Free Nationwide Wireless Internet Access?

LiquidEdge writes "ISP-Planet is reporting that startup M2Z wants to offer 95% of America free wireless Internet access using the 20Mhz frequency allocation. They're backed by Kleiner Perkins, one of the most successful VC firms in history, and being started by the guy who built the @Home network and a former FCC Wireless Bureau Chief. 384/128 speeds will be free and they'll sell the higher speeds and the government will get a kickback of the revenue."

Comments

Not if the Cell Companies...

[AKAImBatman]

...have anything to say about it. This effectively proposes enough bandwidth to eliminate the need for a traditional cellphone. Instead, you'd be able to carry around a Voice over IP phone that gets you the same coverage everywhere, with no "per minute" fees. The likely extension of this would be that a new telephone network would emerge that wouldn't even bother with POTS compatibility. Just assign your phone a DNS name, and you can start calling "l33tdude.myphone.net" instead of a horribly abstract phone number.

Give it enough time, and the POTS system (as well as all those expensive cell towers) would go away permenently. The result would be a network with communications that are as free as instant messaging from your computer. Certainly an attractive world for the consumer, but can we really expect to get there without interference? Not to mention that this would mean the end to phones subsidized by cell phone connectivity. Net phones would sell for what they're actually worth as opposed to being "free" or "discounted" with service.

Not that this isn't without its advantages. I don't know about anyone else, but my cell phone never truly feels like it's "mine". Its linkage with my phone carrier makes it feel more like a device I've rented. Especially when carriers like Verizon go out of their way to disable features like the USB connectivity on the Razrs. Sure, in theory you can pop in a new SIM card. But because of network differences and technology changes, it usually ends up being easier to get a new phone and throw your old one in a landfill. What a waste.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[interiot]

Even without inexpensive wireless, sooner or later POTS numbers will be supplemented and ultimately supplanted.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[Anonymous Coward]

the POTS system (as well as all those expensive cell towers) would go away permenently.

So how is this network going to be implemented? Where are all the WAP antennae going to be located? On top of phone poles? In people's houses/apartments? On separately built towers? Or rent tower space just like cell companies do? This also brings up the issue of transmitter power...you have to be able to hit the WAPs. Using today's 802.11 technology, the WAPs can't be far away or you'll need a UHF amp. (The article is slashdotted BTW).

And POTS going away? As someone who lives in a hurricane prone area, many times POTS (and amateur radio :)is all you have. Cable modem, DSL, and cell usually go down.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[lawpoop]

Certainly the telecommunications industry has a vested interest in not seeing this come to fruition. However, given the recent efforts by the government to build massive data-mining operations, we now have the government emerging as a player not interested in seeing this happen.

If we have a VOIP cell phone that has secure communications, then the government has no way of listening in on calls ( with or without a warrant). If we have some kind of onion-based routing of calls, the government is no longer able to do its social network mapping (who called who, how often, and how long) that it purportedly uses to detect terrorist cells.

So, while it's a great idea, it's unlikely to happen. The future is looking more and more dystopian, at least in this country.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[thedletterman]

Actually, you would probably wnt to call l33tdude.mobi

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[natedubbya]

but can we really expect to get there without interference?

No pun intended.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[mrbcs]

Not without a proper mesh network. Just got back from a Motorola conference. There was one company that claims it's possible. http://www.extricom.com/ They turn the spectrum into 3 clouds, instead of many areas. The clouds sit on top of one another so that you can cover a larger area with one channel.

I can't imagine doing this over a city. The costs would be insane.

That band should give decent coverage though. We use 2.4 ghz motorolas and they can shoot 25kms.

Still don't think that this is very viable.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[nxtw]

Not that this isn't without its advantages. I don't know about anyone else, but my cell phone never truly feels like it's "mine". Its linkage with my phone carrier makes it feel more like a device I've rented. Especially when carriers like Verizon go out of their way to disable features like the USB connectivity on the Razrs. Sure, in theory you can pop in a new SIM card. But because of network differences and technology changes, it usually ends up being easier to get a new phone and throw your old one in a landfill. What a waste.

I use Cingular and don't have these problems. I can switch phones with my SIM card whenever I want. I can upload whatever I want via Bluetooth or USB, be it games, pictures, ringtones, etc. I am able to do this on Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and probably any other manufacturer's phones (but those are all I've used recently).

Should I decide I want a new phone, I can get a boring phone for $150-250 (Razr V3, Sony Ericsson T637 or Z520a), a reasonably advanced phone unlocked online for $300-400 (Razr V3i, Sony Ericsson W600i, Nokia 6680) or a really fancy phone for $500-700. Of course, I usually wait for my carrier's upgrade eligibility so I don't have to pay that much, but the option's always there. As for carrier phones being locked, the only other competition is T-Mobile (which is inferior in my area), so I'm not going to switch. If I were going to (or if I were going to sell my phone), Cingular will unlock the phone for free with a little hassle (mainly finding someone one the phone that knows what 'unlocking' means and how to get it done).

Perhaps you should use a provider that uses a less restrictive technology?

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[Fjandr]

As someone who lives in a hurricane prone area, many times POTS (and amateur radio :)is all you have. Cable modem, DSL, and cell usually go down.

As lines running on the same poles as the cable lines, and being the same lines as the DSL service runs over, I'd think that the outages as a result of natural disaster would tend to include POTS as well.

At least that thinking tends to follow with the communication problems after Katrina, where HAM radio was basically it for long-distance communication.

As I find it prudent to live outside of storm-ravaged areas, however, I have no firsthand knowledge of which services continue to run when the poles get knocked down. :)

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[AKAImBatman]

You could probably handle this in software as long as there's a central server available. All you need is a call-token from some sort of central server. As you pass between network clouds, the call would be lost for a few moments while the phone establishes a new connection. Upon connecting with the next tower and obtaining an IP address, the unit could then proceed to contact the central server to update the call token and re-establish communications.

Fraught with a few minor annoyances, perhaps, but it should be practicable.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[AKAImBatman]

You sir, are missing the point. *whack*

I use Cingular

So do I.

don't have these problems.

You don't have the issue that you have to replace your phone every few years because the technology, service plans, and network differences have made you obsolete? You don't have the problem that your service provider is soaking you for every little service above and beyond "voice call time"? You don't have the problem that you have to worry about whether your network covers an area instead of Sprint Nextel, Celluar One, or Verizon? (I remember when you used to be able to at least roam! Good luck on getting that to work right these days.)

I don't give a flying monkey that I can buy the phone independent of the carrier. I still have to slave myself to a carrier. While ubiquitous GSM has been slowly making it easier to switch services on a whim, it's far from practicable.

Now imagine that you have a phone that can work anywhere there's a network. It doesn't matter who's it is, as long as it's an Internet network. And not only does your phone work, but it can also do Internet, Instant Messanging, Games Downloading, etc. without all those silly fees that today's carriers charge you. In fact, you never even sign up with a carrier. You just purchase your device, assign it a dynamic DNS name, and turn it on. THAT is freedom, and THAT is what everyone should have. Good luck on getting that from Cingular. (Who I'll agree is the best of of the cell carriers ATM.)

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[Firehed]

Just assign your phone a DNS name, and you can start calling "l33tdude.myphone.net" instead of a horribly abstract phone number.

Why bother? We've already got 10-digit phone numbers, what's two more for a proper full IP address? As phones all have number storage built in, you've only gotta remember it once and sending a text message or doing anything else that requires text input on a standard phone keypad is annoying enough as-is.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[sp0rk173]

Yeah, well, reality is dystopian.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[squiggleslash]

My experience, having gone through three major* hurricanes in two years:

1. All communications go down during the storm.

2. Cellular comes up pretty quickly, but is generally too spotty and jammed to be that effective as a communications medium. Usable, general, service doesn't really appear until the third day.

3. POTS sometimes comes up right away, and sometimes takes a few days. Bellsouth seems to be much better at keeping its cabling working than the power companies. All services under POTS come back at the same time, if there's a problem with one, it's not to do with the hurricane.

4. Most people don't get cable back until they get power back (between three days and four weeks.)

(* major is defined as causing power outages of several days to hundreds of thousands of people - the vast majority of people living around here - as well as making tens of thousands homeless due to destroyed roofs etc)

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[AKAImBatman]

We've already got 10-digit phone numbers, what's two more for a proper full IP address?.

IP Addresses change. Not to mention that making static IP addresses mobile would really screw with internet routing.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[dgatwood]

You could do even better than that. There's nothing stopping you from establishing communication with more than one tower concurrently, so long as you keep track of which tower/network goes with which IP address. If the signal drops below some threshold, you simply message the other end and say "Hey, I'm still here, but my new IP is [blah]."

At the very least, with such a mechanism, you would, however, need some sort of mechanism for verifying that the new stream is associated with the same phone to prevent man-in-the-middle or other similar attacks.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[zcsteele]

Use IPv6. There ought to be enough room there for every cell phone to have a unique permanent IP number.

Though it does make the DNS idea a seem a bit more usefull...

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[AKAImBatman]

Precisely. 16 digit, alpha-numeric, gobbldey-gook is not what people should be memorizing. DNS (or some sort of more advanced directory service) could provide a name that is easy to remember, and moves with you no matter which device and IP version you're currently using.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[dgatwood]

Let's see if I get this straight.... We have to remember ten digit numbers for each person now. It's not that much harder to remember a sequence of 32 letters and numbers.

Yeah. Right.

With IPv4, at least it falls within the realm of possibility. Memorizing your friend's IPv6 number... nuh-uh. DNS is pretty much mandatory for this sort of thing. Either that or an IM address or something similar. Now if we could just get all the IM services to talk to each other....

*sigh*

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[nxtw]

I think you're looking for things to complain about.

You don't have the issue that you have to replace your phone every few years because the technology, service plans, and network differences have made you obsolete?

No. Cingular and AT&T have used GSM here since 2002. T-Mobile also entered this market in 2002. Phones from 2002 still work, but I upgrade regularly. That doesn't stop people from using old phones. If people have no interest in using GPRS/EDGE based services, they don't need to upgrade. But GPRS-based services still work on phones that are 4 years old. Assuming they haven't been abused and the battery still works, GSM phones from five years ago should still work.

However, with upgrades allowed every 2 years, why not get a new phone?

You don't have the problem that your service provider is soaking you for every little service above and beyond "voice call time"?

No. I have a $20/mo text, data, and picture plan (1500/unlimited/200), mainly for the unlimited data. I never use 411. Of the 3 other lines, two of them never use more than 20 text messages a month. I download my own ringtones and games via BT/USB.

You don't have the problem that you have to worry about whether your network covers an area instead of Sprint Nextel, Celluar One, or Verizon? (I remember when you used to be able to at least roam! Good luck on getting that to work right these days.)

No. Coverage is decent enough. If I need to, I can roam all I want on T-Mobile here and Cellular One where needed. I haven't been on a carrier other than Cingular since they combined AT&T and Cingular's networks at the beginning of this year.

While ubiquitous GSM has been slowly making it easier to switch services on a whim, it's far from practicable.

I haven't been outside of GSM service since 2004. That was for about 15 minutes in rural North Carolina. I could sign up for T-Mobile (prepaid or regular) and use my current phone right now.

Now imagine that you have a phone that can work anywhere there's a network. It doesn't matter who's it is, as long as it's an Internet network. And not only does your phone work, but it can also do Internet, Instant Messanging, Games Downloading, etc. without all those silly fees that today's carriers charge you. In fact, you never even sign up with a carrier. You just purchase your device, assign it a dynamic DNS name, and turn it on. THAT is freedom, and THAT is what everyone should have. Good luck on getting that from Cingular. (Who I'll agree is the best of of the cell carriers ATM.)

Doesn't sound realisitc. Such a change in the carriers' business model wouldn't be acceptable to them. That's barely practical with wired interweb connections right now (Skype & the IM services doesn't count; they're way too closed). There are some SIP providers that provide calls on their own "network"/numbering plan, and offer PSTN connectivity and are relatively open, but many are unreliable (and, since they're not P2P at all, are funded only via PSTN connectivity charges or donations). Most other VoIP players provide wholesale connectivity or service designed to emulate regular phone company service.

An open, secure, as P2P as possible system would be ideal.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[mungewell]

Well people are good at remembering telephone numbers....which is where 'enum' comes in.

see http://www.e164.org/

You register your VoIP account (etc.) under your land line (or allocated VoIP) number and when someone calls you their system does a look up and routes the call via the cheapest (nominally VoIP) route.

The nice thing is that they don't need to know where you are, or what method is used. They just pick up their telephone device and dial....

Simon.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[AKAImBatman]

Cingular and AT&T have used GSM here since 2002.

Good for you. I had to get a Tri-Mode phone back in 2002 because GSM wasn't deployed across the entire network.

That doesn't stop people from using old phones.

Ehh, no. Cingular would not continue supporting the Tri-Mode phone I had. If I wanted to update my plan, I needed to get a new phone.

I have a $20/mo text, data, and picture plan (1500/unlimited/200), mainly for the unlimited data.

Wait. How is that *not* soaking you for extra services? With voice, you're using the network. With data, you're using the network. With voice and data, they're charging you twice for the same service.

If I need to, I can roam all I want on T-Mobile here and Cellular One where needed.

At least in the areas where I roam, Celluar One roaming DOES NOT WORK. I don't know if it's Celluar One's problem (probably) or Cingular. But there's simply no signal where there should be. Even on the Tri-Mode I used to have. (There's a Celluar One sales office across the street, BTW.) Not to mention that many of their towers are still PCS...

