road. Limbaugh told the chauffeur to drive up to the farm and apologize to the farmer.
They drove up to the farm, the chauffeur got out and knocked on the front door and was let in. He was in there for what seemed like hours. When the chauffeur came out, Limbaugh was confused about why his driver had been in there so long.
"Well, first the farmer shook my hand, then he offered me a beer, then his wife brought me some cookies, and his daughter showered me with kisses." explained the driver.
"What did you tell the farmer?" Limbaugh asked.
The chauffeur replied, "I told him I was Rush Limbaugh's driver and I'd just killed the pig."
--Residential Interior Design
Here's a small example of how the internet has changed farming:
In southern Ontario, where I'm from, a whole lot of ginseng farms started springing up all over. There's a growing demand for it in North America, and a huge demand in asia.
Typically, a farmer would harvest his crop, sell it all to a distributor for a fixed price, who would then take it from there. Everyone get's 10 cents a kilogram, or whatever.
Now, I happened to be friends with a farmer who switched to growing ginseng. And he told me what makes it so lucrative. The crop itself isn't worth a whole hell of a lot, and it's somewhat harder to grow. To just sell it bulk, it's not very attractive.
But, what he told me is, every harvest, he and whoever he can get, sit around picking through the ginseng roots looking for ones that "look like stuff".
If you find a root that looks like an animal in the Chinese zodiac, that little root can be worth HUGE ASS BUCKS to little chinese apothecarys.
What the internet does is connect him, the farmer, to the chinese guy who wants to buy a ginseng root imbued with the magical powers of the Rabbit.
He showed me a lumpy looking root which if you squinted, you could kind of see a pig in it. He told me he'd just sold it on ebay for $5,000. He told me of a friend got 20 grand for a big one that looked "like a dragon".
It's like finding a four leaf clover, except you can actually trade it to a leprechaun for a pot o' gold.
This is all on top of the regular profit for the crop, which would just barely keep the farm going year to year.
The internet really makes this type of thing possible. There's no way this could be done before.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Farming is high tech. GPS systems are available for combines, tractors and crop dusters. They are able to map the fields and apply different amounts of chemicals where the need is different. I have seen (pictures and information about) a linux powered weed spray application system that uses leaf recognition to spray the chemical only where needed. Saves money and the environment. As farmers deal with more and more information they need ways to share it. Perhaps, in the future, they could download improved leaf recognition programs, and instantly upgrade the sprayer. Sneaker-net is a bummer from desk to desk, but it becomes more inefficient as the distance increases.
Oh. I also run an aircraft repair shop in the middle of a wheat field, and I have been using wireless internet at $49 / month for 2 years. It was such a vast improvement over dialup out here, it was like going from black and white to color.
And asked if I wanted to play DOOM
Or know it because of one of the three colleges located there: Walla Walla Community College, Whitman College, and Walla Walla College.
I agree. Rural America isn't going to provide the magic solution to outsourcing. However, there is plenty of housing and land for housing available in rural America (even without cutting out more forests or paving the wetlands). Start in Missouri for low-cost available housing... Dave desperately seeking a gmail invite...
They ain't running fiber to your house for a measly DS1 order.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
1. According to studies, discussions of the offshoring trend, while the wages might be lower by a factor of 10, the actual cost differential is a lot less (around 10 - 50%). While some costs may still exist for rural US (broadband access, being remote from customer), other costs (culture, data security(*)) will be a lot less if the outourcing is domestic USA.
2. Rural IT could be located in a number of places. Most of it would probably be located in smaller towns / cities in rural regions. I know that my state, Virginia, and other states are actively trying to get IT oriented businesses to locate in rural areas.
* - In the US, you can get the FBI on the case. In India, you might not be able to get anyone (without offering a bribe!).
Building the housing will take capital that defeats the purpose of this move. BTW, need a gmail invite? Leave an email address to send it to...
This is merely just an ISP that is delivering broadband wirelessly. Pretty cool though, that they can cover such a large area that normally would be hard pressed to get a reliable 56k connection (our plants out in the wheats there have no end of dial-up trouble).
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
Or, warpointing!
Back to the client side.,,
8' surplus C band satellite dish on an old boat trailer makes a dandy antenna for long haul client side. 34db and 3.5 degree beamwidth. Hooked up to the truck with power over the ethernet and it's easy to find a connection.
True, but most of rural america has lots of housing in the fixer-upper category...true we won't find any condos in Alto, Mo, but plenty of houses available... Dave n9uxu@yahoo.com (Gmail me please)
This is some next level s**t, y'all. It's got my wheels turning...
sent invite...enjoy!
to users downloading p0rn while driving tractors one-handed...
