Verizon like all other cellular data services, is riding on the coattails of their voice. At this point, data is a pimple on the butt of voice.
When voice infrastructure is all digital, why not piggyback the data customers on the same equipment. More money.
This is quite different from building out a separate infrastructure for just data users, which is what HypeMAX proposes to it's investors.
By the way I was thinking of Ricochet. See the Wikipedia entry for Ricochet internet service.
It's proponents will tell you it will bring a NEW GOLDEN AGE.
Our society, and particular THE CHILDREN, will be more connected and of course that must be a good thing.
They ignore that all other efforts to build a massive wireless data infrastructure have failed to find sufficient customers even when they make it easy and fairly cheap. Most people simply do not have that much of a need for the technology or MetroCom wouldn't be bankrupt.
This is a technology that will remain mired in the mud and never goes anywhere.
DID THE ORIGINAL POSTER STATE WHAT WAS INADEQUATE TO THEM? NO!
Therefore I am free to generalize them with the other 95% of people I meet in my working life who classify their current PC or laptop as "inadequate" based simply on the fact that it's 3 years old.
I work in IT.
All day long I see people with 1 gig+ laptops complaining about how they want the shiny NEW model. Anything wrong with their current one? Nope.
I can't tell you how much it irks me to see someone "upgrade" from a great XP-based laptop to the latest laptop with Vista, just so they can read email and look at YouTube at the SAME SPEED.
95+% currently in circulation could use some more RAM, maybe a faster hard-drive, and an OS re-install and they work just great.
I have an X23 that I refurbished. Maxed out the RAM and put in a new hard-drive. I can't see any reason to replace until it dies.
Eventually I will replace the spinning hard-drive with a flash-drive. I'd love to find a way to replace the CCFL backlight with LED were that possible, to make it even more long-lived.
The American fascination with tossing perfectly adequate technology into a landfill is apalling.
Ever time someone kicks the microwave oven in the break room, and you lose your WiFi link, yeah I'll be laughing with my BORING old copper connection.
If there weren't umpteen consumer devices already sharing a narrow 2.4 GHz spectrum this MIGHT have some shot. As it is, in a workplace you'd have to ban all other other devices that might interfere with it.
Any production IT shop these days is already stressed to it's limit and underfunded.
Then the MBA knotheads say:
"Sure we know you're underpaid"
"We know you work 60 hours a week"
"Here's your pager so we can wake you at 3AM for any reason"
"Keep all our production systems running, and SECURE"
"Oh, and in your spare time we'd like you to learn this ephemeral new tech and implement it!"
Yeah, resistance is surprising.
I used to find hooking up TV equipment fairly easy.
I got a TiVO HD last week and getting it to work was a NIGHTMARE
First I couldn't find anyone at ComCast that seemed to know how this CableCard junk works. My local office wouldn't just give me one and let me hook it up myself, I had to have a "technician" for that.
I requested a visit and specified it was for TiVO HD, and I needed a MultiStream card.
THREE guys show up. Two of them were n00bs being trained. The supposed experienced hand doing the training, hadn't heard of an M-card, and only had one single-stream card with him.
Next he informs me none of it will work until I upgrade to "Digital Classic" I can't do it with just basic digital service.
Says I'll need to call in again and schedule another truck roll after I've upgraded.
Useless! How many mornings off am I supposed to request from work, so I can hope they will show up and figure this out?
They've made it so frakkin complicated their own people don't know how it works, and they won't let you do it yourself in many places. This is like the old AT&T monopoly. This half-baked idea is supposed to replace analog cable by 2009. Ugh! The CableCo has frakked this up through sheer incompetence or spite, and the FCC is asleep at the switch. This stuff should be kept SIMPLE not layered up with a bunch of unneccessary widgets. Adding MORE widgets will not fix a broken design.
Yes I returned my TiVO HD within the 30 days for full refund. I ABSOLUTELY do not blame TiVO in this, the returns lady was very gracious and didn't try to talk me out of it or anything. TiVO is just trying to play the hand it was dealt.
Because they STUPID OLD OLD WHITE MEN who cannot come up with anything new!
The answer is always, okay smarty-pants meet my lawyer Mr. Cohen.
Meanwhile, let's dust off another old movie and do a remake, or a sequel.
Hey Google Boy,
Why isn't Google handing out Green Cards at the door to entering foreign workers.
I'll tell you why, because then Google has no carrot to keep the worker dancing on the hot plate. That's what it's all about.