T-Mobile is incredibly useless for any sort of coverage. Cingular's network covers everything they do and more.

I haven't been outside of GSM service since 2004. That was for about 15 minutes in rural North Carolina.

Also good for you. I regularly travel into areas they don't cover, but are covered WELL by other carriers. The roaming doesn't work. (As I said, probably Celluar One's problem, but that doesn't help me any.) With my latest phone I've simply given up on Tri-Mode. Surfing carriers doesn't work.

I could sign up for T-Mobile (prepaid or regular) and use my current phone right now.

You could? And not have to pay Cingular for exiting your contract early? Really?

Or do you mean, "I could sign up for T-Mobile after my contract expires, at which point my phone will be a barely supported piece of junk that T-Mobile will urge me to replace with a model that will require another 2-3 year contract?"

Such a change in the carriers' business model wouldn't be acceptable to them.

We're not talking about carriers. We're talking about replacing the carriers with an open Internet pipe.

Skype & the IM services doesn't count; they're way too closed

Skype, Vonage, Net2Phone, and many other companies all compete for your VOIP service today. Closed or not, they'd be happy to configure your WIFI phone to handle their service. If you don't like one, go with another. The service they provide is an abstract connection to the POTS system, so there's no real concern about coverage areas or other carrier nonsense. For WIFI to WIFI calls, you can use direct phone-to-phone connections rather than bothering with a VOIP service.

An open, secure, as P2P as possible system would be ideal.

Which is what I'm getting at. Once there's always-on wireless internet for phones, your phone will only have to maintain its dynamic DNS entry. From there, any other phone could contact your phone directly without any of this proxy nonsense. Which would make phone calls as simple as establishing a TCP/IP socket.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[ACMENEWSLLC]

I have a WIFI phone. The battery life sucks. And WIFI is far from as reliable as GSM for making a call. The handoff doesn't work well either.

While I agree, that would be a long term effect, it would not be felt for 10 years.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[TrueXtremeIcon]

That doesn't mean that we have to accept it though. I for one would enjoy a little Utopia every now and then :)

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[David Gould]

  No pun intended.

dgould's Fifth Law: All puns are "intended".
Corollary: No puns will be "pardoned".

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[TubeSteak]

I highly suggest you look at T-Mobile's coverage map:
http://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/

There are HUGE portions of [Your State Here] that get no coverage at all.

T-Mobile only uses the 1900 MHz frequency, the other big U.S. cell providers use both 1900 & 850. (850 MHz has better range than 1900)

If you have some other GSM cell provider, you can check their frequencies & coverage area

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[azpenguin]

Just a mention... T-Mobile now roams on the Cingular network.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[NormalVisual]

Most people don't get cable back until they get power back (between three days and four weeks.)

I got lucky with the storms in 2004. The eye of Charley passed less than seven miles away, with 77 mph sustained winds and 109 mph gusts recorded at MCO about a mile and a half from my place, and the power was out for about 40 minutes where I was. Frances put us down for about eight hours, but that was punctuated by several periods where the power would be up for 5-10 minutes. We didn't lose power at all during Jeanne.

I think it was probably because we were located in a newer area where most of the lines were underground, but it seemed that areas served by Orlando Utilities got service back quicker in general than those served by FP&L.

As I recall we didn't lose phone service at all, which I have to contrast to the two weeks we were down last year because of a BellSouth screwup, which we didn't discover until our new neighbors let us know they were getting our calls. BellSouth's inadequate response and attempts to sell us yet more expensive services after that clinched our decision to go with Vonage, and the service has been great for us.

Re:Not if the Cell Companies...

[NormalVisual]

If I were going to (or if I were going to sell my phone), Cingular will unlock the phone for free with a little hassle (mainly finding someone one the phone that knows what 'unlocking' means and how to get it done).

That wasn't my experience. When I cancelled my contract, not only did Cingular steadfastly refuse to unlock the phone, but they insisted on charging me a cancellation fee until I forced them to pull the recording where I agreed to a one-year contract instead of the two years they argued I agreed to, because "we don't do one-year contracts". To this day, I still get a bill for the cancellation fee from those fools, with a corresponding credit that brings it to a zero balance. I've gotten one every month for five months now.

I wouldn't count on any assistance whatsoever from them if you're not going to be handing them money on a monthly basis.

Sounds like a dot com idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. They'll make up for it on volume.

Re:Sounds like a dot com idea

[Pope]

Ah, yes, I remember the very successful @Home network, the one that tanked, bleeding money from every orifice. Sounds like a sure-fire winner!

Re:Sounds like a dot com idea

[smackt4rd]

I heard they're going to get $1 for every brain tumor.

Intriguing, but...

[TripMaster Monkey]

...it also sounds strangely familiar, somehow...

From TFA (emphasis mine):

"M2Z's goal is ... provide free high speed connections to 95 percent of U.S. consumers without any recurring fees. This is a grand undertaking."

Translation: We won't see it in our lifetimes.

I hope I'm wrong, but this sort of thing has been tried before, with less than satisfactory results.

Re:I'm confused.

[AKAImBatman]

I'm confused.

No wonder you're confused. You've gone from "not reading the article" to "not even reading the summary"! News these days will soon be nothing more than a cheap headline! BWHAHAHA!

Hint: If you want more bandwidth than the default (e.g. enough to watch internet television on the go), you'll need to pay.

Re:A kickback on "free"?

[oahazmatt]

The only way I see any revunue being generated is:
a) Free customers have to utilize a special browser that encourages the user to view advertisments. (This would of course be PC only, which is why only 95% of Americans would be offered this access ;p)
b) Customers can subscribe to higher speeds or premium packages.

How do we make money?

[misleb]

Free internet access. How do we make money? Volume.

Ya, I know, just the low speed is free. But still, doesn't sound like a solid business plan. From what I understand, what people like most about broadband is the "always on" aspect.. not so much the bandwidth. I wonder if 384/128 is low enough to encourage people to pay for the faster service.

-matthew

Re:How do we make money?

[Red Flayer]

With more video and audio being delivered, you can bet that 384/128 is too slow. Hi-def streaming video (eg, pr0n, the driver of internet technology) needs bandwidth.

Re:How do we make money?

[AKAImBatman]

I wonder if 384/128 is low enough to encourage people to pay for the faster service.

Generally I would tend to agree with you. IMHO, 128/128 would be a better bandwidth point. However, with the rise of Hi-Def media and multimedia over the Internet, it's only a matter of time before Hi-Def over the Internet becomes the standard. When that happens, I imagine that you'll see a lot of users looking for more bandwidth to power their in-SUV televisions/radios, their video-conferencing cellphones, and their on-the-spot videoblog reporting. All these concepts need is a network.

Err, on second thought, that's a rather scary thought.

Re:How do we make money?

[whyrat]

I'm reminded of the good old days of "shotgunning" modems together to combine the total bandwidth. Only now you don't even need multiple phone lines, just multiple wireless receivers.

What stops me from getting 20 free wireless hookups and running a shotgun program to effectively combine the bandwidth? Other than some sort of account creation requirements (one connection per address? or per Credit card?) I don't see how they could really prevent this.

Sounds like a future OSS project if this project goes through ;)

Re:How do we make money?

[misleb]

I think uniqutous HiDef over the internet is a long way off. It is barely a standard in broadcast (in the US anyway). The internet bandwidth just isn't there. To get it there, expect to see the bill from your ISP double. But I guess that wouldn't be so bad if you could say good bye to your $100 cable/satelite TV bill...

-matthew

Re:How do we make money?

[mikeisme77]

Can you please post some good resources for shotgunning wireless and/or ethernet connections? I had been looking into this earlier when I had two connections I could use on campus, but only one computer to use the connections with (and a great desire to combine the two). Even if the free nationwide wireless thing doesn't happen, I would still find this useful for free wireless at Starbucks and other places. As for what I'd need that much bandwidth for... Bittorrent, of course--that way I can increase my upload and download speeds and get those Linux distros (and unlicensed anime) that much faster--while also reaching the 300+% shared ratio that much faster (and, hopefully, without slowing down my browsing experience... which was the main problem I kept running into).

Re:How do we make money?

[AKAImBatman]

I think uniqutous HiDef over the internet is a long way off.

So's the 95% coverage of a wireless network. This request to the FCC is nothing more than planting a tiny seed at the moment. It will easily take 5-10 years to come to fruition.

The internet bandwidth just isn't there. To get it there, expect to see the bill from your ISP double.

I think you underestimate the economics of the situation. Each year, the companies who make the networking equipment make new breakthroughs in faster telecommunications hardware. That breakthrough means that lots of expensive equipment can be replaced with less equipment at a lower price. That lower price then translates into the ability to add more equipment to produce more bandwidth. Thus there's more bandwidth available at the same price. Ergo, why you're using broadband now instead of a modem, and why DSL and cable providers are able to keep bumping up the speeds on their connections.

In other words, Moores Law—while not actually being a law at all—applies to more than just CPUs. All microelectronics benefit from smaller, faster circuitry and more advanced electronic processing technology.

Re:How do we make money?

[MobyDisk]

Free internet access. How do we make money? Volume.

That's genius! You can get a quiet phone call for free, but normal phone calls would cost 1 cent per minute, and loud phone calls 2 cents per minute. If you want speaker phone, that's 3 cents per minute, or 1 center per minute per person within audio range.

Re:How do we make money?

[jacksonj04]

You're onto something there. I think this could stop people using phones in cinemas and restaraunts!

Re:How do we make money?

[MountainLogic]

The use of Law is correct in this case. While it is not a physical law it is a fair to describe it as a technological law derived from repeated empirical observations of technological development behavior.

From the Wiki:

A physical law, scientific law, or a law of nature is a scientific generalization based on empirical observations of physical behavior. They are typically conclusions based on the confirmation of hypotheses through repeated scientific experiments over many years, and which have become accepted universally within the scientific community. However, there are no strict guidelines as to how or when a scientific hypothesis becomes a scientific law.

snip

Physical laws are distinguished from scientific theories by their simplicity. Scientific theories are generally more complex than laws; they have many component parts, and are more likely to be changed as the body of available experimental data and analysis develops. This is because a physical law is a summary observation of strictly empirical matters, whereas a theory is a model that accounts for the observation, explains it, relates it to other observations, and makes testable predictions based upon it. Simply stated, while a law notes that something happens, a theory explains why and how something happens, in terms of the more fundamental laws.

Re:How do we make money?

[RobertLTux]

speaking of "shotgun" + modem does anybody have a copy of the old Diamond multimedia ads for shotgun modems? if they do please send a copy out in the normal manner

Re:How do we make money?

[LWATCDR]

Nvidia offers it on some of their new motherboards. It also has fall over if one connection fails. Does it work with Linux? Who knows. If that and the RAID 5 both work under Linux a am getting one.

Re:How do we make money?

[0racle]

Personally, I would pay for more then 384/128. As someone who is going to be moving to an area that has no options other then dialup, I hope this works out.

Re:How do we make money?

[krunk4ever]

there's always:
http://research.microsoft.com/netres/projects/virt ualwifi/

VirtualWiFi is a virtualization architecture for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards. It abstracts a single WLAN card to appear as multiple virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can then configure each virtual card to connect to a different wireless network. Therefore, VirtualWiFi allows a user to simultaneously connect his machine to multiple wireless networks using just one WLAN card. This new functionality introduced by VirtualWiFi enables many new applications, which were not possible earlier using a single WLAN card.

Re:How do we make money?

[mothas]

You can always get a dual-WAN router.

Re:How do we make money?

[misleb]

I think you underestimate the economics of the situation. Each year, the companies who make the networking equipment make new breakthroughs in faster telecommunications hardware. That breakthrough means that lots of expensive equipment can be replaced with less equipment at a lower price.

I don't think that is necessarily the trend. Having worked for an ISP, the big routers are still pretty damn expensive and you still need a router per peering point (and then some) unless you want to consolidate your networking into single points of failure. And on top of that, vast amounts of spam and other malicious traffic are clogging up servers. Routing tables are massive and maintenence is general is getting more and more complicated. Things were easy for ISPs when all they had to do was keep centralized banks of dialin ports running. Any mom or pop could open up an ISP back in the day. Didn't need much more than a T1 for data, a PRI circuit, and a modem pool.

That lower price then translates into the ability to add more equipment to produce more bandwidth. Thus there's more bandwidth available at the same price. Ergo, why you're using broadband now instead of a modem, and why DSL and cable providers are able to keep bumping up the speeds on their connections.

They can bump up the speeds because most people still don't really utilize the bandwidth. It is a selling point. Do you remember the days when internet access was was like $20/mo? The cost is going up, not down. Just like cable TV. They kept adding more and more channels to justify higher and higher rates until your once $30 or so cable bill became more like $80 despite newer and better technology.

In other words, Moores Law--while not actually being a law at all--applies to more than just CPUs. All microelectronics benefit from smaller, faster circuitry and more advanced electronic processing technology.

Sure, but ISPs are not selling you electronics.

-matthew

Re:How do we make money?

[chris.evans]

Hey, 384/128kbps is faster than a 56k modem :) If it always on, then they should throttle it to 56/33.6k to entice buy ing higher speeds.

Not just the cells

[wiredog]

The cable companies (not much difference between them and 'traditional' telcos) will also want to stomp his idea flat.

