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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."
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 $9.95 cheapo-ISP. YMMV I suppose.
ah nevermind.
It's because the government wants nerds to go outside and see the real world.
Why? Networked tractors of course!
Even blind squirrels find nuts now and then.
Wireless is probably the only connection available in these areas; Dialup degrades as your distance increases from your core phone system, and dialup speeds in the middle of a corn field are probably not too hot (14.4k anyone?). The only other suggestion for high speed internet for these people would be satelite (read: expensive), or dedicated cable of any kind (read: even more expensive).
I would be more than willing to pay 40$ 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
Why put it in the middle of a wheat field
o pdusting...
dunno, but we're going to have to come up with new terminology:
war-plowing
war-sowing
war-harvesting
war-cr
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
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.
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"
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.
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!!!!
Umm maybe because we shouldn't discriminate against the rural communities just because they don't live in a big city.
Personally I would like to move to a rural community of less than 10,000, but there is no technology in most of those places - and that's how I make my living.
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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!!!!
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.