I live in Walla Walla. Cable internet service from Charter is $40/month minimum, and of course is only available in town. A lot of people around here live out of town due to the farming, and there's just no getting anything to them.
Of course, this seems really overblown to me. All they did was stick a couple of huge dishes on the tallest hills. That covers a huge area here because the hills overlook a lot of land. The nicest thing is that it's very low latency and hard to screw with. At least one company is using a 5.8GHz signal now.
If I read this correctly, the price includes not only the wireless transport, but the ISP service as well. Reference the woman who said it was only slightly more expensive than her AOL service.
I pay about that much for my combined DSL and ISP service. For rural communities such as these, combining the transport and the ISP makes a great deal of sense.
I'd like to pay $4-500 a month for a T1!
I hear you, man. My previous employer spends about $800/mo for a T1. That's just the line lease, doesn't cover the data services. How far away from the the CO? About 7 miles, but only about 4 city blocks from a fiber termination.
Or know it because the Walla Walla Sweet Onions are the best onion ring onions in the world... ;)
With a single 3mbs web link you can support 50*3/0.256 = 600 users.
On top of that, there's multiple WIFI channels, and further, using directional antennas and multiple masts you can reuse the channels quite a bit.
And 50:1 is not ridiculously oversold- I'm sitting on that right now, I'm perfectly happy with it.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I apologize for my agricultural ignorance, but is there some reason you'd want wireless in your wheatfield? Like, is there a reason to have your irrigation machine or tractor online?
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Do you have no sense of history??? Japan kicked America's ass for a while recently. China is predicted too in our lifetimes and its quite conceivable India will too with a few small changes.
You know, it's kinda funny. I had no idea we produced even a bit of gensing in the US until I saw some for sale in China and S. Korea. I asked someone about it in Beijing and they said something to the effect of "Oh, yeah. American gensing is the best!"
I think the net may also be able to help an enterprising few farmers by allowing them to garner international contacts and perhaps to broker there own deals and cut out at least one middleman.
Cisco carries a brief press release on the Yakima County public safety network, a WiFi network that replaced the old repeater/trunking radio network. Yakima county is the second largest (by area)county in Washington state and with careful site planning and radio engineering, they are able to cover almost the entire county with 30 wireless bridges. You have to realize that most of the county is located in a large valley surrounded by fairly tall hills, so it is an ideal candidate for line-of-site networks. But to cover 4,296.1 square miles in such a manner is pretty impressive. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps 430/prod_business_case09186a00800a9de3.html
The press release is very bland compared to the actual implementation. The police and safety officials seem to love it. This network is now becoming a standard for implementation by many of the rural counties in Washington and Oregon.
Does "largest" mean "most geography encompassed" or "most users/usage"?
Either is valid, but it changes the meaning. If you mean "most geography encompassed" then sure, this probably gets the nod. But if you mean "most users/usage" then Philly should kick it in the repeaters.
Personally I think they are both interesting measurements, but doing it across Philly is probably the more impressive once you get over the idea of long distance connections. City meshes are much harder to accomplish.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
First off I have to say, WOOT, I cant believe my small home town got on slashdot. I mean we had the simpson and bugs bunny but now slashdot. Wow. Anyways, I would like to point out that while Walla might be a small little town this new service is not its only or best solution for internet. You can get cable and dsl in Walla just like any other place and it isnt much more expensive. The farmers can even get cable on the outskirts of town. I suppose they cant get it on their combine but who the hell cares.
...because its big and flat--a great obstruction-free place to put up a big tall transmitter. Wheat fields--those next to railway tracks in particular--tend to be home to grain elevators, or the larger, modern grain terminal equivalents. These structures are very tall and are an ideal mounting point for transmitters.
Community Networks is a company in Alberta, Canada that runs a broadband ISP for rural residents near the city of Calgary called EFirehose (I do not work for them but my parents still reside on the farm and are happy customers that switched from Telus due to foot-dragging in providing more than marginally acceptable telephone service, much less the DSL service they promised would come some day--but that's another story).
I am not sure about the exact area of coverage, but based upon the list of rural communities they serve I KNOW it is also significantly bigger in area than the Philadelphia proposal. Community Networks also provides wireless broadband to some rural schools using highly directional antennae. For example, I believe the school in Bassano is served by a signal beamed from 100s of kms away in Calgary.
I'm not sure exactly where the claim of worlds largest hotspot came from in regards to Philly, but perhaps it has to do with population since the larger areas covered by wireless in Washingston State and Alberta serve rural areas. Also, the Alberta service is a private venture and is not wide-open to public use. However it is fairly cheap--about CA$40 or US$30 per month for 1 to 2.5 megabit connectivity, and for more money you can get business service, including 5 megabit connectivity and static, public IP addresses--great for rural facilities that wish to maintain their own setup for email servers, VPN gateways to main offices in the city, etc.