Re:Not just the cells

[twistedsymphony]

indeed, especially considering a system like this wouldn't have any need for net-neutrality laws and the whole telco ideal of throttling bandwidth to sites or consumers that don't pay up would only hurt them further.

If they really want to sell this they'd just have to promote the angle that a government controlled network would allow the government to much more easily spy and monitor that network... then knobbiest be damned because legal power is worth more then bribes at that point.

Re:Not just the cells

[twistedsymphony]

er *lobbyists not knobbiest :p

Re:Not just the cells

[Ex-MislTech]

Well technically some o them can be knobs of a sort

Re:Not just the cells

[dueling recorder sol]

well seeing as how neither cable or dsl is available to me and i refuse to have a half second delay in everything as is with satelite, they have no room to complain until they provide it to me.

This *is* just another greedy cell company

[dsginter]

From what I can gather, any cell company would want the sole control of some UHF bandwidth in exchange for offering "free" entry-level wireless internet access *in exchange for* the right to offer premium pay-for / high-performance service.

Its a trick. Get an axe!

No sir. If anything, just open the entire UHF spectrum for municipal wireless internet access. We don't need to assign control to a single entity (e.g. - two or three companies would be able to compete for both free and pay-for service). Yes, you'd still have to regulate it a bit since the spectrum is too valuable to be clouded up by the general public but single-source is just too dangerous. We've already learned that most anyone will take a few dollars in exchange for their corruption (e.g. - the "free" service has high-latency that prevents VoIP and other value added services).

Re:This *is* just another greedy cell company

[kunwon1]

The UHF spectrum is almost entirely licensed, and there are tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of licensed operators who use the spectrum on a daily basis. It can't be 'opened up' because then those licensed operators would no longer have the access they are entitled to -as- licensed operators.

have fun with that

[hyperstation]

how much do you value your privacy? prepare for the mother of all click thru EULAs.

Re:have fun with that

[szembek]

I value it less than the $45 per month I pay for RoadRunner.

Re:have fun with that

[LunaticTippy]

You're sadly deluded if you have an expectation of privacy on the intarweb.

Re:have fun with that

[ls -la]

how much do you value your privacy? prepare for the mother of all click thru EULAs.

Your standard wired ISP makes you agree to a EULA (usually including things like not running servers). They just don't make you click through it, they put it in 3pt font on the back of some random sheet of paper. They can also monitor and record your internet activity just as easily as this proposed company.

Re:have fun with that

[thedletterman]

This is my big gripe about free municipal networks, an absolute lack of privacy. I'm sure part of this EULA will include a provision that allows the government to "inspect" any computer that accesses the network for "security violations". Keep my ISP corporate, private, and for profit. I'll gladly dish out $19.95 a month for that.

Re:have fun with that

[pluther]

Keep my ISP corporate, private, and for profit.

Absolutely! Because a for-profit corporation like AT&T would never share our private data with the government!

Re:have fun with that

[hyperstation]

still no excuse for end users not to have access to and be using *strong* encryption. it'll take several more outings (such as the AT&T thing) for this to be pounded into the collective heads of the masses.

Re:have fun with that

[Kijori]

If you use this as your primary internet connection, yes the privacy concerns apply. But if, as I would, you just use it when out of the house, you can always use a VPN to your home connection to avoid their monitoring - send it as encrypted HTTP packets and they'd be indistinguishable from normal network traffic.

Re:have fun with that

[thedletterman]

I'm not saying that AT&T would never share my personal information, what I'm saying is that it's a hundred times better than the government examining every packet that leaves my house and the computer that sends them on a daily basis.

Re:have fun with that

[pluther]

Why? Why is having AT&T, a group over which you exert almost no influence, examining every packet that leaves your house a hundred times better than having the government, which is bound by law and the constitution, doing it?

Re:have fun with that

[thedletterman]

Because AT&T has no executive powers of government. Yes, they can cooperate in an investigation, but they cannot conduct an investigation, and they certainly cannot impose their will upon me. I have considerably more influence over AT&T than I do over my government, which reminds me of something President Reagan once said...

People patronize a business because they provide a product they desire, and they furnish them with funds voluntarily. People go to the government for services because there is nowhere else to go, and furnish them with funds under the threat of imprisonment. Business has historically provided for the American people in ways the government never could. The government is only good at doing what it was designed to do. Create a more perfect union between the States, establishing Justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, and providing for a common defense. As James Madison, who wrote the Constitution once said, "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one...." The government should remain restricted to their constutionally defined roles, please tell me why I should look to the government to control my access to the internet??

No different than normal

[chundo]

and the government will get a kickback of the revenue.

That's called "lobbying".

Re:No different than normal

[Shadyman]

No, that's called 'government'.

Not enough bandwidth

[EmbeddedJanitor]

I didnt RTFA (probably slashdotted anyway). IBut if they're using 20MHz carrier frequency then they won't be able to stuff many bits down that pipe. To get, say, a 1Mbit channel is going to require a reasonably large bandwidth. Bigger than you're going to be allocated at 20MHz.

Perhaps TFA means a 20MHz wide band at some vastly higher frequency. In that case I guess things are possible. Still, all those free users will very soon choke the channel and if you're paying nothing you can't exactly demand any performance level.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[ZombieWomble]

Yes, TFA is incorrectly worded. They applied for the 2155 to 2175MHZ band.

Interestingly, they reason they're offering the government money is not as a 'kick-back', but to actually pay for the allocation, since they aren't offering any money to purchase it up-front.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[MoOsEb0y]

A single 802.11a channel occupies 16.6 Mhz of bandwidth. This gets 54 mbps using QAM. Look it up on wikipedia if you don't believe me. Using CDMA and directional antennas, the issue of signals jumping on each other could easily be solved. 20 Mhz is plenty of bandwidth for 384kbps wireless. I pay $15 a month for this already with Sprint, so handing it out for free would be great.

Oh, and yes.. TFA is slashdotted.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[Zondar]

I was wondering the same thing. Since (I think) best case you can get 1Mbit/sec out of 1MHz of spectrum width, that would mean that the channel at 20.00MHz would need 384kHz to deliver 384kbits/sec, meaning 20.00 - 20.384 would be used downstream. Where the heck would the upstream be?

And not to mention that 20MHz propagation carries it all over the world. I'm not sure our global neighbors would like us stomping all over entire swaths of the international spectrum.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[interiot]

...

... pay-as-you-go spectrum? Is the U.S. government in the habit of approving business plans now? Has the FCC ever had this arrangement with any other company before?

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

The post above you said this system does not have a 20 MHz carrier, so this is not relevant in this case, BUT it is close to imposible that someone would get the frequency range between, say, 12MHz to 28Mhz (Asuming carrier in the middle), just to send something equivalent to one 802.11a channel. That would be a LOT logarithmically (very unlikely to be granted), and that's what the poster meant.

Carrier frequency and bandiwith are two different things. Most of the time the first is much higher than the latter.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[glassjaw rocks]

I love Coral Cache

http://www.isp-planet.com.nyud.net:8090/cplanet/te ch/2006/prime_letter_060522.html?coral-no-redirect

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[baldass_newbie]

Yes. With the telephone and cable companies. Look at your bill every month. What do you think those FCC charges are? Tips?

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[tinkerghost]

Ummm, that FCC charge is a surcharge that goes directly into the pocket of the Telco.
It's there as part of the settlement that made everyone open their networks to competition. In exchange for that & loosing part of the very lucrative LD business (local/last-mile can be a loss leader in rural areas - which is covered under grants funded by the FUSF fee), the telcos get's to charge everyone the FCC charge.
So, no the FCC charge doesn't go to the FCC - stunned me to find that tidbit out.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[Kadin2048]

They are definitely wrong; 20 MHz really isn't any good for the type of bandwidth they want, unless they took a huge swath of spectrum.

I noticed however that aside from what I knew was down around 20MHz (namely the 15m amateur band), there is a chunk of specturm that's just allocated to "Fixed" and "Mobile" operation (20.010 to 21.0 MHz), so it's not wholly unbelievable. That's the same allocation as the frequencies they're actually asking for, which is a 20 MHz block up at 2155 MHz.

Anyone with an interest in IT these days owes it to themselves to take a look at the Freqency Allocation Chart. Most people I've showed it to (I have a large printout on my wall) are generally surprised at the huge swaths of bandwidth taken up by commercial broadcasting allocations that are barely utilized today. By far the most obvious hog on the chart is the AM radio spectrum, but the VHF and UHF TV bands are pretty bad, too, for what most people get from them.

Of course, I'm probably deluding myself to even imagine that whatever purpose the FCC is going to put them towards, if/when they're reallocated, will do any more public good then sitting there un/under-utilized, like they are right now.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

['nother poster]

You realize that those scales are not fixed, right? Each bar you go down the page the scale is an order of magnitude greater. AM is tiny bandwidth.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[Kadin2048]

I'm aware. However, if you look at the bandwidth allocations at the lower end of the HF spectrum, they are correspondingly smaller as well. I'd argue that the AM broadcast band's spectrum is significantly more valuable than an equivalent-sized chunk in the UHF or VHF. (For distance communication; obviously feelings may differ depending on what you want to do wirelessly.)

So I don't think the FCC's choice of scale is really misleading: it's basically an appropriate choice for the material. Also, in my post I called the AM band the most "obvious" hog, not the largest. By MHz, certainly the UHF broadcast band is larger. A single TV channel would sit across all of the AM broadcast band, after all.

I've heard that at times, back before FM radio overshadowed the medium-wave bands, that there was discussion about moving "AM radio" to SSB operation, in order to increase the number of possible stations and free up more bandwidth. Obviously this never happened, but it's interesting to note that the thinking driving the current digital TV (and eventually, I suspect, digital radio) changeover is not new. It's just that this is the first time when it's really gotten traction.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[scoove]

They are definitely wrong; 20 MHz really isn't any good for the type of bandwidth they want, unless they took a huge swath of spectrum.

It's an interesting band as well. I'd love to see how they deal with it during more active cycles. Your 1 MHz slice might suddenly propegate for a few hundred miles - not exactly the kind of frequency you want for cell-based coverage (unless that is their plan - to only use a couple of nodes per state for "384" divided by tens of thousands of customers. I've been working 17 MHz an increasing amount as the solar cycle begins to wake up a little bit - from the middle of the USA, I had a long PSK-31 contact in Pittsburg PA. It works when your protocol is 31 baud (remember 300 baud modems? or 1200? Yea... that slow). Sharing 1 MHz over a thousand mile radius when the band is open would truly demonstrate some fascinating issues (and you wanna talk about problems with hidden nodes or implementing polling mechanisms over a 1000 mile radius?).

I'm mostly surprised that there are still believers in the dot-com model. Capacity gets paid for regardless of how you fudge the numbers. Either you buy the backbone capacity to feed it or you don't - and towers, trunking, engineering, licensing, compliance all cost real money. Ask a Level3 exec if they ever considered giving free dialup to "pay" for their national fiber rollout and watch their reaction.

This seems more like a frequency givaway scam in search of an engineering solution than anything. Remember that Internet CP80 Port stuff that was so unworkable and absurd to anyone that actually understands anything about IP engineering? Our US house representative has indicated those people are still pushing and they claim their engineers have looked it over and haven't had a credible complaint about their proposal. (Note: The CP80 people haven't gone away and have enough Congressmen that actually think their proposal is a good idea - good time for some followup!)

And if the discussions of the bandwidth utilization were correct, I'm curious where all that higher capacity stuff will come from that is necessary to revenue-share with the FCC. Or is that going to be an oops after the frequency gets allocated - guess we didn't have any left to sell and share. Thanks for the free frequency givaway for a single company. Now there's a scheme I can believe. Just send your Senator a few thousand dollars and get it earmarked. One of our own Senators was kind enough to find $50 million for a rainforest in the middle of flyover USA for a couple thousand dollar donation, so anything's really possible.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[scoove]

And not to mention that 20MHz propagation carries it all over the world.

Exactly. Lots of folks don't realize we're in the bottom of the solar cycle. It's freaking dead on 10 meters (28 MHz) right now - I made a PSK-31 contact a month ago on 10m only because some other guy 40 miles from me was as curious as I was as to how dead it really was.

But the old hams talk about when the cycle wakes up. I mentioned in a previous post about working 17m (18 MHz) two nights ago for a 800+ mile contact. I picked up CW (morse code) from southern Mexico about 1300 miles south of me this weekend on 15m (21 MHz - just above the proposed frequency). I deal with wifi broadband engineering as part of my job and have enough to contend with in 802.11n/g/b/a, contention, collisions, etc. - spread my signal out and give it an occasional atmospheric skip and my network would be hell.

The point some of the "RF aware" are making is that taking a slice of 20 MHz isn't like taking a slice of 2400 MHz, or 20,000 MHz (which was what I originally thought they were talking about - great frequency for this, but requires *massive* cellular infrastructure - literally tens of billions of dollars to get decent national coverage).

Under 1,000 MHz, signals tend to start doing non-line-of-sight things, and depending upon how active the sun is, the lower you get, the more things get unpredictable.

Consider this: tonight we've got a storm system moving in. We were picking up solid traffic on 145 MHz (again, higher than the proposed 20 and less prone to these problems) from 300+ miles away. This is called tropospheric ducting - it has to do with warm air near the ground and frequencies travelling in a trapped manner within that warm air mass. This 20 MHz proposal would be amusing to watch it fail if it wasn't for the failure occuring during an abuse of the public commons.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[Ramadog]

Exactly. Lots of folks don't realize we're in the bottom of the solar cycle. It's freaking dead on 10 meters (28 MHz) right now - I made a PSK-31 contact a month ago on 10m only because some other guy 40 miles from me was as curious as I was as to how dead it really was.

Maybe it depends where you are. Around Australia has been opening up with some sporadic E and back scatter. Same around America. Has been some good propagation across the Pacific. There have been a few threads on qrz about all the openings. East coast Australia, California, Texas, Florida talking to each other in the same qso.

Might not be as good as even last year but there is still fun to be had.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[evilviper]

By far the most obvious hog on the chart is the AM radio spectrum, but the VHF and UHF TV bands are pretty bad, too, for what most people get from them.

Bah! AM radio LOOKS big on that chart, but it's actually quite a tiny ammount of bandwidth, and completely useless for just about any other purposes...

Who's going to built a huge antenna, use up all that power, just to broadcast (intermittent) low-quality voice, or perhaps text?

Let the barber shop have their oldies AM radio station... There's select few other purposes that would make using that band worthwhile.

After all, look at the frequenies below the AM band, and all you've got are a few radio beacons spread around, and there's already more than enough bandwidth to accomodate them.

I'll hold back on my rant about VHF and UHF and just say that the switch to HDTV is not a moment too soon.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[AdamHaun]

They're asking for 2155-2175 MHz.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[Reziac]

Not only that, but the telcos can make said surcharge as high as their markets will bear.

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[elvum]

Have you come across Digital Radio Mondiale?

Re:Not enough bandwidth

[evilviper]

Yes, as well as the open source software: http://drm.sourceforge.net/

The quality of AM/MW wasn't really the point, though. The point was the seriously limited bandwidth in that range, and the large ammount of power and large antenna needed to broadcasting. That makes MW completely useless for 2-way communications (fire/police/ambulance), and too expensive for niche broadcasters.

There's already a free nationwide wireless ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

It's apparently called "linksys"

Re:There's already a free nationwide wireless ISP

[kvn]

it sometimes goes by the name "default"...

Re:There's already a free nationwide wireless ISP

[absinthminded64]

I thought it was just free with purchase of any pringle like potatoe chips?

Hmmm...

[lorcha]

Looks like isp-planet.com should have paid for the faster link!

Frequency Allocation

[Detritus]

According to this, they plan to use 2155-2175 MHz, not 20 MHz. After all the nonsense with BPL. I was afraid that someone else was stupid enough to propose using HF for short-range data transmission.

Re:Frequency Allocation

[mongoose(!no)]

I saw that too, its mentioned pretty far down in the article that this story links to. It would be a lot nicer if they didn't make that little typo, I was worried about how they were going to fit all that in on a tiny sliver of bandwidth.

Re:Frequency Allocation

[Goaway]

Well, they didn't say which 20 MHz!

Business plan

[Jhan]

I'll go to hell for this, but

1. Give away bandwidth
2. ???
3. Profit!

Re:Business plan

[jgoemat]

2. Charge for faster connection speeds

Re:Business plan

[skinnygmg]

2. relentless NetZero style advertizements

Re:Business plan

[banuk]

yes, go to hell don't pass go, and don't collect $200 for using the same tired joke

Re:Business plan

[bmalia]

2. Control the internet

Like getting the Three Stooges to do your plumbing

[Rob T Firefly]

They're backed by Kleiner Perkins, one of the most successful VC firms in history

Oh, that's good.

and being started by the guy who built the @Home network and a former FCC Wireless Bureau Chief.

Oh, that's bad.

Re:95 percent?

[digitaldc]

So, will this be 95% of the population of the U.S., or 95% of the geographical area?

It will work in all areas except the ones we live in. There it will be $59.99 a month for AOL Dial-up access.

20 MHz

[Intron]

Looks like that's WWV right now. I guess we have to give up the radio time standard?

Google competition?

[Iphtashu Fitz]

I wonder if this might end up in direct (or indirect) competition with Google at some point in the future. With all the reports of dark fibre that Google is interested in, one possible purpose would be to provide free/cheap internet access to people. Google is rapidly becoming a major player in the advertising space. Providing free ad-based internet access is something they already seem to have many of the building blocks for.

20 MHz *Bandwidth*, not Frequency

[Parker51]

"20Mhz frequency allocation"

More precisely, a 20 MHz *bandwidth* of frequencies in the 2155-2175 MHz band. I did a double-take when first reading this article, because it almost reads as though this service will be operating on a center carrier frequency of 20 MHz. That wouldn't make sense, as that's smack in the middle of the High Frequency, or "shortwave," bands. Not only does that provide worldwide propagation at modest signal powers (as little as a few Watts), users of those frequency bands would be limited to at most a few hundred kHz of bandwidth, which would be unusuable for high-speed computer networking.

So, the M2Z service is proposing to run on a microwave band, requiring lots of infrastructure and towers, like WiFi or cellular telephone.

Re:20 MHz *Bandwidth*, not Frequency

[dubbreak]

I read it as "20Hz" the first time and was thinking "All our bass belong to M2Z".

Re:20 MHz *Bandwidth*, not Frequency

[Lije Baley]

Um, that's 20kHz, not 20MHz of bandwidth. Good luck with getting anything useful out of that...

Re:20 MHz *Bandwidth*, not Frequency

[epp_b]

I read it as "20Hz" the first time and was thinking "All our bass belong to M2Z".

I dunno about that. They may want pickerel instead, it tastes better.

No not vonage ! ;-)

[OneInEveryCrowd]

Actually I'd try to use something like Voipbuster or Skype to get around the monthly fees vonage charges. I might be willing to pay extra too if I could get enough bandwidth for sip/Skype/wigiwigi video.

Another thing I wonder about it whether widespread BitTorrent usage would kill off the response time.

Um Excuse me?

[Mantrid]

Um, the 1990's called, they want their business model back!

Re:Um Excuse me?

[hackstraw]

Um, the 1990's called, they want their business model back!

Oh, and this is started by the guy who built the @Home network. This is the same guy that had a pretty much monopoly on high-speed, almost nationwide coverage, that everybody wanted, but just couldn't seem to make any cash off of it.

I want the 90s back!

Re:Um Excuse me?

[Wayne247]

A year ago called, they want their joke templates back!

sounds fishy

[smartsaga]

Could this be so that the goverment is allowed to sniff users traffic without being liable for anything? I mean, a user would get a webpage saying:

By using this free service you agree to bla, blah, blah, etc, etc and agree to have your traffic inspected...

Right?

Have a good one.

Re:sounds fishy

[LunaticTippy]

They're doing that now. They don't need no stinkin' EULA.

We'll See!

[WaveRider]

I'll Believe it when 50 million people are using the service. Making the service free is goign cause a massive conjestion problem. What would the contention ratio be? (200:1) It would be sooo slow using it would be just not reasonable. Dont think the phone companies have anythign to worry about.

Re:A kickback on "free"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they seem to have a real plan:

1) Gain monopoly control of a bandwidth portion, by promising to everyone that part of it will be "free."

2) As, inevitably, 384kbps speeds become entirely obsolete, the free portion of the service will no longer be worth anything to anybody.

3) Continue doing business, now effectively owning part of the spectrum and paying practically nothing in return.

(I can't read the article itself because it's Slashdotted; if their plan includes automatically scaling the free bandwidth as some percentage of their commercial bandwidth, then I retract my cynicism.)

And it'll fall apart...

[nbannerman]

... the minute ISPs get together and decide to traffic shape, shoving VoIP to the bottom of the list. A nice idea, and certainly it has it's merits. But can anyone else expect ISPs to tolerate a massive increase in end-to-end communications like this? Especially when some of them (Verizon, I'm looking at you) have a vested interest.

If they'll do it for bit-torrent, they'll do it for VoIP.

Re:And it'll fall apart...

[Dangolo]

1. voice takes up VERY little bandwidth, which wouldn't warrant a need for shaping. Bittorrent is a poor example since it's mostly used to distibute illegal software and it can too easily saturate bandwidth for entire neighborhoods. 2. Ask any voip providing company and they'll tell you that VOIP data packets are given top network priority due [mainly] to the emergency 911 service. 3. companies like Verizon and countless others are all a little freaked out about the idea of *losing* their control of the market to a VC that just decides to give away for free. They have time to innovate up their own competitive ideas and personally i'm excited to see how things end up when the dust settles. ---> i'm betting on the cable companies since the super high speed infrastructure is already there for video/internet/voip... and then M2Z for any and all mobile applications outside of the home. That leaves bell monopolies found wanting.

Ok, working link finally

[lorcha]

In case anyone wants to RTFA, I was finally able to get Coral to cache a copy of it. You can view the article in all its glory here.

But...

[Instine]

...will I be able to use it in my flying car?

More LEO and other trash; slower than EVDO, too

[postbigbang]

Fooey.

Still another plan that will fail out of the starting gate. How about blimps, covering the horizon? 384k is barely usable. If you want it today, get an EV-DO card from Verizon or Sprint... or maybe an Edge card from Cingular/T-Mobile downstream-- once they can cover more than a few sq mi at a time.

This is not only money down a rat hole, but the announcement is also designed to queer all of the WiFi providers trying to build business cases across the country.

Not going to happen. Worse, it's obfuscation at its pinnacle.

Re:More LEO and other trash; slower than EVDO, too

[cyphergirl]

Where I live, I can't get cable, DSL or satellite internet. No one is providing broadband wireless that actually works at my house and the local microwave inTARweb place is too far away. I would gladly trade in my modem for 384k anything -- free or not free.

Eventually a flat-rate thing is going to happen.

[thealsir]

The whole idea of "long distance" went away with the net. Since then, it's just been phone companies that have gotten in the way of progress. Internet == phone. Will happen soon. Why not yet? Pigopoly.

More Info on M2Z

[theGreater]

M2Z Networks, Inc. 2800 Sand Hill Road, Suite 150 Menlo Park, CA 94025
M2Z's website
M2Z FCC application

-theGreater.

Re:More Info on M2Z

[Valdrax]

What's the first link for?

Finding out where to camp out to be first in the theater?
Geocaching your wireless modem?
Aiming the orbital laser strike?

Or 95% of the web sites

[PIPBoy3000]

It looks like they'll be implementing an "always on" filter. From their filing:

Mandatory Filtering of Indecent and Obscene Material. M2Z commits to mandatory filtering of indecent and obscene material for the National Broadband Radio Service. This will be accomplished through a compulsory setting on the service that will utilize state of the art filters, taking every reasonable and available step to block access to sites purveying pornographic, obscene or indecent material. Like the free service itself, M2Z's content filtering will be "always on." Moreover, National Broadband Radio Service customers will be unable to alter the filters as they constitute an essential element of that service. To accomplish these critical filtering functions, M2Z plans to route National Broadband Radio Service traffic through a set of servers that can examine the traffic flows for improper activity and restrict access as required. Thus, the nation's children -- and their parents -- will have free access to broadband that is not only very affordable but also family-friendly and free from pornographic and other indecent material.

Think of the children . . .

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[ag-gvts-inc]

You know, I think that blocking porn on this thing is a great idea. I understand there's always going to be false positives and other problems, but it would keep the network free from bandwidth abusers. If anyone wants porn, there's nothing stopping them from signing up with an isp to get it. This would be a free service (the bottom speed anyway), they don't have to provide anything at all.

Re: Or 95% of the web sites

[Spud Stud]

No porn? It says a lot about their lack of business sense that they're deliberately blocking the content that has driven most of the technological innovation of our times.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[ender-]

Although I think it would be great to have free nationwide 384/128kbps wireless, I see two issues:

One with the filter they want to implement. If this becomes ubiquitous then anyone who pays for another ISP may be assumed to be doing so for 'porn' purposes. So you might want to keep your non-NBRS ISP connection to yourself.

Also this is a big-brother wet-dream! Especially if people start using it for unencrypted voip traffic. No need to bug people's houses. Just get anywhere within x-miles of the target and you can read everything they send out. And it will be easy to find them using a triangulation of multiple towers in the area. At least in heavily populated area's; it might be alittle more difficult to triangulate someone's position using the single tower in BFE, Kansas.

Anyway, in the past I would have considered someone crazy if they really thought these things were an issue. Unfortunately recent history is making me more and more concerned.

Re: Or 95% of the web sites

[AKAImBatman]

Notice how it constantly refers to the free service. I'm guessing that an option on the pay service will be to disable filtering. I'm not going to comment on the moral implications of the entire thing (especially given that filtering tends to be a fly-with-a-cannon solution; hitting all the wrong targets), but the promise of disabling filtering on a service that people already use could be enough to drive subscriptions to the premium service.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[LunaticTippy]

If you want to limit bandwidth use, limit bandwidth use.

If you want to impose your morality on someone else, try to restrain yourself. Think of the children.

Re: Or 95% of the web sites

[Electrum]

No porn? It says a lot about their lack of business sense that they're deliberately blocking the content that has driven most of the technological innovation of our times.

From the above linked document:

Adult consumers providing M2Z with appropriate proof that they are of the age of majority, for example through the use of a credit card, can subscribe to a premium product.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[Alioth]

I suspect the real reason is they want to make sure that (at least the free service) has some bandwidth left. Porn is incredibly high bandwidth due to its popularity. It's for this reason many cheap hosting providers advertising 1TB/month bandwidth forbid the hosting of adult sites, because that might actually _use_ 1TB/month.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[ag-gvts-inc]

I don't understand...the GPL is allows one to use software freely, but with some restrictions. If people disagree with the principles behind the GPL, we here have no problem saying "don't like it? don't use it?" But when some group says "you can use some of our bandwidth for free, just don't surf porn." We go: "don't force your rules on me!" Come on now, no one's forcing you to use it.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[glindsey]

Dear NBRS:

Please feel free to try and examine the traffic flows from my SSH-tunneled connection to a box at home with a wired broadband connection.

