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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."
It's because the government wants nerds to go outside and see the real world.
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.
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.
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!
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.