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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 $9.95 cheapo-ISP. YMMV I suppose.
ah nevermind.
Why? Networked tractors of course!
Even blind squirrels find nuts now and then.
Wireless is probably the only connection available in these areas; Dialup degrades as your distance increases from your core phone system, and dialup speeds in the middle of a corn field are probably not too hot (14.4k anyone?). The only other suggestion for high speed internet for these people would be satelite (read: expensive), or dedicated cable of any kind (read: even more expensive).
I would be more than willing to pay 40$ 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.
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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.
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.
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i thought they made that name up for old bugs bunny cartoons!
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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".
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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.
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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.
Tractors have been computerized for quite some time. Check out NASA's Precision Ag site.
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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!!!!
Ever priced out the equipment and installation fees for satellite internet?
Also, the ping time is guaranteed to be 1000+ ms (500 up to space, 500 back down, then you have to account for traffic)
Because satellite service sucks ass.
Especially in an area as overcast and rainy as Washington state.
Even when you are connected, the latency is god-awful as all your packets go to space and back.
Then after two days of light web browsing and reading email, they decide arbitrarily that you've abused the system, and FAP you down to speeds much slower than dial-up.
I looked into satellite when I was land-locked on an island and had no other broadband options. I had a really hard time finding anyone with anything good to say about it (DirecPC at the time).
Don't know about the newer services, StarBand, etc. But I haven't heard any rave reviews on that front either.
Besides, if you wanted to game online, satellite wont work. 40 bucks a month to a gamer is nothing.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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??
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.
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 know it because the Walla Walla Sweet Onions are the best onion ring onions in the world... ;)
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.
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.