Sincerely,
glindsey

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[gnuadam]

The GPL ensures that users can use software with absolutely *no* restirctions. The only restrictions it imposes is on developers and distributers. Read term #0 of the GPL if you doubt me. Use of the software is completely free of restrictions.

I'm not addressing your argument, just clearing up your misunderstanding of the GPL.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[LunaticTippy]

OK, good, we're making progress.

It isn't about bandwidth, it's about imposing rules on other people. Make sure the rules you try to impose are justifiable and rational. Singling out porn is pretty hard to justify. Why not filter violence? Politically different viewpoints? Non-approved religions? Non-approved news? Are breasts ok? How about on men? Is birth control ok? What about STDs?

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[Ken_g6]

Dear glindsey:

From the filing, Appendix 3, paragraph 3:

While there are several approaches that could address these problems, M2Z's current approach is to route free-user traffic through a set of proxy servers, which can examine the traffic flows for improper activity and restrict access as required.

Please feel free to develop a system to tunnel SSH over HTTP.

Sincerely,
Ken

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[Miaomiao]

Honestly, it drives me crazy when services add porn blocking features. Alot of the work I do, both professional and volunteer, involves advocating for sexual health education, sexual violence prevention and even glbt activism.

I routinely get emails from my colleages caught by filtering software for "pornographic content". Partially it's just a hazard with working in this field, but the problem is you also want to get this information out to youth as well. And even the best filter has trouble distinguishing between "porn" and "educational content".

Similar attempts always come to the same conclusion, you really have to have filtering client side, not server side. On top of that I'm not talking about computer software either, but responsible parents. That way the parent can decide what they want their kids to see and not see, and if they're digging into these things the parent can take appropriate actions.

One thing to think about, would you rather youth have access to sexual health information? Or should it be censored? Didn't the schools mostly get rid of filtering software for this very reason? I'd say a parent or teacher looking over your shoulder is a great deterrent for the children.

I wont ever believe that a filter can distinguish between the two, especially since I've seen alot of porn taken off porn sites and actually USED for educational purposes. So much depends on context, and even young minds can be healtily educated when you're talking about when you're asking about exploitation and sexual violence.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[bobs666]

I do not need p0rn.

I want access to MMORPG's.

Right now there are no broadband providers that go to my house even thow I live in a metropolitan area. Only 3 miles from a verizon city switch and only 1000 feet from the TV cable data pipe.

if a small fee is required to reduce latency, so be it.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[squiggleslash]

One with the filter they want to implement. If this becomes ubiquitous then anyone who pays for another ISP may be assumed to be doing so for 'porn' purposes. So you might want to keep your non-NBRS ISP connection to yourself.

The quotes from the FA posted here suggest that the entire system will be filtered, which will go a long way towards preventing generic use of the service. It'll be a free web system, but secure shell access to your office would, for example, be a massive loophole as far as allowing porn goes.

Plus what are they going to do about HTTPS?

I suspect either the controls will be circumventable, or the controls will be so draconian as to force telecommuters (and other professionals needing remote access), gamers, and other groups to use alternative means.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[squiggleslash]

If they're over-enthusiastic with the port blocking, they're going to cut off a lot of legitimate traffic. SSH is mostly used for remote access to computers (such as tech staff needing access to office computers from home)

I wonder, actually, what they'll do about HTTPS. Cut it off, and the service becomes completely useless. Keep it, and there's an obvious workaround for anyone wanting to create accessable porn sites.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[jimcooncat]

Run your SSH over port 80. You didn't need to host your own blog, anyway.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[John Hasler]

> Why not filter violence? Politically different viewpoints? Non-approved
> religions? Non-approved news?

Don't worry. They'll hit all of those too, as well as enough random false positives to irritate everyone and enough false negatives to get them in trouble with the theocrats.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[John Hasler]

> I suspect either the controls will be circumventable...

Perhaps, or perhaps they will require that you install and use their (Windows only) client software.

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[LunaticTippy]

Everybody wins!

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[squiggleslash]

...which will fall under the "draconian" category because at that point, telecommutors and gamers are screwed...

Re:Or 95% of the web sites

[Maximum Prophet]

So all we have to do is encrypt the pron in Rot13 (Hmm, what does a Rot13 gif look like?) or something like TES (Trivial Encryption Standard) so that the "State of the Art Filters" don't see it. Anyone in the know will have what they want. Just don't let the authorities know the key.

On the other hand

[iamlucky13]

The existing phone companies could use their massive financial resources to jump on top of this and beat any startups to the punch, cornering a potentially massive market early on.

Yes, I know it's not as simple as that, but ultimately I see traditional providers as shooting themselves in the foot by trying to restrict change. If you don't have the best way of doing something, sooner or later your customers are going to take their money to the person who does.

Re:On the other hand

[coastwalker]

Theres plenty of non traditional suppliers lining up for the auction with similar aspirations to unwire the States. This particular idea has probably arrived too late to be considered by the Government, which will have already lined up some very agressive bidders with very deep pockets for the spectrum sale.

Its an appealing business model though, because it matches the price of the spectrum against the revenue that can be earned from it rather than the crazy bids for 3G mobile which IMHO was partly to blame for the tech crash in 2001.

I'm torn...

[ag-gvts-inc]

If it works, it'll be extremely useful. Combine it with either webmail or webmail via pop3, and my parents'll never have to pay for an isp again. Unfortunately, it'll also probably kill the local wisp. Which would be quite a shame, those guys have nearly succeeded in covering the last mile here where I live. And they're affordable too (ie, they're not making much off it.)

I for one...

[soft_guy]

I for one would like to welcome our new free wireless overlords. May death come quickly to their enemies!

Yeah, but

[atomicthumbs]

You'd need a rather large antenna. 20mhz is fifteen meters wavelength. I think that even a quarter-wave whip would be too large to put on a VoIP phone, or a laptop.

Re:Yeah, but

[LunaticTippy]

What if the frequency were 2 orders of magnitude larger?

Re:Like getting the Three Stooges to do your plumb

[jpvlsmv]

and being started by the guy who built the @Home network and a former FCC Wireless Bureau Chief.

Oh, that's bad.

He built what? Dude, if this guy can build his own FCC Wireless Bureau Chief, he can do anything. --Joe

384k is barely usable?

[jgoemat]

EVDO isn't much better now. A lot of DSL subscribers are still that slow. 384k is perfectly usable for most things you need to do on the net (email, remote desktop, web browsing, game playing), it just takes longer for downloading large files or watching streaming video. Tell my parents out in the boonies that still use dialup that it wouldn't be an improvement, or people that can't afford the rates for cell-based wireless. Also, 95% sounds pretty dang good for driving around the country.

Ummm...

[n6kuy]

The allocation is 20 MHz wide, not at 20 MHz.

Not going to work the way you think it will..

[Svartalf]

"I'm reminded of the good old days of "shotgunning" modems together to combine the total bandwidth. Only now you don't even need multiple phone lines, just multiple wireless receivers."

Well, that would sort-of work. You might be able to get multiple transmitters to send on each one of the frequency slots on a given channel set. The largest problem to that really working is that you're going to have a hell of a time getting the transponders to sync up nicely and not collide and interfere with each other. The second problem is that "shotgunning" worked mostly because you were using multiple independent channels (Seperate phone lines...) and hooked in at the lowest device driver levels and aggregated the total bandwidth in a just so way so that parts of packets could be sent down one wire and other parts down another. You have only ONE channel and you're not going to very likely get the level of device access that you had with the dialup modems. You could get BGP to probably handle all of that if it's exposed only as an network type connection to the user, but since you're a freebie account, you're probably not going to get BGP to readily work because their routers won't acknowlege your router on the recieving end of the multiple recievers.

"What stops me from getting 20 free wireless hookups and running a shotgun program to effectively combine the bandwidth? Other than some sort of account creation requirements (one connection per address? or per Credit card?) I don't see how they could really prevent this."

Well, the above items cause their own set of problems- but there's one more. If you succeed in doing this, you're guilty of theft of service- which is a felony offense in pretty much all of the US as a whole. If you encourage this practice, you're inciting to commit a crime- also a criminal offense in most states. Sure, you're not as likely to get caught doing it as with some other things, but I'm not one for commiting felonies just to get bandwith. Perhaps you don't have those moral qualms?

Re:Not going to work the way you think it will..

[whyrat]

I'd disagree this is theft of service, unless they specify it's limited to one free access per person.

If I had a laptop and a desktop would it be theft of service to link each up seperately? If I then decide to download some files on my laptop, and some on my desktop, then share the files between the two I'm suddently stealing (assuming it's legal to DL these files in the first place).

Besides, preaching to internet users about theft is roughly equivilent to asking a baby not to cry (do I need to remind you about the whole P2P music sharing fiasco that's been ongoing for the past ~7 years since Napster hit). If it is more economically fesible to buy multiple devices and use them in parallel for free compared to buying one device and using it at a higher capacity for a fee... someone's bound to do it. Now if the access point costs $250 and the higher bandwidth service is $5 / mo then it's pretty obvious this won't be economically feasible for most individuals. One the other hand if acess points are $20 and the higher bandwidth costs $40 / mo... well, use whatever numbers you like; at this point it's speculation on if this service will even exist.

The sync of the transponders needs to be coordinated only so that when there are multiple *independent* request / reply packets they are distributed amongst the input / output channels (instead of sending 5 packets through a single device you send 3 through one and 2 through the other). If these wireless devices are designed correctly there shouldn't be interferance from other devices being nearby (otherwise I'd just as likely be colliding with my neighbors, which wouldn't be nice at all). Think of two people standing next to each other on cell phones... they don't interfere with each other's signals to the tower to they? But of course they do interefere with any nearby speakerphones :(

As to the other poster asking for links I don't know any because ever since I got broadband I lost interest in trying this. I do know there are programs like netants (http://www.netants.com/) which do this same sort of thing in principal, but across a single access medium.

Re:Not going to work the way you think it will..

[MoonBuggy]

How is this in any way theft, or even illegal? Abuse of the service definitely, and probably ruled out by any EULA that you have to pass before getting on the network, but you can't steal something that's free. It's not like you'd be getting the paid service for free either - what you do get may be as good or better than the paid service, but it isn't the same so they haven't "stolen" that. It'd be like taking 20 free AOL CDs from the bucket rather than the one they intend you to take; I can't see how it can be illegal.

Re:Not going to work the way you think it will..

[esper]

Walk into the back of a local fast-food joint. Grab an unopened case of napkins and walk out. When they stop you, try convincing them that "you give away napkins for free and you can't steal something that's free, therefore I can take all your napkins and it's not stealing."

Good luck.

Re:Not going to work the way you think it will..

[MoonBuggy]

Where do you get the idea I feel entitled? I actually said just above that it's "Abuse of the service definitely, and probably ruled out by any EULA that you have to pass before getting on the network", just as you say. The point I was arguing is that it would be Theft of Service, which I don't see as being possible with a free (beer) service. You might take more than you're meant to and get cut off, but it's still not theft.

Re:Not going to work the way you think it will..

[Svartalf]

Oh, and the sync issue you "addressed" will only work if you've complete control of the transponders. If you try staging them, you will probably find out that thier throttling algorithm that allows you transmit windows isn't consistent at all (It wouldn't be...). If you hack the radio units to allow you that control, you've violated the TOS and are stealing service. If you cobble together your own RF unit, you run afoul of the FCC regs AND are stealing service.

Nice.

Is it REALLY worth all that trouble to get basically low-end ADSL bandwidths? Fun hack, in all honesty, but it's just not really worth all of this.

Re:Not going to work the way you think it will..

[MoonBuggy]

They might have a problem with me going into non-public areas of the shop, but I don't see that it would be illegal to take all the napkins, ketchup and straws that are on the counter for me to take. As I've said, they'd be well within their rights to eject me from the shop, but not to arrest me. I don't want to sound like I'm arguing that it's the right thing to do either, it's not, but I just want to make the point that I can't see it as illegal.

Re:Not going to work the way you think it will..

[Svartalf]

The biggest problem with your line of argument is that it's just a violation of the TOS- it's more than that.

If you're not subscribed, you're stealing it (Just like the analogy of taking a wad of napkins from a fast food restraunt...)- doesn't matter if it's free. If it's not per the terms of the offer, it doesn't matter what the cost of a product or service is- if you took something outside the deal you would normally get it by, it's theft. If I take 20 "free" samples of something, it's still theft- it's just that more often than not it's not worth the trouble to pursue the thief over 20 AOL CDs to use your example (But you still stole those discs, if you took that many all at once and weren't planning on handing them to 20 people other than yourself or were planning on having 20 backup discs (God, whatever for?!)).

If you're subscribed, your use is solely predicated on the terms of service. If you don't abide by the terms of service, most TOS agreements void your end of the deal on the spot. If you're no longer a subscriber, as far as the legal end of things go, and you're using it, you're stealing service. Back again to what I said in the original post, really.

Re:Not going to work the way you think it will..

[NichG]

You'll end up crashing a lot of social events that way. Is it one guy in that house using 20 people's allocation of bandwidth or twenty people getting together for a party/study session/cohabitation/whatever. It'll be fun seeing all the lawsuits that the victims of indiscriminate fishing expeditions like driving around the neighborhood with a signal meter and barging into any house with a spike will levy against the company or local police.

Re:Not going to work the way you think it will..

[NichG]

This raises a point of the difference between something with an explicit terms of service and something with implied terms of service. Something like napkins on the counter in a fast food place: you have some idea that taking many of them is inappropriate but its never written out anywhere. So I think they'd have a hard time going after you for taking 20 napkins (if you didn't go into a non-public area or take something thats not placed out there for public use). Or the opposite being that unless there's a signed form from the restaurant manager saying that you can take napkins, even if you take a single one for use with your meal its theft.

Similarly, I'd imagine the wireless service would have some problem going after people if all they do is make wireless available without any sort of registration or explicit signed agreement from the one receiving the service. It makes me wonder what the legal status of me placing a bin of items out in front of my house is. Have I somehow waived my property rights on those items and have given blanket permission for people to take them, or do I retain property rights and the right to prosecute someone who goes and takes one of the items.
Seems like a good scam in the making there...

But of course if there's a TOS/registration/etc it's a much clearer case.

And the Catch?

[TekGnos]

You have to use their devices. From the FCC app: committed to: 1) provide nation-wide broadband service with no reocurring costs to all users who purchase and register a M2Z device. So they will make most their money off of hardware. I guess its still might be worth it, but I bet they will charge a premium for each device because their network would be so large. Free turns out to be not so free.

Re:And the Catch?

[TheJediGeek]

How is that different from the "free" cell phones that most providers hand out? They're not really free since to get it they lock you in to a (usually) 2 year contract with their service. You do end up paying for it because you have to keep that service for a period of time.
Personally, I'd rather pay a one time $250 (according to TFA) for a tranciever that can connect me to the internet almost everywhere I go with no recurring fees. So many people have gotten used to the pseudo-free idea of cell phones that they don't realize it's not that great of a deal.
Many years ago Sprint used to do things this way. You'd buy a phone at a retailer for market price and take it home and activate it at your leisure. This had the effect of higher quality phones than the other providers at the time, and no contracts so you could cancel your service any time if you weren't happy. How often does one get a new cell service only to find the coverage is terrible and they almost never get a signal? If they don't jump through the cancel hoops in the first 15 days, they're stuck with it for 2 years. The "free" cell phone model isn't really that good of a thing to compare to.

A common conversation

[devphaeton]

Here's a conversation I have increasingly often:

customer: I just bought a laptop and the wireless internet stuff only works in my apartment.

me: Do you have an account with ?

customer: I don't need one. It's free here in .

me: Sorry, you're not an customer. There is no wireless internet available where you are.

customer: Yes there is! Flip over the other card and read that. *duh*

me: ....

customer: All new laptops come with free internet.

me: Great, but you still need to contact the ISP that your laptop is partnered with and sign up.

customer: You must be new, or something. You obviously don't get it. I just start up my laptop, and it says "Successfully connected to the Linksie System thingy" and off i go!

Re:A common conversation

[bmalia]

My girlfriends sister told me that cable internet sucks, because it only works when the neighbors internet is on too.

Imagine a beowulf cluster.....

[Ktistec Machine]

....of EVERYTHING!

Not really

[jgoemat]

That doesn't really make sense. 1 hz of frequency range doesn't equate to 1 bit of data per second. Think about it, if you have a carrier wave at 20 million cycles per second, you could theoretically have 40 million edges of the wave to carry information, along with the amplitude of the wave. I'm not an electrical engineer by any means, and I'm not sure how you would calculate theoretical values for frequency modulated signals. Am I missing something? Is there some page that would explain it better?

Re:Not really

[Agripa]

Channel Capacity (bits/s) = 0.332 x Bandwidth x SNR (db) from Shannon-Hartley theorem is a rough estimate but assumes better conditions then they would likely get. Pessimistically, 10MHz and 10db gives 33.2 Mbits/s total. A lot depends on the details like cell size, transmit/receive turn around time, and transmit power.

Re:Not really

[Zondar]

Knew someone would help me out there. Guess it's all academic now that we know it's up above 2GHz...

Re:I'm confused.

[Valdrax]

A) Offer introductory service for free with an upgrade path that costs money.
B) Ads. Remember kids, your time and smooth browsing experience cost nothing.

Re:384/128 is low speed?

[windex]

I, too, felt as trapped as you, friend.

I now have a T1 running over b-grade copper to my house. Sure, I had to pick up 5 phone lines, and my combined bill is about $230 for the whole circuit, but I have high speed AND live in the middle of nowhere.

Hurrah.

Re:How come I'm always the last to comment... ?

[Merle Darling]

Wait, you mean there are other countries?

My experience: ~550kb or 120kb

[postbigbang]

This is the diff between actual EV-DO and 1xRTT.

Perfectly usable.... today.... if you don't mind waiting for anything with serious graphical content. Those damned to dialup deserve something better. This is like putting your foot on the garden hose, and that's yesterday, not four years from now when the graphical content mix will be a far higher ratio.

Bad idea. Bad cost, and the 95% is a pipe dream-- a pipe full of drugs.

Re:My experience: ~550kb or 120kb

[nasch]

Bad idea. Bad cost, and the 95% is a pipe dream-- a pipe full of drugs.

Glad you cleared that up, I had no idea what kind of pipe you were talking about. Oh, and please adjust your sarcasm meter and re-read my comment.

How aggressively will they police this?

[Valdrax]

I'm all fine with porn being blocked from a practical standpoint, but if this gets in the way of me using TOR because of people possibly using TOR to view porn, then I'm not interested.

A service that isn't necessarily tied to your home address and name sounds pretty attractive for the privacy-minded. Wireless, unfiltered broadband is kind of a holy grail of networking for some of us. If they promise to screw it up by acting as a nanny ISP and holding hands with the government, then I'm out.

Re:384/128 is low speed?

[AKAImBatman]

my combined bill is about $230 for the whole circuit,

Hey, that's not bad. Does that cover your bandwidth usage too, or are they charging you per GBit? I wonder if the phone company would setup a fractional T1 shared with neighbors to lower the costs?

Somehow...

[Nom du Keyboard]

wants to offer 95% of America free wireless Internet access

Somehow I just know I'll find myself in the 5% without.

Somehow the RIAA will find you anyway.

Somehow it won't be as free, or as fast, as you thought it would be.

Somehow it will arrive later than expected.

Somehow most of the above will prove true.

Free Nationwide Wireless Internet Access?

[MrNougat]

[X] Yes
[ ] No

Re: Free Nationwide Wireless Internet Access?

[pboyd2004]

[] Yes [] No [X] Pat Buchanan Doh!

Channel Capacity

[Detritus]

The capacity of a communications channel is primarily dependent on the bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio. See the Shannon-Hartley theorem. Given a fixed 1 MHz channel, the bit rate depends on the signal-to-noise ratio.

Correction...

[mypalmike]

"they'll sell the higher speeds and a select group of corrupt individuals in the government will get a kickback of the revenue and hide it away in their freezers "

Re:95 percent?

[tmasssey]

When the summary says 20MHz, I can't figure out of they mean a 20MHz allocation, or an allocation at 20MHz. I'd RTFA, but it's down... However, if it's an allocation at 20MHz, they won't need to put towers in the boonies.

20MHz is allocated as Government/Non-Government Shared Fixed (Primary), Government Mobile (Secondary). Right next to that at 21MHz is 450kHz of Amateur Radio allocation (the 15-meter band). You can do long-distance (DX) communications on 15-meter, including around the world, if conditions are right.

In other words, with an allocation in the 20MHz range, a user is theoretically capable of covering an entire continent with just a single tower. Even if they use a relatively small number of towers (which would be realistically required, if not theoretically), all of the towers will most likely be able to at least interfere with each other. So they'll all be using the same frequencies, and therefore all sharing the same bandwidth, even if there are multiple towers. This is unlike cell towers. Two neighboring cell towers may overlap, but a cell tower 50 miles away can use the same frequency (and therefore bandwidth) without a problem.

So, how much bandwidth will they be able to provide? Let's assume a fairly high-tech encoding: 64-QAM or OFDM. Nyquist tell us that bandwidth = 2 * bandwidth * Log2 (states/signal) bits/second, or 2 * 1MHz * Log2(6), which is 3.6Mbit. For the entire area served by each tower.

But remember that these towers will cover a huge area. States, easily, and the entire continent regularly. I live in the Detroit, MI area. That's 6 Million people. That's about *half* a bit per second per person... And that's with a high-tech encoding like 64QAM.

Now I am not an EE, so please check my math. And I haven't read the article (only the summary), so if it's a 20MHz allocation in some other region of the spectrum (instead of a 1MHz allocation at 20MHz), then the story changes. However, even then, it's not great. You're most likely going to be limited to line-of-sight frequencies (the DX frequencies are already taken).

So, if it's an allocation of DX-capable frequencies at 20MHz, you can get away with a few towers, but you won't have enough bandwidth. And even if it's a dedicated 20MHz allocation somewhere else, you're going to need a bunch of towers.

What is the advantage of this over something like 802.11? I just don't know. No matter what, it seems like you'll need a number of towers comparable to cell phones today, even with a dedicated 20MHz of frequency. 802.11g uses 20MHz channels to provide 54Mbit of bandwidth using OFDM. So even assuming that the entire 20MHz is allocated exclusively to them (so it's cleaner than the ISM bands 802.11 works in), you're still only going to have 54Mbit of bandwidth (and likely only half that usable bandwidth) for your users. At 384kbps/user, you're looking at a theoretical maximum of 140 users per sector per tower, and a likely limit of 70. That's comparable to cell phone towers (roughly 100 users per sector).

In any case, this does not seem like a brilliant flash of inspiration in bringing broadband to the masses. It sounds like an attempt to create a government-backed monopoly on wireless communication. At least the cell companies had to buy their frequencies. In the end, I can't see the difference between this and digital cell service...

Kleiner Perkins?

[mapkinase]

Kleiner Perkins, one of the most successful VC firms in history

Here is their portfolio

Why I am not impressed?

Re:Kleiner Perkins?

[Andy Dodd]

I suggest you click on the "Public Companies" link to the left on the page you linked to.

Your opinion might change.

Re:Kleiner Perkins?

[mapkinase]

I did.

Reading: Google. Were they main force behind Google?

Without specification of what is the percentage of their capital (compared to total investment at that moment) that brought up a startup from non-existence this table is useless, IMHO.

Re:Kleiner Perkins?

[mapkinase]

I trust more Wikipedia on that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiner_Perkins_Caufi eld_%26_Byers

Re:Kleiner Perkins?

[Andy Dodd]

Normally I would trust the company's own site the most as far as publicity and propaganda, but obviously they are not listing many of their older investments. Perhaps they may no longer have a stake in any of those other companies listed on the Wikipedia page.

poles or buried

[zogger]

Certainly makes a difference. Buried pots cable is pretty robust. I remember back in january 2000 we had a near week long power outtage due to ice, etc, knocking down a lot of tree limbs and breaking the wires, but the phone stayed up because they had buried the cable. We hade solar so we never lost power at all, and it was nice to be able to continue using the net and phone.

Now how those buried cables would do in *floods* I have no idea. I guess it would depend on the local switching boxes staying intact and not flooding out.

Re:poles or buried

[ThisOrThat]

Same here, most all phone lines are buried and not above ground like power and cable lines. - Justin

Re:poles or buried

[dgatwood]

They do just fine in floods. If they didn't, they'd short out every time it rained. As soon as you see runoff, it usually means the top layer of soil is approaching saturation. Most cables aren't buried very far down, so the cables are exposed to plenty of water.

When cables do start taking in water, you start getting crosstalk on the phone lines, which is always lovely. There's nothing quite like being able to talk to your neighbors across the street by simply being on the phone at the same time.... This often happens when mice eat through the cables, tree roots cut through the jacket, etc. Such problems usually become obvious every time it rains from what I've seen, though I suppose there's a -slight- chance of an exception.

The real problem with buried cables is freezing. You need to bury cables (and particularly pipes) far enough down that they don't freeze, as water that does seep into the jackets would then expand as it freezes and burst the (now brittle) wire jackets, leading to significant degradation of the cables in a shorter period of time.

Re:poles or buried

[dgatwood]

The real problem with buried cables is freezing.

Oh, yeah, and backhoes. Forgot about those. :-D

Re:poles or buried

[RobertLTux]

so which ieee standard is the
"method of detirming current location by summoning a backhoe with operator"?

Re:poles or buried

[Fjandr]

Huh, all the places I've seen have either had all the lines either aerial or buried across any given segment.

Thinking about it as I typed that though, there is actually one location I can recall the POTS lines being buried while power transmission lines weren't.

Re:Like getting the Three Stooges to do your plumb

[ichigo 2.0]

He built what? Dude, if this guy can build his own FCC Wireless Bureau Chief, he can do anything. --Joe

I know this is Slashdot, but that isn't as difficult as you make it sound. ;)

AT&T/NSA offer free/unlimited e-mail & P2P

[CranberryKing]

Just register with your address and valid SSN. And photo.

yes, but!

