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The US May Finally See Widespread 'Super Wi-Fi' Deployment (siliconvalley.com)
The end of the FCC's spectrum auction last week "should give a clear indication of how much space will be available in each TV market for Super Wi-Fi," according to the Bay Area Newsgroup. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
[T]he technology has promised speedy internet for rural citizens and to help urban dwellers get connected in buildings and rooms that are now twilight zones for Wi-Fi signals... And because the spectrum is regulated and largely reserved for television signals, Super Wi-Fi transmissions don't have to contend with interference from random devices like microwaves or cordless phones, as do signals in other wireless bands. Super Wi-Fi signals generally won't be as fast as regular Wi-Fi signals, but for many customers, they'll be faster and provide better service than what they'd get otherwise...
It's widely expected that there will be plenty of room for Super Wi-Fi in rural areas where there are few television signals, which is why companies like Cal.net and Q-Wireless have pressed forward with the technology even before the auction closes. The big question is whether regulators will preserve sufficient space for Super Wi-Fi in areas like New York and Los Angeles where there are lots of broadcast stations and in cities like Detroit and San Diego that have to share the airwaves with cities from other countries. If there's not enough space in those areas, Super Wi-Fi, in this country at least, will likely be relegated to rural areas.
It's widely expected that there will be plenty of room for Super Wi-Fi in rural areas where there are few television signals, which is why companies like Cal.net and Q-Wireless have pressed forward with the technology even before the auction closes. The big question is whether regulators will preserve sufficient space for Super Wi-Fi in areas like New York and Los Angeles where there are lots of broadcast stations and in cities like Detroit and San Diego that have to share the airwaves with cities from other countries. If there's not enough space in those areas, Super Wi-Fi, in this country at least, will likely be relegated to rural areas.
If it's all but useless in the city, but can provide rural users with something better than satellite service or dial-up, it's still a big deal. And by "rural users," I mean ... people who live 20 miles outside of places like Washington, DC. There are places even in the relatively close-in 'burbs where nobody's been willing or able to pull fiber, and the CO is too far away for DSL, and the metering hit on LTE if it's even there (or the too-slow-to-use-ness of 3G) is a show stopper. Not sure what deployment on this actually looks like, though, and there still has to be some sort of low-latency, reliable backhaul. But if it's easy enough to pop something shoebox-size on modest towers in the countryside, that's pretty compelling.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Because rural WiFi crowding is such a problem...
So, Mr. Snarky City Guy, you really don't have any idea what you're talking about, do you? The problem isn't WiFi congestion in rural areas, it's the lack of any affordable infrastructure able to get broadband out to those areas in the first place. Having your WiFi busy on your property when your neighbor's WiFi is a quarter mile away is NOT a problem. But if neither of you can actually get those routers to connect to the internet because there's no there there, what's the point? There are millions of people who live where poor DSL, at best, is the broadband they can get - no matter what they're willing to pay. That, or laggy, expensive, very much capped satellite service with dial-up upload speeds. No cable, no fiber, no T-1 to your business ... just dial-up, and perhaps some 3G mobile coverage if you're lucky.
This broadband desert starts happening just a few miles outside of most towns. You know, where the people who grow your food live.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Sprint bought it and shut it down.
When you hear people talking about clearwire that's what they are talking about.
The laptop i'm typing this on actually has a wimax card built in but there has never been a wimax AP anywhere near here so I doubt i'll ever be able to try it.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
An approach that would meet the needs of far more people would be addressing poor inner city areas
That's a different problem that requires a different solution.
Then it's not "WiFi", but WiMAX2. The problem is that the names have been butchered by people who don't really know what they mean. WiFi was initially designed for one computer per AP, with the computer and AP in the same room. The idea was to replace the cable for fixed computers, and that's how it was built. It wasn't designed for roaming, handoff, multi-AP deployments, or even (really) multi-device deployments. The initial standards were slow, and replacement for the 56k wires of the day.
So a wide-spread WiFi is the opposite of everything WiFi was initially designed to do. So to keep the same name will only confuse people.
Learn to love Alaska
Rural WiFi is not the same thing your home WiFi, although it does use the same frequencies and technologies.
Rural WiFi is used by wireless ISPs (that is, the rural equivalent to your urban cable modem or DSL connection). This is accomplished with directional antennas that concentrate the signal so that it can span five to 10 miles. They do this because it is prohibitively expensive to string fiber (or copper) when there are only a few customers per mile. Because the signal is so weak by the time it gets all the way to the receiver, interference anywhere along the "line of sight" path is more difficult to filter out.
An urban dweller needs maybe a 500-foot circle of no interference. The rural need is a non-interference rectangle 500 feet wide by maybe 10 miles long, stretching from his roof-mount antenna all the way to the ISP antenna which likely is mounted on a grain elevator in a nearby town.
Through who? iirc all the other WiMAX carriers were smaller clearwire was the big one and afaik there aren't any others still operating.
My carrier is Rise Broadband, which used to operate under various names, including JAB Wireless, Digis, and others. They operate in 16 states.
I thought Clearwire was 4G, not WiMax (IEEE 802.16).
Hmm. Looking at some Wikipedia articles, it appears that there are two different standards, WiMax (802.16, which later gained the name "Fixed WiMax", when the mobile standard was created) and Mobile WiMax (802.16m). It seems you were talking about the latter, while I was talking about the former.
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