Slashdot Mirror
Speakeasy Will Test IEEE 802.16 In Downtown Seattle
An anonymous reader writes "Speakeasy will be testing a WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) network in downtown Seattle. If successful, plans to roll out similar networks in other cities will follow."
I've been waiting for the day when microwaves would be interoperable worldwide. Now I can make popcorn or EasyMac anywhere!
... this will begin to curb the reproductive capability of certain people living in and around Seattle.
Ahem.
why can't we skip a bit to, say... 803.11?
(i have no clue about the IEEE naming convention. sorry.)
"
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Wireless net to cover downtown Seattle
By JOHN COOK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
A high-speed wireless network that covers most of downtown Seattle is being rolled out by Internet service provider Speakeasy.
The Seattle company plans to have 10 to 15 test customers using the network by the end of the year, with Speakeasy CEO Bruce Chatterley saying commercial deployment of the WiMax network will occur early next year. The network -- powered by as many as four base stations located at high points throughout the city -- will cover an area from Queen Anne Hill to Qwest Field and Lake Washington to Elliott Bay, he said.
"This is the equivalent of putting in a T-1 line, but it is wireless," said Chatterley. "It is going to change everything."
The company chose Seattle as its first test market, citing the geographic challenges along with the demand for high-speed Internet in the downtown area. Speakeasy will roll out similar WiMax networks in other cities if the test in Seattle is successful, Chatterley said.
WiMax, which is short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a relatively new technology that provides wireless Internet access over great distances. Unlike Wi-Fi, which is typically confined to a couple of hundred feet in coffee shops or bookstores, WiMax networks have a range of several miles.
Speakeasy is not disclosing the equipment vendor that it is using for the Seattle deployment. But Chatterley said customers who sign up for the service will attach a small device to a window, allowing the signal to be transmitted from nearby base stations. Some potential customers have expressed interest in using the wireless network as a backup to a more traditional system, while Chatterley said others are considering making a switch to a complete wireless network.
"If you had good coverage, you absolutely would be able to run your business on this," said Chatterley, whose company has been testing a similar technology at its Belltown headquarters. Chatterley also said the WiMax offering is designed to support Voice over Internet Protocol, meaning phone calls could be routed over the network.
Pricing has not been finalized, but the company is considering charging about $650 per month for a wireless connection that reaches speeds of three megabits per second. That compares to $530 per month for a T-1 line, which is 1.5 megabits per second. A T-1 line is about 30 times faster than a dial-up modem.
In August, Intel invested an undisclosed amount in Speakeasy as a way to help the Internet service provider develop its WiMax strategy. The Santa Clara, Calif., semiconductor giant is one of the biggest backers of the technology. Last month, it invested in Clearwire -- a Kirkland startup led by billionaire Craig McCaw that is throwing its weight behind WiMax networks.
Speakeasy, which offers Internet service in 120 markets, has fewer than 100,000 customers. It reported revenues of $49 million last year"
Are they going to use a large pringles can for this?
I am psychic. It will work so well in Seattle, you'll be very pleased.
That said, using my psychic abilities, I'd like to save you a little work.
I think your next target city should be Phoenix Metro, specifically Tempe, and even more specifically, the corner of University and Mill.
The fact that I live at that crossroad is just a coincidence, I promise.
Thanks.
vodka, straight up, thank you!
I just got their new VOIP service and it works great. They control the QOS from end-to-end, so it doesn't drop out when you're using the intarweb.
Kick-ass ISP.
At $600/mo they arent going to be getting too many residential customers (nor do they probably expect to). Nor do they want to put up what is probably some expensive connection so they can get all 25 of them that would live in the rural area this would cover. They are targeting businesses who want an alternative to paying for a wired T1.
What *I* want to see, is equipment, affordable to end users, to facilitate point-to-point Megabit-or-faster wireless links over 30+ miles. 802.11 can do this, with the same equipment on both ends. I seriously home WiMax equipment eventually supports that, as opposed to only offering a huge expensive 'head end' to tie to the small end-user units (like DSL and cablemodems currently work)
Wouldn't you rather say 802.20 phones?
When I order a partial T-1 line for a remote location, I get a CONSTANT 1.5 up and down, guaranteed. I also get 6 voice lines with 6 separate numbers through the T-1, and 16 different public IP addresses. Supposedly I get 24 hour support with technicians on-call, but we all know how that works. Plus, there are regulations (at least in California) that prevent us from ordering cable Internet for a business location. Correct me if I am wrong there.
Here in the wide open expanses of the midwestern U.S., we have small cities of 10-100K spread out about 50 miles apart. In between there are small farming communities, each with their own grain elevator. Atop the grain elevator there is usually a satellite dish and a TV/radio tower.
A fella could do worse than to set up a network of WiMax repeaters and WiMax-WiFi routers (for local traffic) on these grain elevators.
sigs, as if you care.
If you use six sectors per cell, that means 360-420 customers per cell, which is quite a bit. If they have more customers they can always turn down the power and use more, smaller cells.