[porkThreeWays]

This company will probably fail, but maybe this will open the door to the FCC making lower frequencies available easier. 2.4ghz and 20mhz are quite a bit different in their carrying power. It'd be nice if an organization could pay under 5,000 bucks and get licensed spectrum that low. They could become a citywide ISP, or large organizations could equip their mobile units with citywide internet access. Not for your average consumer, but GPRS is too expensive and I could fathom small ISP's charging 30 bucks a month for this wireless (rather than the mega-hyper-insane-huge cell phone companies being the only ones in the mobile wireless game)

Re:yes, but!

[letxa2000]

I get unlimited GPRS service on my Treo with Cingular for $40/month. So it's not too expensive. The problem is that it's too slow. Unless I'm more than about 10 minutes away from a computer (which only really happens when I'm on a road-trip or camping), I just wait to get back to my computer rather than dealing with the slow speed of Cingular's GPRS service. At some point I'll definitely ditch the $40/month plan and look into their pay-as-you-go GPRS plans, because I just don't use it enough to justify the $40/month charge. I planned to, but the speed (or lack thereof) made sure that I wouldn't.

Bad Summary

[Phreakiture]

"A" 20MHz allocation != "The" 20MHz allocation

Radioheads such as myself, when reading of an allocation beginning with "The", read it to mean that the allocation is in the vicinity of the stated frquency, without saying anything about how wide the band is. In other words, rather than reading this as being 20MHz of spectrum somewehere around 2.1GHz, I read it as being an unspecified amount of spectrum somewhere around 20MHz, which led me to "How the hell are they going to pull that off?!?"

"A" 20MHz allocation, on the other hand, can be any consecutive 20MHz wide block of spectrum.

Bad summary! Bad summary! Bad! Bad! Bad!

Re:384/128 is low speed?

[windex]

I'm using Choice One Communications, and it's a business-class circuit. I get unlimited data over it (1.54mbit, with phone lines over ATM on demand -- drops data capacity when in use)), and have no restrictions.. because it's a business class circuit. The data part of it costs almost nothing ($100 i think), it's the 5 voice lines that make the bulk of the cost.

What is the Frequency, Kenneth?

[Mignon]

Free internet at 20MHz? I think they meant to say it's between 5 and 9 Hz because it sounds like they're full of shit to me.

Remember free dial-up?

[cafucu]

Yeah, that worked...for about a year. Ask altavista, netzero, or anybody who worked for one that went under (like me). Nothing is free.

Re:Remember free dial-up?

[Starcub]

Yup, and dial-up ISP's will tank, and the telco's will complain about about a monopoly... try to claim infrastructure, and... rewind...play...

Re:Remember free dial-up?

[squiggleslash]

Altavista, NetZero, et al, were all based upon the "subsidized by advertising" model, whose viability for new ventures has always been open to question.

This company is talking, essentially, about actually selling a service to 10% of the population (which would give them an extremely high market share, more than enough to cover the 90% of the country roll-out), and then, effectively, allowing non-customers to use any unsold bandwidth for free. Their model, therefore, is pretty close to that of T-Mobile, Cingular, or most other mobile phone companies. Put up antennas. Route them. Sell access to those who can afford it. The "free internet access!!!1!" is a marketing gimmick that, in practice, will not undermine their model (just as if T-Mobile knew it had more capacity than it knew what to do with, it could offer a "limited access to the Internet via GPRS/EDGE" service for anyone wishing to buy an unsubsidized T-Mobile phone and SIM.)

Don't look at the free internet access as the service. Look at it as the marketing scheme used to sell the actual service. There's been no mention of advertising so far, and while I don't doubt it's possible it'll happen, I don't think that'll ever be their primary source of revenue, unlike what the ISPs you mention were trying to do.

Getting started on your own large-scale network

[Douglas Simmons]

Linking up a router to a bunch of routers is called point to multipoint networking and if you want to wirelessly wire up your neighborhood you're going to need routers that can do this. The most economical and possibly the best option that I have found is the Buffalo NL-3054CB3. (If you google the model number, other brands pop up, apparently the identical device -- saw one deal for under $120 each). It sounds a little too good to be true, but according to this website, http://www.buffalowireless.net/wireless_equipment/ wireless_equipment.html, this can transmit data up to 1.2KM (line of sight) and it can function both as an access point and bridge simultaneously (it can talk to routers and regular laptops and computers).

If you wanted to use a familiar brand, Cisco's Aironet 1300, http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5861/product s_configuration_guide_chapter09186a008021e5ca.html , looks like another option except it costs ten times as much and I'm not sure what advantages if any it has over the aforementioned device other than perhaps the support you'd get from a larger company like Cisco. When you deploy a network on such a scale, you're going to get people who use it to download movie after movie, so advanced bandwidth throttling (prioritizing certain types of traffic over others) would be key, and you might have to pay up for something like this Cisco device for the traffic shaping. Not sure about that...

For mega long range antennae to scatter around the neighborhood, as with the city of Cleveland which went wireless, have a look at this to learn more about the WISP (wireless internet service provider) deployment and equipment you'd need: http://www.trangobroadband.com/products/atlas_ptp. shtml.
That company sells products that can beam twenty miles (line of sight, of course).

Re:I'm confused.

[VGR]

If you FTLITFA (follow the link in the article), you'll see that they intend to use the same model as over-the-air television: it will be supported by advertising.

I also see numerous mentions of being "family-friendly" and having "automatic filtering of indecent material." Yeah, that made me smirk, too, but considering its involvement with the FCC, and its proposal to service schools nationwide, I'm not surprised.

I'd be mildly interested to learn whether the advanced, non-free service also has "decency filters," but as long as commercial ISPs exist, I'll probably stick with them so that it never becomes an issue.

Re:Please. Stop with the state-run wireless networ

[yincrash]

state-run, eh? which part? this is a private endeavor funded by a VC. i think you should hold up on the paranoia.

Re:384/128 is low speed?

[AKAImBatman]

Nice. I'll have to keep that in mind. I was looking at building on some rather rural property at one point, but Internet connectivity was a huge concern for me. I was concerned that running a T1 would be too expensive. $230/mo isn't cheap, but it's not too bad either. Especially when you consider that you can use the line both ways without anyone telling you what to do and not to do with it.

I'll have to keep it in mind if I end up in a similar position again. (Which is somewhat likely.) Thanks! :-)

Re:I'm confused.

[cez]

just have to sit through anoying lil pop-ups, tracking software and cookies that will be necessary to use the service...hell they'd probably change VOIP phone call rings to ads to supplement income...instead of rrrrrring...rrrrrring...it will be "Hey check out that Planet Pizza behind you! Rocking meatball subs. Hey check out that pizza place behind you! Rocking meatball subs"

Re:Please. Stop with the state-run wireless networ

[abe ferlman]

Someone needs to read their David Brin.

Dan?

[missing000]

I thought it was just free with purchase of any pringle like potatoe chips?

Dan Quayle called, he wants his comment back.

What about security?

[bepolite]

If it's free and radio based. There's the possibility of truly anonymous internet access... short of them triangulating your position. I'm not sure if this is good or bad.

Re:What about security?

[remembertomorrow]

1. Get laptop steering wheel mount
2. Never stop your vehicle while using the free wifi
3. ???
4. Anonymity!

Re:What about security?

[Valdrax]

If you're looking to avoid law enforcement, you're pretty much SOL. I hope you don't carry an active cell phone, by the way.

If you're looking to avoid snoopy private eyes and stalker ex-girlfriends, then this is good stuff, but you can already achieve pretty good privacy by not having your bills in your name by using a nominee and by always paying with cash / money order.

However, getting a device that connects you to the internet without any address of yours being associated with it would be the ultimate in privacy. You'd pretty much have to tick off the government to get in trouble, and if you in it that deep, then there's pretty much nothing that going to help you.

Personally, I'm tickled by the idea of sticking a dedicated Freenet node or TOR server on one just for kicks.

I'd give my eyeteeth for 384k

[smellsofbikes]

Maybe, some day, we'll have cable or DSL or even POTS on lines that aren't 50 years old, but it isn't going to be any time soon.

Re:I'm confused.

[kenj0418]

The missing step 2 can be found in appendix 3 of their proposal "M2Z'S COMMITMENT TO PROTECT MINORS...".

Unfiltered sites are free. Porn costs extra.

So their business plan must be:

1. Give away free broadband access
2. Charge for porn
3. Profit

kenj0418
--
This week's message brought to you by the numbers 0 and 1.

Worldwide at low power

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>worldwide propagation at modest signal powers (as little as a few Watts)

Even less than that in some cases. Some ham radio operators make a sport of seeing just how little power they can use. With some skill and luck, and a good receiver at the other end, it's quite possible to communicate across oceans with milliwatts(*). Google "QRP" or "miles per watt" to get Too Much Information about this.

(*)I found a record on Google of 1310 miles with 6 *micro*watts(http://www.arrl.org/news/features/200 1/02/12/1/?nc=1). This is why BPL horrifies hams.

This is exactly what I mean: you'll never get it

[postbigbang]

It's not going to happen. I'm sorry to burst your bubble.

They're not going to do it. Don't believe their lies.

I'm sorry that I can't improve your situation. But there have been so many bald face liars, guaranteeing some kind of alternative to reality that I've become very jaded. The chances are very very slim that this could happen.

Consider the asset outlay vs return vs the current and future competition already embedded in the scenery of the US. From nothing, these guys propose to lay out literally billions, and give you 384K. It's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen, just like the low orbit blimps, and the satellites with low latency/high speed, just like a bunch of FAT LIES designed to slow down the development of what's really needed: FTTX, high-bit-rate 'WiFi', and other technologies.

It's not going to happen. I'm sorry.

Re:95 percent?

[randomErr]

Just a thought, what about satelite?

And there's the money

[phorm]

So your normal filtered access is free... but perhaps they'll be charging for "unfiltered" access.

It would be a clever move, as there has always been a market for pr0n and ways to access it...

Block, or log?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

The filter is the perfect place in the network to start keeping a list of who's looking at dirty pictures. If they have any kind of signup program ("free with registration") then the information is individually identifiable. Much more convenient to search 'SELECT FROM bigbrother WHERE user="Alfred E. Neumann" AND urlstatus="blocked"' than to comb DHCP logs and screen every HTTP transaction from each IP against the list of no-no sites.

Next up, a little more paranoid: has there ever been some bad language on, say, Daily Kos? That would be indecent material.

I started to say this was bad business since they'll have to pay salaries to people to hunt down proxies and add them to the banned list, but of course that work could be done cheaply by outsourcing it to China.

Great

[andre3001]

I think free wireless is the wave of the future. I just hope it's sucure and Big Brother won't have his hands in it.

--
Online Dating Tips - A practical guide to online dating in the 21st century.

Re:This is exactly what I mean: you'll never get i

[cyphergirl]

Oh, I do know it ain't gonna happen. So instead I keep hoping that Comiecast will hurry up and buy Adelphia in the hope that they might extend their coverage in the process. There is cable within 1/2 mile of my street -- but Adelphia just doesn't seem to be willing to go that last (half) mile to offer service to us folks in cow country. (There are about 50 households out here absolutely begging for cable tv and broadband internet.)

But hey, I can dream can't I? lol

Preview is your friend

[bobs666]

BTW, great post. You saved me the time :)

It comes with a free frogurt

[SlashSquatch]

that's good

The frogurt is also cursed.

Free EV-DO? Neat! Where?

[Valdrax]

Explain to me exactly where I can get free EV-DO service right now, and you've sold me.

Another good point.....

[postbigbang]

Now show me free 384K service.....

I'll stick with free city-wide broadband

[WillAffleckUW]

According to a number of my city councilmembers, Seattle will be offering free city-wide broadband access in all public buildings soon. Kind of like how South Korea has faster speeds than most US providers give you.

Security?

[pedrop357]

Someone probably already brought this up, but what about security? Unless I'm mistaken, and please let me know if I am, this will basically be acting like a cable/DSL modem.
Will each user get an internet addressable IP address, or will we be 10/172/192 NATed at the node or beyond?

Will I be an island unto myself, or will I be able to browse my subnet like some people I know with cable modems used to do?

What type of security will these devices use? I don't really feel like sharing my network's traffic with everyone around who builds/buys a sniffer. Will their be some sort of pre-established key setup like WEP/WPA or will I/my device need to authenticate EAP style?

Also, what kind of node distribution issues will there be? I'm assuming that the 384/128 is per node. 5 people all watching a cheesy low bandwith video could eat that up pretty quick.

Power limits

[snowwrestler]

Sure you can communicate around the world at 20MHz, but you can communicate around the world at many frequencies--provided you have enough power behind the signal.

There's no reason that this service couldn't be laid out exactly like the cell network, with the cell size being controlled by signal power. This is how footprints are controlled now--the operators must set their transmit power to attentuate to a certain level beyond the footprint for which they hold a license. The longer a signal carries (lower the frequency), the lower the transmit power must be set.

Also keep in mind the geographic obstacles to full coverage. In HAM if you don't reach exactly where you want, oh well. But if you are offering a "blanket" commercial service, you will need multiple towers to back-fill signal around physical obstructions like buildings, hills, etc. Even a 2Hz signal can't go through a mountain range.

Re:Power limits

[flynns]

No, a 2Hz signal just uses the mountain range as a ground plane :D /ham operator

Re:Like getting the Three Stooges to do your plumb

[Rob T Firefly]

I think there's even an FCC Wireless Bureau Chief kit on clearance in Radio Shack.

Oops, yet another incorrect summary...

[msauve]

"the 20 MHz frequency band" != "20 megahertz of spectrum, 2155-2175 MHz"

Re:I'm confused.

