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User: Daxel

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  1. Re:Question for Wimax Experts on Mobile WiMAX to Succeed Where Muni WiFi Failed? · · Score: 1

    No. 900mhz would have a VERY hard time (would depend on the bounce) factor. 700mhz would have a VERY hard time (would depend on the bounce) factor. Might be able to do it with X-Ray... You stand there, and we will test.

  2. The WiMAX Snowjob on Mobile WiMAX to Succeed Where Muni WiFi Failed? · · Score: 1

    What amazes me is that WiMax does nothing that RF doesn't already do. It is a rebundle of existing services and technology with the potential for interoperability between radios. Nobody seems to realize this and thinks it is an "super" new tech that can break the laws of physics and do everything they ever dreamed of in a wireless world. I have built 20-30 mile RF links in the 6ghz or 11ghz at 100mbps or greater. In theory, if the company decided to change the protocol and radio registration process, this would be a WiMax product. Radio links like this have been in existance for a long, long time. I have seen 45mbps DS3 links that are still functioning and were setup in the late 80's. I think this covers the "long range", and potentially, the "High Bandwidth". Some of the Ceragon (www.ceragon.com) has products that have "capacities starting from 50 to 400 Mbps per radio carrier". These are typically in 6ghz, 18ghz, or 11ghz (depending on range that you need). You can get a 400mbps link to about 30 miles using this gear, although you will need large dishes (8-12') with a 99.999% uptime. The gear will cost ~$40,000 and you need an FCC license ($3000 for 10 years). Mobile solutions also exist already today. Most of the tech is in your cell phones, and operate at various frequencies starting at 1ghz and going up. Because of propagation and object density, most cell companies have an infrastructure that includes a tower every mile or 1.5 miles. The reason you don't have super speed to your cell phones? They are bonding virtual pots lines to provide the bandwidth. If you remember the good old days of modem dialup, you remember there used to be a way to dial up on multiple modems and get 112k, and so forth. The cell companies are (for the most part) using that tech to give you bandwidth. As they expand the tech and gear at the towers, they can swap out this gear for something that makes sense - providing they keep support for the older stuff along the way. The biggest issue and problem with any and all of this (Muni WiFi or WiMax) is that it requires a huge infrastructure. You need to replicate the cell network size and complexity, regargless of if your radio is interoperable with multiple recievers. That is a huge cost. If you cannot come up with a way to pay for it, you cannot have it. "Free Muni Wireless" is supposed to come from the tax payers, or (wait for it) advertising revenue. Wow. Two things that historically don't work. The tax payers complain, and the Internet Advertising model is far from a hugely lucrative business model. From bidding on some of these projects, here is what I can tell you - for a city/town of about 5 square miles, you need at least $500,000 in equipment to cover it with decent propagation. It will take about another $500,000 to $1,000,000 to install all the equipment and set it up. (Remember, you are mounting this stuff on telephone poles, you need to phase the power to pull something you can use, and you need to get the permission of whomever owns the pole in the first place.) So, you have a line electrician, and a tech there to do this. You are talking 3-4 hours per install for a 2 man team. It adds up (quickly). You may also need to hire or pay for the police escort to close the road/lane while you do this install. So, your town now has a "wireless network". Who is going to support it? Maintain it? Fix it? Where does that come from? Let us assume that you have 20,000 people in this town. On average, you get 10% of a base of people who call in on tech support per month. This increases with a potentially non-tech savvy populace. Ok, so you might have 2000 calls a month. Average of 100 per work day (because, why would you be open on the weekend or after 5pm). Somebody needs to answer those and help the people - right? I mean, their tax dollars are paying for it - right? You also need to connect to the Internet "somewhere" for "some price". You may or may not need to run DNS servers, Email servers, web servers, support routers, switches, deal with outages, routing (you get the picture). So, you ne

  3. Tivo vs Cable Companies on The Trouble With TiVo · · Score: 1

    What most people do not realize is that every Comcast/Time Warner/RCN/DirectTV DVR that goes out includes a royalty to Tivo. Tivo won the patent war with Direct TV over their box, and won a significant settlement. The also locked in the patent, which now generates income for them. Tivo will always have a niche in the market. That said, anyone who has just used a cable DVR as opposed to a Tivo does not understand the difference. I am not going to go into the feature set here, but suffice to say, bringing your comcast DVR to a Tivo party is like showing up with a low end dell while everyone else has tricked out Alienware boxes.