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."

Comments

Seems a bit pricey compared to other small WISPs.

[garcia]

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.

Vivato Phased Array

[Baldrson]

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.

How many Bananas?

[stratjakt]

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".

Re:Seems a bit pricey compared to other small WISP

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:Good for nothing?

[stratjakt]

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.