All else is lies and misdirection. I love it when people start waxing poetic about bringing the brightest minds and mixing them into the American melting pot. The fresh smell of such horse-hockey being dealt out just makes me teary-eyed. You think that 3-year guest worker program is the equivalent of an Ellis Island right in the middle of Silicon Valley. HAHAHAHA!
Google is supposed to have as one of it's principals "do no evil".
Bah!
They have become just another big money-grubbing corporation run by the accountants.
If they WANTED the BEST talent of the world, they would be supporting higher immigration quotas. Push Congress that across the board we need more entry into the US of skilled people. You know the old-fashioned way of doing things where people fill out a form, and they are allowed to emigrate here and find a job.
INSTEAD we have the exclusive promotion of a guest worker program that is tied to a specific company. If you lose your job you get deported.
Why is NOBODY publicly pointing out the truth in what they are after? Cheap workers!! Why are the majority of applicants listed as skill-level 1 (out of 4) if they are after the best & brightest? Because they are lying!
Bah!
Perhaps something surprisingly simple?
Like key-bumping was for locks?
Like the Sharpie was for Sony's CD copy protection?
It's amazing how some well-paid hack can wrap themselves up in knots making a complex system, and be defeated by simple tricks.
Ah the concept of "corporate personhood" rears it's ugly head.
You sir, are individually a constituent of your district and a voter.
Your corporation is not a constituent or a voter.
The rest of it is rationalizing bribery and influence peddling.
Yeah, so you want to build this embedded widget to sell to my company. Yet you are a one-man show intent on keeping all the secrets of how it works to yourself.
What happens when it breaks down, or I just need it modified to fit some new requirement, and YOU *LONE* *RANGER* ARE NOT AROUND?
I can't see any sane businessmen buying your product.
Whose scientific "code" do we still base much of science on hundreds of years later?
People like Avogadro, Boyle, etc. who published their work? Or some alchemist who may have discovered the same things but kept it to themselves?
Will MicroSoft exist in 300 years? Will kids then study in school the basis of the OS they are using owes framework to MS? I sincerely doubt it. By then MS will just be another dead corporation in a long line of them, replaced perhaps by some other alchemists who gain the favor of the king and for a time shine very brightly but contribute little or nothing to the public good codebase.
My argument is that work which is made freely available WILL be incorporated in other people's work. If all you want is to MAKE MONEY go be a licensed plumber or electrician. Those guys make quite excellent money and without a lot of schooling.
What is your motivation for closed source? And why do you feel you need to use all the benefits of open source yet keep your code under lock and key? Will you only use it yourself in a locked room and never allow it to be run by anyone else?
Perhaps you should look into DRM restrictions and lawyers. Lots of lawyers.
Only alchemists and very poor cooks feel the need to have secret recipes. Look how little mark they leave on the world.
Another n00b who thinks they can build a data-center capably 5-9's setup using cheap stuff they strung together.
I love you guys.
Let me take you on a tour of my email-server setup where I can randomly yank out fiber or even flip off one of the 3510FC arrays in my group, and watch it all keep purring along with 70,000 users NOT EVEN NOTICING.
You simply don't understand that saving a few bucks on a lashed-together setup can be MUCH less important than having it "JUST WORK". Can your solution survive a mid-plane board or a controller or PSU going PHTHTHT! Can it survive an admin oops? Mine can. It's massively inefficient to do a RAID 5+1+0 as far as money, but it's VERY efficient as far as not ever having to say "yeah this service will be down for 3 days while we figure out how to unscramble things and restore the data."
Professionalism means never having to say you're sorry. That's why there will always be work for guys like me. Because one day your "miraculously cheap" setup will go FIZZLE and people will look around for a home for their services that is first and foremost RELIABLE not cheap.
If you let Google run your email for you, they will be subject at any moment to forwarding all copies of your email to any government agent that asks for it. And under the terms of the Patriot Act in the USA they can never tell you about it. Google is just another big soul-less mega-corporation that is only too happy to turn in Chinese dissidents as long as it profits.
I like the Berkeley sysadmin attitude a lot. I was talking with those guys recently and they consider themselves the guardian of campus data. If Feds show up waving a Patriot Act letter, there will be a fight over it, not just meekly handing them whatever they want.
IMAP and FORWARDS ring any bells? If there's one thing thing you know about GOOGLE it's just like MSN and Yahoo, they want to own your mindshare they do not want to share.