I assume the project is sponsored by the Wishy Washy Washing Machine Co.?
I saw a good news story about how GPS is changing the world. One example was farmers. Here's what one farmer said (paraphrased, from my memory, so not an exact quote:
Let's start with the basics: how big are our fields? You'd think we'd at least know that, but we didn't, really. If Grandpa called it a 5-acre field, we called it a 5-acre field. Now with GPS we measured, and maybe it's 5.4 acres. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it matters when trying to get the amount of fertilizer right.
Blue Mountain Internet (bmi.net) has provided reliable dialup ISP service to Walla Walla for many years. Charter Cable now provides cable internet, too.
As more and more people move out of rural areas, there's tons of available housing for dirt cheap. You can get a nice 3000-sq-ft home with hardwood floors in Nebraska for under $100k.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They can also use it to control irrigation systems. Put up IP cameras to monitor the far reaches of your farm. These farms can be huge, is it really worth while to drive 15 to 20 minutes one way to make sure your irrigation system is working or to turn it off because its started raining.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
More efficent farming, reduced costs of equipment, all put forth in place by a capitalist company that saw an open market and an efficent way to enter in that market and make a profit.
It is innovative solutions to market demands like this one that the backbone of the American economy, and culture. If only more company's could realize this and get back to where they started from.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Whoa! How much does one of those Vivato switches cost? How often are they going to have to replace them?
Seastead this.
I doubt a whole switch would ever need replacing, unless they had one hell of a storm, but the antennae can get pushed out of alignment and some of the more remote towers run off solar so the panels need to be kept cleaned, batteries replaced periodically and of course there's always cabling and whatnot that eventually succumb to the elements no matter how well weather-proofed they are...
Do you know how much power one of these things consumes running flat out?
Seastead this.
farmers, especially wheat and alfalfa farmers are real happy to have upto the minute weather data, weather is a *BIG* factor in farming, and they more information and faster you can get it the better. As a farmer's son living in the Walla Walla valley I would know. As you sir know nothing about the walla walla valley, you are the dumb ass.
A person who knows nothing about a place is merely ignorant of it.
A person who continues to live in god-forsaken Walla Walla could be considered the true dumbass.
I'm experimenting with a mesh right now, just 3 access points and a wireless card. Three wireless "hops" is still less than 10ms.
I really can't comment on that network because I don't know the topology. Obviously, the closer to a wire backhaul point, the better.
OK, I was thinking of starting out assuming 3:1 oversell. I had a hard time figuring out what to assume, because information on the net is very sketchy.
I knew that most people don't use the link much. Reading a page then going to another one leaves a lot of dead time, and not everyone is using the internet at one time. Not many users will be doing a massive download at one time.
Do ISPs run chaches to save link bandwidth, or is this considered unecessary or even detrimental?
It should be noted that Walla Walla is not a strictly agricultural area. Granted, most of the land area out here is devoted to farming (lots of grapes for wine, also home of the Walla Walla sweet onion), but the city of Walla Walla actually has about 30,000 residents. And we're not all farmers; there are three colleges in this town, Walla Walla Community College, Walla Walla College, and Whitman College. And us college kids love the bandwidth. :)
Internet provider PocketINet provides bandwidth to Whitman College and Walla Walla College; this bandwidth is "microwaved" from the Tri-Cities as far as I know. Therefore, a lot of the connectivity out here is wireless in the strict sense of the word. Of course, to get their service, you need special equipment and line of sight to one of their towers.
There are also other broadband options in Walla Walla. I'm not sure about any DSL options, but Charter Communications, the local cable provider, offers a 3Mbps/256kbps package for $40/mo. in these parts. That's a great deal, especially in "rual" Walla Walla. I don't know if this wireless network is really all that big a deal, especially considering the prices they charge.
As one other person noted, Walla Walla isn't one big hot spot, that's for sure. A lot of the downtown establishments offer free wireless, but once you're outside their range, you won't find any networks of any kind to connect to.
Just wait until geeks and their laptops start trampling down wheat!
Furthermore, remember that in irrigated farming, water is money. It's feasible that in the not too distant future, the irrigation equipment could actually download the weather forecast and adjust the watering schedule accordingly, so as to maximize the water usage efficiency.
The link bandwidth isn't usually the expensive bit, the connection to the internet is pricey. They do often run caches to minise their costs there.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Wait ... you're not telling me Walla Walla, Washington is a real place? I always thought it was a joke name.
In that case, what's the real truth about Bumfuck, Illinois?
the network covers an area larger than the state Rhode Island.
Saying that is like saying "... larger than the planet Pluto!"
Why did they wait to roll this out until AFTER I left Walla Walla. Well, good riddance to that shithole of a town...