[zuricher]

1. wait for google to buy the company 2. google to hand out free e-paper readers with space for 2 inches of adsense ads 3. profit!

Re:This is exactly what I mean: you'll never get i

[cr0sh]

On the side that has the cable, does someone over there subscribe to it? If so, ask if they will go in half on their bill with you (cable and broadband), in exchange for setting up an 802.11 AP on their end that you can connect to from your house (via a cantenna or something). Make sure they know it will go up on their roof or on a pole or something. Once it is set up, secure the hell out of it (you really just want to make it a wireless bridge to your network, not an open AP free-for-all), so that only you have access (lock it down with 128 bit WEP and MAC address filtering).

No, you won't get cable TV this way (but what is on there ain't worth it anyhow), but you can get decent speed internet connectivity. If you want the TV, then you will need to go with a dish. It seems like you might have this option, if you have a willing neighbor (unfortunately, if all you have is a cable buried in the ground, this plan won't work too well)...

Author Dave Burstein here, agreeing

[Daveberstein]

Dave Burstein here, author of this one. Comments are right on target, so I thought to stop by with some followup.
1- The business plan sounds dubious, but heck, let's let Kleiner Perkins pay the bill to find out whether they are chasing a dot-com model. May or may not be decent business (smart folk like Dewayne Hendricks are skeptical), but it's good policy to get it built. They are only asking for a 15 year license, not perpetual.
2- The existing carriers will fight like hell to stop anything like this, as noted. So instead of whining, do something in D.C.. I hear more people making noise on these forums than I ever hear in Washington. I know you think Washington never listens, but I've seen ideas of mine in FCC regulations and congressional statements. You may not have the $million AT&T gave to Congressman Bobby Rush, but may of the people making decisions are honest and will listen to you as well. Email me daveb at dslprime.com for some ideas.
3- "So, will this be 95% of the population of the U.S., or 95% of the geographical area?" They are aiming for 95% of the population, with a sensible excuse not to get to the other 5%: excess cost of fiber to connect the towers to the Internet backbone. So my next editorial will be: Serving the next 10%: FCC needs to bring down the cost of backhaul Revive tough "special access" rules where broadband is hard to get (suggesting that if the local carrier isn't offering DSL, make them lease fiber cheaply to someone who will.)
4- All that said about universal broadband coverage on land, some small portion of users (my guess is 1-3% but no one has hard data) are best served by satellite because of terrain/distance problems. Policy on that is to find a way to bring down the price/bring up the speed of satellite service. I always prefer to do that by competition when that can work.
Dave Burstein
Editor, DSL Prime

Re:Author Dave Burstein here, agreeing

[Daveberstein]

Actually, it's me. Years back, wanting to make it a little harder to be tracked on the web if I went anti-government, I used a slightly misspelled version of my name, including for my slashdot login. Since then, I realized I have no secrets or privacy, but haven't changed all my ids. Send me a direct email to any address on the Dslprime.com website and I'll confirm if you still doubt. db

Spectrum Cash

[TubeSteak]

Its an appealing business model though, because it matches the price of the spectrum against the revenue that can be earned from it rather than the crazy bids for 3G mobile which IMHO was partly to blame for the tech crash in 2001.

Spectrum sales have much more to do with stuff than just the tech crash.

One of the secrets to the Clinton Administration's projected budget surplus(es) was they expected a lot of cash to come in from future spectrum auctions.

The specific auction (I think) that you're talking about was for the 2500 MHz to 2690 MHz band & they were planning to auction it off "no later" than 9/30/2002. There was a lot of problems with the plan, partially because the military uses a lot of those frequencies.

Anyways, Clinton was expecting that there would be big bucks made when the FCC auctioned off the TV spectrum after they switched over from analog to digital broadcast.

If you haven't noticed, that switch never happened, the FCC never got to auction off those frequencies, and the next President didn't have all that extra cash to play with.

I'm not blaming/defending either President, just pointing out that the future Clinton surpluses were heavily dependant on FCC spectrum auctions.

Re:Spectrum Cash

[coastwalker]

I expect you are right about the date, I am more familiar with the sell off on my side of the pond in the UK. The market is only now begining to recover and sell some services on the 3g network - like the upcomming world cup soccer vidos possibly to be seen on a cell phone near you soon. The new services have been grossly overpriced because of the need to pay off the licences and the cell phone market has collectively stalled. Just compare with the activity in the wired world with skype and google.

Blocking "Indecent Content"?

[Mozleron]

Did any of you happen to read the Executive summary of M2Z's proposal? Their goals are: "(1)provide nationwide boadband service with no recurring costs to all users that pruchase and register an M2Z certified device; (2)construct its network so that at least 95% of the U.S. population - in urban centers and rural communities across America - can avail themselves of the service within 10 years of license grant and commencement of operations; (3)block access to indecent content for all free access service users;(emphasis added) (4)provide public safety officials with access to an interoperable secondary data network, with appropriate consultation with such officials as to their needs; and (5)submit a voluntary payment to the U.S. Treasurey of 5% of gross revenues generated from the subscription services that it will offer in addition to the free National Broadband Radio Service."

Quoted from http://www.m2znetworks.com/pdf/Application.pdf/

I'm not too sure if i'm okay with giving this agency the power to decide what is "indecent" or not. China's government has assumed that 'right' and look at what they consider "indecent". While this is America, the pandering tone of this application makes me think that the currently Bush stacked F'nCC will jump all over that "indecent Content" bit and have a field day with it...

Re:Like getting the Three Stooges to do your plumb

[ahem]

When he left the FCC, he turned his switch from evil to good

Oh, that's good

However, the yogurt is cursed

Oh, that's bad.

We all know how this will end...

[Baloo Ursidae]

...Comcast, Cox and AT&T illegally collude against this new startup, making over $6 billion in new service requests, then refusing to pay, forcing them out of business. Enron will collapse, causing the FTC to backburner the collusion case past it's term of limitation, dropping the case. Comcast, Cox and AT&T divy up the prebuilt network for pennies on the dollar, pocket the difference, then raise rates claiming expanded service...

Re:Not just the cells... Don't give

[davidsyes]

the telcos any IDEAS!

Oh, wait, I give up lots of ideas, too.

But, would that his head-flattening be "patent-pending"?

Re:384/128 is low speed?

[misleb]

$230 for a T1 circuit is pretty damn good... especially one long distance. I know for a fact that just the loop costs about $350 for 1 mile in Chicago. I can't imagine what it costs a rural carrier. Who did you have to sleep with to get that deal? Did you pay for the line card/smart jack? How about the CSU/DSU?

-matthew

A 20 MHz - not /the/ 20 MHz

[scoove]

Correction: I finally got thru and read the referred-to post. Clearly "A 20 MHz slice" is what they're talking about, not /the/ 20 MHz part of the spectrum. Geesh. Let's give them a hell of a lot more than that - say 200 Ghz to 220 GHz. A whole whopping 20 gigahertz of bandwidth. Have at it boys. In fact, tell your dot-com VC that we'll let you have 1 TerraHertz and above! Unlimited! Terrabytes kick Megabytes any day and that outta make his capital raising job a whole lot easier when you freaking own a terrahertz of data.

Incidentally, I wouldn't be broadcasting that I was involved with @Home. Talk about an unhappy death and totally unsound financials. @Home's business competence was... lacking. The cable operators were wise to pull away from that mess.

If anything, this story tells us that the largest dot-com losers have found the courage to hook up with a VC once again. I guess we'll be seeing a Slashdot post about the latest and greatest online petstore in the near future.

Sockpuppet rules!

*scoove*

technical complexities

[lon3st4r]

the notion and idea is a really good one. i for one, however, am not sure if the existing WiFi standards can support such a large scale deployment.

for starters, the 802.11 standards do not have a large number of channel models for open-space deployment. each nw access point will be shared by a number of people - so for example, if 54 MBps has to be shared by each laptop @ 512 Kbps, you can theoritically have only 108 people. In a real world scenario, due to contentions and access clashes- this number usually drops down to ~50 people. Assuming a ratio of active users to total users as 1:10, each nw point would support 500 users. So essentially, you'd need to put a access point for every 500 individuals. That is a LOT of access points jam-packed together.

i'm not sure if the access points can even run at their maximum supported speeds at such high densities (there will be a lot of co-channel interference from nearby access points). effectively, the available bandwidth per person will jack down to nothing.

this is not a new phenomenon also - a lot of people have reported this problem in tech-conventions where there are such a large number of access points that nothing works. even google is reportedly having trouble setting up a WiFi cover at mountainview!

to sum up - it looks like a good idea; but it requires a lot of work from the technological perspective. * lon3st4r *

Re:384/128 is low speed?

[windex]

The whole play is a hack on teleco system inefficencies.

If you order 5 or more phone lines, the ILEC is going to run a T1, because a T1 uses less copper than 5 analog lines.

The CLEC is then going to get the other end of that T1, and is going to offer to sell you cheap data on it, since hell, it is taking up a switch port anyway. And since the CLEC controls the circuit, hell, let's turn the whole thing over on ATM and do everything on demand, so you can get that full 1.54mbit of use out of it, eh?

No one winds up paying a circuit charge, because it's saving the damned teleco money at the end of the day. :)

I learned this trick working for a CLEC. They started quoting T1's with integrated voice lines to data customers who never used or even knew the voice lines were part of the circuit, just to cut costs.

Re:384/128 is low speed?

[misleb]

If the ILEC finds out what the CLEC is doing with the line, can the ILEC charge the CLEC more for it? I mean, the circuit was run under the false pretense that it was going to be used for 5 phone lines. Almost seems like fraud. Or is it just some loophole in FCC regulations?

-matthew

Re:95 percent?

[flynns]

It sucks that you went to all that work to figure it out, when you could've read the posts above you and learned that it's a 20 MHz allocation somewhere up around the 2.1 GHz band. At this point your signal is rabidly line of sight, and will probably require more towers per geographic area than cell phone towers do, plus an ungodly amount of infrastructure at each tower (not like cell phones don't have said infrastructure....)

However, I kinda like this "OMFG 300 million people on 20 MHz!" insanity.

So you take an average of propagation, and ou position your towers accordingly. What happens when propagation massively increases? NOAA weather radio has the same problem in my area; when the vhf bands open up, I'm smack in the middle between milton and tallahassee (fl) weather radio... so when the band opens up, I can't hear either one because the fm signals are interfering with each other and producing unintelligible gibber-jabber.

/ham radio operator
//okaloosa county, fl skywarn/ARES EC

Re:95 percent?

[evilviper]

In other words, with an allocation in the 20MHz range, a user is theoretically capable of covering an entire continent with just a single tower.

Problem: Internet access is bidirectional.

If you have a single tower for a state, every user is going to have to put up their own tower, so they can transmit back... Not to mention the large ammounts of power it will take to broadcast across hundreds of miles at 20MHz.

Yeah, the summary sucked.

BINGO!

[Melllvar]

Funny and informative. Good show, sport. In fact, I think that honestly figures to be a big part of their revenue supplementation.

That, and I suspect that because of the nature of the FCC license they're applying for, they'll have to restrict the adult content on their network to an ID-check, pay-per-surf basis.

Only a kickback of the revenue?

[kipple]

[...] and the government will get a kickback of the revenue.

...plus a free back-room to spy on the traffic.

Re:384/128 is low speed?

[windex]

They're allowed to do it because DSL is not available in the market, so there is no other choice to do data. Normally, you could just run DSL over one of the analog lines.

That depends on the "bin"...

[Svartalf]

As the other poster pointed out, if it's the "rubbish" bin, you're officially disowning it. If it's just on your property out for the taking, unless it's got a sign that says "free" on it, it's not for the taking and it's theft. In the case of the wireless service, they don't have a sign on it that just says "free", it says, "free, if you agree to these terms". If you don't agree to the terms, they're expressly not giving it to you at all and if you take it outside of the terms, you're stealing it. Whether it be free AOL CDs or "free" wireless service.

Actually, not...

[Svartalf]

In the case of the gear that I'm talking about, they can identify user accts (Because you're going to still have these, if only to determine who's supposed to have higher bandwidth...)- if it comes and goes, it's probably a social event, esp. if the people are from all over the place (Is anyone at a neighborhood block party going to be bringing all their laptops with them? God, I hope not- don't wanna do that unless it's a neighborhood LAN party... :-)

In reality, what they'll do is increase monitoring when something shows up in signal strength- if you do it on a regular enough basis, they'll inquire against all the user accounts, etc.

It's still more likely than the satellite and cable thieves to get you caught- and they catch these jokers all the time.

Re:Actually, not...

[NichG]

If there are accounts for free usage, then this entire thing is a non-issue. Why? Because they can simply sum over all the traffic thats going over a single user account and limit that. Combining resources from multiple physical devices wouldn't work straight out since you'd have to have a separate login for each of them. Of course, some people will register multiple accounts under false names/addresses in which case it won't be too hard to catch if the usage isn't coming from the address that was registered.

On the other hand, most places right now that provide free wireless like coffee houses, universities, etc don't bother with logins. You can just go and use the network.

Now here's an interesting thought. You and your neighbors are all burst users. That is, you use a ton of bandwidth for say an hour or two each day. So you get together and rig up a local network such that you each can tap the sum bandwidth of everyone's accounts. Thats probably not even theft of service since the net used will be the net allocation for all those people, just staggered in such a way that its used to the full extent rather than permitted to go idle.