If US corporations really wanted the best talent of the world, they would be supporting GREEN CARD applicants and trying to find the best foreign students to cultivate. Or they would US students directly by scholarships and grants.
No, they do not want US citizens. Full citizens have too many rights and demands. They want disposable workers which is what an H1-B is for them. Eventually they get to send the person home and ARE NOT OBLIGATED BY A PENSION. It's all about destroying the entire concept of pensions.
It's all about corporate greed and short-sighted behaviour not what is good for the country. Bill Gates and his Foundation are taking dollars and stealing your future with one hand, and giving a few pennies back with the other and this apparently makes them saints to the people fooled by their PR.
I notice the summary above references the BOFH. Here again we see SysAdmin confused with Operator. This is one of the problems, most people view SysAdmin as some sort of Operator. In a Data Center the Operators are low-paid monkeys who can push a few buttons and dial a phone, but most importantly are willing to WORK ANY SHIFT! I used to work as an Operator, it sucks after a year and I wouldn't go back to rotating into graveyard shift.
The problem is in most organizations they view SysAdmin as a higher-paid version of that. You are doing typically some very complex work, still have to answer your pager at 3AM or on vacation, and have bosses who can't understand why any given problem can't be resolved in about 5 minutes. Everyone in the organization thinks they are smarter than you, and bring you answers that you have to implement. I can't tell you how many times I've been handed a bunch of hardware and told "we bought this without consulting you, but here make it work!"
The problem has as much to do with the perception of SysAdmin by YOU, as it does with the Sysadmin. Organizations generally treat us like garbage, so that's what they get.
Some good quotes from alt.sysadmin.recovery here:
http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.ht ml
I work with a small neighborhood WISP. We tell customers up-front we have a SHARED DSL line and a shared radio spectrum, and if they want to download full-out 24x7 we are not the place for that. On the other hand we charge as little as $15/month so for people who just want email and occasional downloads that works fine. If I find the gateway is totally clogged and run ntop and find out user-X is running P2P all day long uploading and downloading they get booted. You get what you pay for, and we state up front we are a cheap basic mobile service, and NOT trying to compete with wired ISP.
I recommend them to SpeakEasy or similar ISP which are quite good, if a bit pricey.
Considering there are only THREE usable fully-separated channels in WiFi, 1, 6, & 11.
If you DON'T grant a WiFi monopoly it will only lead to a frequency and amplifier war.
Consdering the limited channel space and it's wide consumer uses, WiFi is already severely constrained in some areas. Adding more noise to that tiny sliver of spectrum will only make things worse.
Had the government granted WiFi it's own spectrum strictly for data and allocated about 10 times the channel space then Muni-WiFi might be broadly successful. They didn't so it never will be. Let's say we make WiFi 2.0 to correct all the glarging deficiencies of the current one for WWAN usage. What's your time before this is generally available? 10 years?
"A Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up is planning to build a free wireless Internet network in central San Francisco, and all residents have to do put a small wireless router supplied by the company in their window or rooftop. Meraki Networks plans, within months, to bring free wireless Internet access to about 15,000 residents who live in parts of the Mission, Castro, Duboce Park, Lower Haight and Alamo Square neighborhoods."
Hmmm, I stand by my PIPE-DREAM comment. This is PR junk. Does it say UNIVERSAL? No. Does it say it's here now? No.
As I said I've worked with neighborhood WiFi project and in an urban area about 60% is the best we've been able to do with WiFi due to it's massively inappropriate design for what we are trying to do with it. WiFi was DESIGNED for coffee-shops and conference rooms. It was not DESIGNED for large-area coverage and it's limits show quite clearly when we try to use it for that. You stick up a few AP's and they work great in winter. Now it's full summer and it rains and your signal goes to zero in what were formerly good zones. Or someone buys a bunch of 2.4 GHz junk or cranks up the microwave oven in the apartment blocking your customer and your phone rings all the time. If a few of the clients have 12-year olds your network is constantly clogged with P2P activity, and all the activity drags down what is a half-duplex shared medium.
Our community WiFi makes no money, it's just a fun project. But we aren't out making outrageous claims about it's coverage or reliability or anything. We offer service to people in some areas, for a cheap rate they can probably check email and do basic stuff, we don't support heavy usage or file-sharing period. If they have needs beyond that we tell them go get DSL.
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Verizon like all other cellular data services, is riding on the coattails of their voice. At this point, data is a pimple on the butt of voice. When voice infrastructure is all digital, why not piggyback the data customers on the same equipment. More money. This is quite different from building out a separate infrastructure for just data users, which is what HypeMAX proposes to it's investors. By the way I was thinking of Ricochet. See the Wikipedia entry for Ricochet internet service.
Is it HypeMAX or WiMAX?
I forget.
It's proponents will tell you it will bring a NEW GOLDEN AGE.
Our society, and particular THE CHILDREN, will be more connected and
of course that must be a good thing.
They ignore that all other efforts to build a massive wireless data
infrastructure have failed to find sufficient customers even when they
make it easy and fairly cheap. Most people simply do not have that
much of a need for the technology or MetroCom wouldn't be bankrupt.
This is a technology that will remain mired in the mud and never goes anywhere.
DID THE ORIGINAL POSTER STATE WHAT WAS INADEQUATE TO THEM? NO! Therefore I am free to generalize them with the other 95% of people I meet in my working life who classify their current PC or laptop as "inadequate" based simply on the fact that it's 3 years old. I work in IT. All day long I see people with 1 gig+ laptops complaining about how they want the shiny NEW model. Anything wrong with their current one? Nope. I can't tell you how much it irks me to see someone "upgrade" from a great XP-based laptop to the latest laptop with Vista, just so they can read email and look at YouTube at the SAME SPEED. 95+% currently in circulation could use some more RAM, maybe a faster hard-drive, and an OS re-install and they work just great.
What is wrong with your T20?
I have an X23 that I refurbished. Maxed out the RAM and put in a new hard-drive. I can't see any reason to replace until it dies.
Eventually I will replace the spinning hard-drive with a flash-drive. I'd love to find a way to replace the CCFL backlight with LED were that possible, to make it even more long-lived.
The American fascination with tossing perfectly adequate technology into a landfill is apalling.
Ever time someone kicks the microwave oven in the break room, and you lose your WiFi link, yeah I'll be laughing with my BORING old copper connection. If there weren't umpteen consumer devices already sharing a narrow 2.4 GHz spectrum this MIGHT have some shot. As it is, in a workplace you'd have to ban all other other devices that might interfere with it.
Any production IT shop these days is already stressed to it's limit and underfunded. Then the MBA knotheads say: "Sure we know you're underpaid" "We know you work 60 hours a week" "Here's your pager so we can wake you at 3AM for any reason" "Keep all our production systems running, and SECURE" "Oh, and in your spare time we'd like you to learn this ephemeral new tech and implement it!" Yeah, resistance is surprising.
I used to find hooking up TV equipment fairly easy.
I got a TiVO HD last week and getting it to work was a NIGHTMARE
First I couldn't find anyone at ComCast that seemed to know how this CableCard junk works. My local office wouldn't just give me one and let me hook it up myself, I had to have a "technician" for that.
I requested a visit and specified it was for TiVO HD, and I needed a MultiStream card.
THREE guys show up. Two of them were n00bs being trained. The supposed experienced hand doing the training, hadn't heard of an M-card, and only had one single-stream card with him.
Next he informs me none of it will work until I upgrade to "Digital Classic" I can't do it with just basic digital service.
Says I'll need to call in again and schedule another truck roll after I've upgraded.
Useless! How many mornings off am I supposed to request from work, so I can hope they will show up and figure this out?
They've made it so frakkin complicated their own people don't know how it works, and they won't let you do it yourself in many places. This is like the old AT&T monopoly. This half-baked idea is supposed to replace analog cable by 2009. Ugh! The CableCo has frakked this up through sheer incompetence or spite, and the FCC is asleep at the switch. This stuff should be kept SIMPLE not layered up with a bunch of unneccessary widgets. Adding MORE widgets will not fix a broken design.
Yes I returned my TiVO HD within the 30 days for full refund. I ABSOLUTELY do not blame TiVO in this, the returns lady was very gracious and didn't try to talk me out of it or anything. TiVO is just trying to play the hand it was dealt.
Because they STUPID OLD OLD WHITE MEN who cannot come up with anything new! The answer is always, okay smarty-pants meet my lawyer Mr. Cohen. Meanwhile, let's dust off another old movie and do a remake, or a sequel.
Let's see I can pay to have my files stored somewhere that any Federal employee can leaf through anytime they like. No thanks!
Hey Google Boy, Why isn't Google handing out Green Cards at the door to entering foreign workers. I'll tell you why, because then Google has no carrot to keep the worker dancing on the hot plate. That's what it's all about. All else is lies and misdirection. I love it when people start waxing poetic about bringing the brightest minds and mixing them into the American melting pot. The fresh smell of such horse-hockey being dealt out just makes me teary-eyed. You think that 3-year guest worker program is the equivalent of an Ellis Island right in the middle of Silicon Valley. HAHAHAHA!
Google is supposed to have as one of it's principals "do no evil". Bah! They have become just another big money-grubbing corporation run by the accountants. If they WANTED the BEST talent of the world, they would be supporting higher immigration quotas. Push Congress that across the board we need more entry into the US of skilled people. You know the old-fashioned way of doing things where people fill out a form, and they are allowed to emigrate here and find a job. INSTEAD we have the exclusive promotion of a guest worker program that is tied to a specific company. If you lose your job you get deported. Why is NOBODY publicly pointing out the truth in what they are after? Cheap workers!! Why are the majority of applicants listed as skill-level 1 (out of 4) if they are after the best & brightest? Because they are lying! Bah!
Perhaps something surprisingly simple? Like key-bumping was for locks? Like the Sharpie was for Sony's CD copy protection? It's amazing how some well-paid hack can wrap themselves up in knots making a complex system, and be defeated by simple tricks.
Ah the concept of "corporate personhood" rears it's ugly head. You sir, are individually a constituent of your district and a voter. Your corporation is not a constituent or a voter. The rest of it is rationalizing bribery and influence peddling.
I don't know where you live, but here in the USA, the rich get richer and the other classes get poorer. My real wealth is lower than my parents.
Yeah, so you want to build this embedded widget to sell to my company. Yet you are a one-man show intent on keeping all the secrets of how it works to yourself. What happens when it breaks down, or I just need it modified to fit some new requirement, and YOU *LONE* *RANGER* ARE NOT AROUND? I can't see any sane businessmen buying your product.
Whose scientific "code" do we still base much of science on hundreds of years later? People like Avogadro, Boyle, etc. who published their work? Or some alchemist who may have discovered the same things but kept it to themselves? Will MicroSoft exist in 300 years? Will kids then study in school the basis of the OS they are using owes framework to MS? I sincerely doubt it. By then MS will just be another dead corporation in a long line of them, replaced perhaps by some other alchemists who gain the favor of the king and for a time shine very brightly but contribute little or nothing to the public good codebase. My argument is that work which is made freely available WILL be incorporated in other people's work. If all you want is to MAKE MONEY go be a licensed plumber or electrician. Those guys make quite excellent money and without a lot of schooling.
What is your motivation for closed source? And why do you feel you need to use all the benefits of open source yet keep your code under lock and key? Will you only use it yourself in a locked room and never allow it to be run by anyone else?
Perhaps you should look into DRM restrictions and lawyers. Lots of lawyers.
Only alchemists and very poor cooks feel the need to have secret recipes. Look how little mark they leave on the world.
Another n00b who thinks they can build a data-center capably 5-9's setup using cheap stuff they strung together. I love you guys. Let me take you on a tour of my email-server setup where I can randomly yank out fiber or even flip off one of the 3510FC arrays in my group, and watch it all keep purring along with 70,000 users NOT EVEN NOTICING. You simply don't understand that saving a few bucks on a lashed-together setup can be MUCH less important than having it "JUST WORK". Can your solution survive a mid-plane board or a controller or PSU going PHTHTHT! Can it survive an admin oops? Mine can. It's massively inefficient to do a RAID 5+1+0 as far as money, but it's VERY efficient as far as not ever having to say "yeah this service will be down for 3 days while we figure out how to unscramble things and restore the data." Professionalism means never having to say you're sorry. That's why there will always be work for guys like me. Because one day your "miraculously cheap" setup will go FIZZLE and people will look around for a home for their services that is first and foremost RELIABLE not cheap.
If you let Google run your email for you, they will be subject at any moment to forwarding all copies of your email to any government agent that asks for it. And under the terms of the Patriot Act in the USA they can never tell you about it. Google is just another big soul-less mega-corporation that is only too happy to turn in Chinese dissidents as long as it profits.
I like the Berkeley sysadmin attitude a lot. I was talking with those guys recently and they consider themselves the guardian of campus data. If Feds show up waving a Patriot Act letter, there will be a fight over it, not just meekly handing them whatever they want.
IMAP and FORWARDS ring any bells? If there's one thing thing you know about GOOGLE it's just like MSN and Yahoo, they want to own your mindshare they do not want to share.
If US corporations really wanted the best talent of the world, they would be supporting GREEN CARD applicants and trying to find the best foreign students to cultivate. Or they would US students directly by scholarships and grants. No, they do not want US citizens. Full citizens have too many rights and demands. They want disposable workers which is what an H1-B is for them. Eventually they get to send the person home and ARE NOT OBLIGATED BY A PENSION. It's all about destroying the entire concept of pensions. It's all about corporate greed and short-sighted behaviour not what is good for the country. Bill Gates and his Foundation are taking dollars and stealing your future with one hand, and giving a few pennies back with the other and this apparently makes them saints to the people fooled by their PR.
I notice the summary above references the BOFH. Here again we see SysAdmin confused with Operator. This is one of the problems, most people view SysAdmin as some sort of Operator. In a Data Center the Operators are low-paid monkeys who can push a few buttons and dial a phone, but most importantly are willing to WORK ANY SHIFT! I used to work as an Operator, it sucks after a year and I wouldn't go back to rotating into graveyard shift. The problem is in most organizations they view SysAdmin as a higher-paid version of that. You are doing typically some very complex work, still have to answer your pager at 3AM or on vacation, and have bosses who can't understand why any given problem can't be resolved in about 5 minutes. Everyone in the organization thinks they are smarter than you, and bring you answers that you have to implement. I can't tell you how many times I've been handed a bunch of hardware and told "we bought this without consulting you, but here make it work!" The problem has as much to do with the perception of SysAdmin by YOU, as it does with the Sysadmin. Organizations generally treat us like garbage, so that's what they get. Some good quotes from alt.sysadmin.recovery here: http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.ht ml
I work with a small neighborhood WISP. We tell customers up-front we have a SHARED DSL line and a shared radio spectrum, and if they want to download full-out 24x7 we are not the place for that. On the other hand we charge as little as $15/month so for people who just want email and occasional downloads that works fine. If I find the gateway is totally clogged and run ntop and find out user-X is running P2P all day long uploading and downloading they get booted. You get what you pay for, and we state up front we are a cheap basic mobile service, and NOT trying to compete with wired ISP.
I recommend them to SpeakEasy or similar ISP which are quite good, if a bit pricey.
Half the time lately Yahoo seems very slow. Then sometimes I go click on a message and it tells me it can't show me the content just now, try later.
Fat lot of good unlimited storage is if it's slow and unreliable.
Considering there are only THREE usable fully-separated channels in WiFi, 1, 6, & 11. If you DON'T grant a WiFi monopoly it will only lead to a frequency and amplifier war. Consdering the limited channel space and it's wide consumer uses, WiFi is already severely constrained in some areas. Adding more noise to that tiny sliver of spectrum will only make things worse. Had the government granted WiFi it's own spectrum strictly for data and allocated about 10 times the channel space then Muni-WiFi might be broadly successful. They didn't so it never will be. Let's say we make WiFi 2.0 to correct all the glarging deficiencies of the current one for WWAN usage. What's your time before this is generally available? 10 years?
"A Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up is planning to build a free wireless Internet network in central San Francisco, and all residents have to do put a small wireless router supplied by the company in their window or rooftop. Meraki Networks plans, within months, to bring free wireless Internet access to about 15,000 residents who live in parts of the Mission, Castro, Duboce Park, Lower Haight and Alamo Square neighborhoods." Hmmm, I stand by my PIPE-DREAM comment. This is PR junk. Does it say UNIVERSAL? No. Does it say it's here now? No. As I said I've worked with neighborhood WiFi project and in an urban area about 60% is the best we've been able to do with WiFi due to it's massively inappropriate design for what we are trying to do with it. WiFi was DESIGNED for coffee-shops and conference rooms. It was not DESIGNED for large-area coverage and it's limits show quite clearly when we try to use it for that. You stick up a few AP's and they work great in winter. Now it's full summer and it rains and your signal goes to zero in what were formerly good zones. Or someone buys a bunch of 2.4 GHz junk or cranks up the microwave oven in the apartment blocking your customer and your phone rings all the time. If a few of the clients have 12-year olds your network is constantly clogged with P2P activity, and all the activity drags down what is a half-duplex shared medium. Our community WiFi makes no money, it's just a fun project. But we aren't out making outrageous claims about it's coverage or reliability or anything. We offer service to people in some areas, for a cheap rate they can probably check email and do basic stuff, we don't support heavy usage or file-sharing period. If they have needs beyond that we tell them go get DSL.