My city, Hermosa Beach, just rolled out free hi-speed wifi to about 30% of it's residents. Holding a high gain (16db) antenna connected to my lap-top standing in the backyard I was able to get close to 1Mb up/down. I'm about a half mile from the access point but without line of sight. I will be connecting the weatherproof antenna/bridge combo to a pole and installing it on the roof this weekend, which should help a bit. If all goes well, I am looking forward to a day with no ISP bills!
;-).
<PLUG>
However, I must say...Speakeasy is far and away the best ISP I have ever encountered. They encourage you to run mp3/game servers and even will bill your neighbors for you should you choose to share your internet connection via a wireless router. So if you are looking for a new ISP, sign up here and give me a free month. Thanks!
</PLUG>
Not with 50km range, it doesn't.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
It was mis-spoken. Wi-MAX is able to make 70 Mbps.
The Internet - you mean AOL, right? There's a lot of stuff on that Internet that you would not believe!
You just got to know all the right "keywords", they call 'em, and, well, there's some stuff on there I can't mention in front of the kids, if you catch my meaning. Not that I go in for that, mind you, but you get it in your email.
sigs, as if you care.
Anonymous access through 802.11 hotspots is already a law-enforcement headache, especially in crowded (sub)urban areas like NYC, Seattle, and No. Virginia. It's too easy to wardrive until you find a nice open access point, do some dirty deeds (dirt cheap!), and be gone within an hour. As long as there are enough of them around to make blanket stakeouts infeasible, there isn't much that law enforcement can do.
The question of whether wide-area 802.16 access can be anonymous/untraceable will be a HUGE deal. And it depends on a lot of factors. Maybe somebody who knows more about the standard can help me sort this out, too...
In order to get anonymous access, you can't have a billing relationship with the ISP. This would require that you hijack a legitimate user's connection, or fool the base station into granting you a session without really being authorized.
1) What kind of security features does the protocol offer? Do they have WPA or something like it, or do they expect encryption and auth to happen at a higher level? Because if traffic isn't strongly protected, I can envision a whole range of piggy-backing tricks to inject traffic into someone else's session, mostly centered around spoofing.
2) What kind of cheap/hackable client equipment will be available? If the user-premises gear is ISP-owned (likely) and expensive (also likely), it's not going to be easy for the geeks to run down to Fry's and start pulling them apart to make them do neat tricks. WiFi has been so hackable and popular for exactly that reason.
3) A side effect of having costly, ISP-owned quipment (#2) may be to affect the speed at which security problems get fixed. In my experience, the expensive, telco-like equipment doesn't get as much maintenance attention from vendors (firmware upgrades) as the cheap, million-run devices that are owned by the end users. But I could be wrong about that--any ideas?
4) Has the working group learned anything from the experiences with 802.11 and its various security issues? Somehow I doubt it, but this might be their big chance to show the world.
802.11b is supposed to support links less than 1000 feet. We all know that if you buy a 200mw card, get directional antennas and/or big amplifiers that you can make 802.11b do a lot more than that. But you will not get very reliable links without line of sight beyond a few thousand feet.
WiMAX is slated to get 1 to 3 miles. Perhaps using the same approach involving directionals and amplifiers it would be possible to achieve longer distances, but without line of sight, I wouldn't expect it to go 30+ miles unless you put both end points on 400' towers.
The laws of physics cannot and will not be broken by any modulation technique due to the fresnel zone. The laws are a bitch and they're here to stay.
1) DSL is a fixed point to point connection. It's hard to take it with you if you move, and you have no hope at all of roaming.
2) It's expensive to roll out. The ISP needs to put their hardware in every telephone central office (CO).
Also, some cities (like Boston) have a large number of crufty old phone lines that are not suitable for DSL, so rollouts involve rewiring neighborhoods or sorting through lots of existing copper pairs to find the few that are clean enough to use.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
It all depends on the frequency - some frequencies penetrate different materials with different effectiveness. I havent checked, but if we're lucky, maybe WiMax uses an NLOS frequency.
The lower you go on the frequency scale, the less opaque objects become. 900mhz is somewhat successful with NLOS, but you have to go all the way down to about 400 mhz to get exceptional performance. But of course the lower you go, the less data capacity the frequencies have.
WiMAX is defined for 10 to 66 ghz. Between 10 and 11 ghz some NLOS will be possible but not anything that is going to go 30+ miles without some serious altitude on end points.
Keep in mind that the most advantageous NLOS frequencies are already allocated to paying customers to the FCC.
/me moves to seattle.
As someone else mentioned, WiMax has a much higher capacity than a single T-1 line.
The reason he compared it to T-1 lines was not to compare maximum bit rates, but to compare it to the competing service offering. Early roll outs of WiMax are going to target the local monopoly's lucrative T-1 wireline business. T-1's are still in wide use and are cash cows for the guys that own the wires.
This is the same play that the CLECs like Covad made using leased copper and CO space to provide T-1 competition with DSL technologies. Of course, they got screwed over by the Bells and the bubble burst....
So, this is just another attempt to provide a competitive symmetric data pipe for businesses. But, with wireless they can avoid dealing with the local monopoly completely. Which is their only choice at this point since the FCC basically killed the wireline leasing business when the told the monopolies they didn't have to lease their new broadband build-outs.