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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."
...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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Seriously. They'll make up for it on volume.
...it also sounds strangely familiar, somehow...
Translation: We won't see it in our lifetimes.From TFA (emphasis mine):
I hope I'm wrong, but this sort of thing has been tried before, with less than satisfactory results.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The cable companies (not much difference between them and 'traditional' telcos) will also want to stomp his idea flat.
Best Slashdot Co
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).
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and the government will get a kickback of the revenue.
That's called "lobbying".
It's apparently called "linksys"
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
"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.
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.
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.
Um, the 1990's called, they want their business model back!
...will I be able to use it in my flying car?
Because you can - or because you should?
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.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
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.
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!
do() || do_not();
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.
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...
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
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.
I suggest you click on the "Public Companies" link to the left on the page you linked to.
Your opinion might change.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Oh, yeah, and backhoes. Forgot about those. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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
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...
~Mozleron
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups