[NA]Free Nation-wide Internet[NA]
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JeffDG
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Off to SZ in...3...2...
ScottM
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iBazinga!
Wow you guys just came a cross a program that has been discussed for about 10 years and think it is new. BTW just about every other developing country has such a program. You have a better chance of getting Internet these days in backwater India than you do medium city USA. You cannot tell me there is no business case for the US deployment. There is. The hold up has always been real estate and NIMBY. There needs to be something done to bust through those hold ups.
It is sad then when you look at telecom technology that the US is falling further behind the rest of the world each year. Even Pakistan is embracing wireless, ubiquitous Internet and has been building a commercial system for several years now!
It is sad then when you look at telecom technology that the US is falling further behind the rest of the world each year. Even Pakistan is embracing wireless, ubiquitous Internet and has been building a commercial system for several years now!
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Trapper John
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Okaaayy...as long as you consider one sure way of keeping us free is preventing a significant percentage of the population from having access to the internet...
How is this any different from the Rural Electification Administration/Rural Utility Service bringing electricity to rural areas starting back in the 1930s? And assistance to rural telephone co-ops...
Trapper John
jtheune
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So I'm curious just % of the population can't get high speed internet now? Given that a very high percentage of the population lives in urban and suburban areas where cable is running just how much are we talking about? If you look at the ads that are running for verizon vs ATT now with the red vs blue coverage maps you see large areas of the country that are not covered yet AT&T claims 97% of the people have coverage. Is it the same with internet access? Large areas of no coverage but very few people living there?
Important distinction (and, perhaps, a bit of a clarification on my old-fart curmudgeon response to that other old fart curmudgeon's original post.
I agree - absolutely - that national policy needs to aggressively encourage and create incentives for the development of robust and effective broadband access. The REA analogy is an excellent one, too - just because the electrification of remote and rural areas did not directly and immediately benefit the vast majority of Americans did not mean it was not an important and valuable task.
But.
"Free"?
Naw.
I agree - absolutely - that national policy needs to aggressively encourage and create incentives for the development of robust and effective broadband access. The REA analogy is an excellent one, too - just because the electrification of remote and rural areas did not directly and immediately benefit the vast majority of Americans did not mean it was not an important and valuable task.
But.
"Free"?
Naw.
Trapper John
Ejection Handle Pulled
Agree, free's not fair. But to follow the REA model would be entirely appropriate.
I'm in town and can get 7 Mbps DSL from Qwest for about $20/mo. But outside of town, HughesNet charges $350/mo for 5 Mbps service...
Trapper John
TMetzinger
Final Approach
Customers paid for their electricity? I'm all for subsidizing it to make the cost to consumers in rural areas pay similar costs as their neighbors in cities. That's different than "free".
ScottM
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iBazinga!
The article said free or cheap, not just free.
BTW there is a big effort to try and utilize the over develop high speed transit links that were built in the US. Coupled with building networks that can reach the places where people live. As there is almost a total lack of high speed data links to homes and neighborhoods. Business cases for fiber to the home (FTTH) mostly fall apart. Wireless starts to make sense in those cases. But WiFi is very localized and WiMAX will have some capacity issues in dense urban suburban areas. The amount of access points is very high and that gets into a lot of real estate issues that will need to be dealt with. So some sort of 'wireless data; right of way concept needs to be developed and then deployed. Which will involve an army of lawyers and tech experts. That means this decade long project is not anywhere near a reality in happening yet.
What is happening and is more immediate is the wireless broadband deployment for public safety and government applications. Extra capacity in those systems could be used to provide 'civilians' with some Internet access.
Lawreston
En-Route
No cable on this Maine Coast Island(except a few got DSL from Verizon before disaster Fairpoint bought ME, NH, VT landlines from Verizon. I have HughesNet satellite service(faster than dial-up but much inferior to wide-band I had in Topsham(Comcast).
If I'm uploading large images to my photo lab in Texas my better speeds are after 1:30 a.m. Last Sunday evening there was great upload speed; I guess everyone was watching the Academy Awards and staying off the Internet.
Photo? Tongue-in-cheek sign on a parade float a couple years ago.
Other photo? Most of those houses are only occupied during June/July/August when Georgetown population swells there and all through town on Private Roads. Interesting, when flying over the town, is that on each of said Private Road are other Lanes/Loops which spider-leg off Private Roads, totally unknown to motorists driving on Route 127 to Reid State Park.
HR
EDIT: Photo 3 = (after 5 "Web Error - suspected satellite outage") is Reid State Park; not many people on September 03. Slightly upper right-of-center
is Five Islands Harbor, scene of the other aerial.
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Everskyward
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No cable where I live and it's within 30 miles of Denver (and not in the mountains). We only were able to get DSL about 5 years ago. There are plenty of people who live out here too, just not in dense subdivisions. There's also no 3G out here either and regular cell phone reception is better than it was before but still a little sketchy.
Let'sgoflying!
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I mostly think that living in a rural area means you accept what goes along with that, good and bad. There is a large push to make the country just like the city these days.
A nearby town of 7000 just got a 67 million dollar electrical upgrade including a huge, I mean factory sized battery....so they don't suffer the occasional power outage anymore. Is that a wise way to spend our money? They could have provided a couple of very nice standby generators to the essential service providers for a lot less. In fact they could have given every household in the town their own generator with that kind of money.
A nearby town of 7000 just got a 67 million dollar electrical upgrade including a huge, I mean factory sized battery....so they don't suffer the occasional power outage anymore. Is that a wise way to spend our money? They could have provided a couple of very nice standby generators to the essential service providers for a lot less. In fact they could have given every household in the town their own generator with that kind of money.
alaskaflyer
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Alaskaflyer
The article linked in the OP answers most of your questions, though leaves many more unanswered.
dmccormack
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ScottM
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iBazinga!
Not sure what you mean by a front for the cable industry. Comcast is invovled in WiMAX. But they are reselling capacity on ClearWire's network, not building their own.
WiMAX is actually here already. It has been launched in several US cities and many other countries. I think the current number is around 560 networks deployed world wide. http://www.wimaxforum.org/
dmccormack
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Dan Mc
"Front" = Industry manufactured "crisis" grabbed by enterprising pol
WiMax R2 (IEE 802.whatever) holds promise of long transmission ranges. Plop WiMax ontoto existing Cell towers already in rural areas, and the "crisis" is resolved.
ScottM
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iBazinga!
You are mistaken in that conclusion.
Propagation, equalization, NLOS fading issues in the sub-channel, bandwidth and capacity all contribute to a non-equal coverage and capacity between cellular and WiMAX.
Just to set the terminology right. IEEE802.16e is the current iteration of the physical and MAC layer specification that is being deployed. That sort of equates to WiMAX release 1. But as WiMAX also includes the layer 3 and upward parts of the stack and those standards are still being written and revised it is not a one for one mapping.
WiMAX Release 2 will encompass the yet to be published IEEE802.16m phy spec.
About the politics. Well that is a long story and has been going on for three administrations now. It is not 'one enterprising pol'. Bridging the digital divide has been a bipartisan program.
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ScottM
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iBazinga!
I am curious as to what there price by you is? They are offering all you can eat for $59/mo here.
Basic (1.5 down, 0.5 up, unlimited) - $30.00/month; "One:Home" is 6 down, 1 up, $40.00/mo.
Add phone svc for $25/mo on either plan.
This is where my concern lies, as well.
wbarnhill
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The corporations don't consider broadband internet access to be a 'utility'. Even people on this thread don't think that rural areas should be entitled to it. There are many jobs that you can telecommute to. There are numerous new markets your business can expand to. You boost the level of entrepreneurship. But for any of these things, broadband is a necessity.
dmccormack
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Then thos without LOS to WiMAX rcvr will have to use 4G cell for data.
Again, there's more than one way to solve this "problem," but my presumption is a huge government freebie will end up stifling innovation and expansion.
ScottM
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iBazinga!
FYI WiMAX is 4G and is a NLOS technology, It is also a two way technology that requires both a receiver and a transmitter on the customer and base station ends. 4G cellular is a bunch of papers in standards committees, technology trials are expected to begin later this year and into 2011 of preliminary technology.
Here is some national background on the technologies. 4G Cellular is called LTE-Advanced in case anyone was wondering.
The two technologies are being developed internationally amoung many partners. LTE-A got it start as an idea the was sponsored by the EU with Ericsson making most of the early technology strides. They own the lion's share of the IPR and stand the most to gain from the introduction of the technology into the market. WiMAX was started a long time ago as a LOS data system. It evolved into the NLOS mobile system that it is today. It was primarily driven by IT type companies looking to bridge data distribution gaps cheaply. The system of today, 802.16e, was developed by three main companies, Motorola, Samsung, and Alvarion. That last one is an Israeli company that most people probably had not heard of before. Intel is also a big WiMAX player and is already including the technology in their microprocessor chip sets. The big operators in the US for WiMAX are Clearwire, Sprint, and Comcast.
In the US the LTE operator is Verizon. Although AT&T is looking seriously at LTE as well. This is all public knowledge and I am not giving away any secrets, nor will I. But both AT&T and Verizon own spectrum that would favor a FDD technology. LTE-A has that option in their proposed standard. WiMAX is a TDD technology. The technology choice comes down to who owns what type of spectrum allocation. FDD spectrum is hard to get and is very much being used to carry voice traffic. Deploying LTE in that spectrum will cause service disruptions and require everyone with a cellphone to upgrade eventually. This is something that American do not like to do. Just look and you will see people complaining about how their freebie analog bag phone they got 20 years ago no longer can be used. Or better yet look at the people complaining that they have to switch to digital TV.
Sprint and Clearwire own tons of TDD spectrum and have chosen WiMAX because it can be deployed in what is termed a 'greenfield'. They are not bumping anyone out and in the case of Sprint can keep their voice network intact. In the US there is also a lot more TDD spectrum available. While LTE-A does have a TDD mode, it was almost exclusively developed by China and contains enormous amounts of their IP which translates into an expensive technology to deploy. Only China has so far stated they will deploy that mode of LTE-A. This IP royalty issue is less with WiMAX since the IP is split between several players.
Free Internet has been tried in several communities with IEEE 802.11 muni-WiFi and for the most part has failed. The cost to cover is just too high. Free WiFi has worked in small venues like restaurants and other businesses. One of the wild cards in all of this is something called D-block. This is new spectrum, that is FDD allocated and is to be sold at a discount to a cellular carrier with the caveat of a certain amount of nationwide coverage and that it have the capability to be taken over by emergency service and public safety agencies when required. The DHS wants a nationwide wireless network. But it also wants private enterprise to pay for it. This may be their way to get it. But the last auction no one bid enough to win the contract award. It is being rebid.
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GrampaMark
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I live well and truly in the Middle of Nowhere. This area didn't get electricity until the late '40's; telephone service soon after.
The "community" in which I live is about half the size of Rhode Island and has a population of about 300(the entire county is about the size of Connecticut and has a population of about 7500). The cost of providing basic services to an area where the pop. density is measured in square miles per person is hugely expensive on a per customer basis. As the rural population continues to shrink, those costs will increase.
We get electrical and telephone service from two different rural co-ops. Electricity is currently about $.08/kwh. Basic residential phone service is $16/month. Because of the miles of cable pairs required to provide telephone service to each residence, dialup is useless. My ISP is a company called Wild Blue which has agreements with a number of rural telephone co-ops around the country to make their satellite-based service available. I have the fastest connection available (1.5 down, .5 up) for $70/mo. There is no wireless phone service within about 15 miles of here. None, zero, zip, zilch, nada. If not for the fact that the telephone co-op would have to write off the capital costs of the existing infrastructure it would be cheaper to provide wireless service, as is being done in developing countries.
City people cry like little girls who have had their milk money stolen at the high cost of providing airports, roads, and other basic services to the handful of us who live miles off the beaten path. Those same city folks cry equally large tears when they don't get the stuff they want, which is made from the raw materials grown in or extracted from these remote areas.
Sort of a pay me now or pay me later deal, I suppose.
Mark
The "community" in which I live is about half the size of Rhode Island and has a population of about 300(the entire county is about the size of Connecticut and has a population of about 7500). The cost of providing basic services to an area where the pop. density is measured in square miles per person is hugely expensive on a per customer basis. As the rural population continues to shrink, those costs will increase.
We get electrical and telephone service from two different rural co-ops. Electricity is currently about $.08/kwh. Basic residential phone service is $16/month. Because of the miles of cable pairs required to provide telephone service to each residence, dialup is useless. My ISP is a company called Wild Blue which has agreements with a number of rural telephone co-ops around the country to make their satellite-based service available. I have the fastest connection available (1.5 down, .5 up) for $70/mo. There is no wireless phone service within about 15 miles of here. None, zero, zip, zilch, nada. If not for the fact that the telephone co-op would have to write off the capital costs of the existing infrastructure it would be cheaper to provide wireless service, as is being done in developing countries.
City people cry like little girls who have had their milk money stolen at the high cost of providing airports, roads, and other basic services to the handful of us who live miles off the beaten path. Those same city folks cry equally large tears when they don't get the stuff they want, which is made from the raw materials grown in or extracted from these remote areas.
Sort of a pay me now or pay me later deal, I suppose.
Mark