Senator Jay Rockefeller(WV) has already stated we are giving away free internet and it should be stopped. The goverment is coming. They are now meeting to see what steps to take.
EchoStar Seeks $1.1 Billion in Broadband Stimulus Funding
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Senator Jay Rockefeller(WV) has already stated we are giving away free internet and it should be stopped. The goverment is coming. They are now meeting to see what steps to take.
Back to the original topic... You spend 1.1 billion on a satellite, how many people get high speed internet? You spend 1.1 billion on other forms how many get high speed internet?
Satellite really is the last resort method of internet service. It is expensive, slow and has huge capacity problems. One could argue that it is not really high speed internet, just a step above dialup.
A lot of cell towers in rural areas could be built with 4G networking or even wifi attached to a lot of towers could serve more people at a higher speed and far far far less latency.
Satellite really is the last resort method of internet service. It is expensive, slow and has huge capacity problems. One could argue that it is not really high speed internet, just a step above dialup.
A lot of cell towers in rural areas could be built with 4G networking or even wifi attached to a lot of towers could serve more people at a higher speed and far far far less latency.
With 1.1 billion dollars, Rural WISPs could cover a fair deal of ground. I wouldn't trust cell carriers to do it because there are no cell carriers offering aircard plans above 5gb/mo and 4G is just in its infancy. Sprint's Wimax setup is 2.7ghz, which doesn't do nearly as good as say, what the 4G carriers will do with 700mhz or what we can do currently with 900mhz. Also, in Rural America, a local company is more likely to get approval of towers, etc. than a faceless company located in a major city.
WiFi doesn't work for crap anywhere that has trees or ground based obstructions. Here in the sticks of Maine, a tree would take out a distance WiFi connection quite quickly. 2.4 is also extremely polluted thanks to consumer use. The WISP I work for acquired a 2.4 WISP last week that has had consistent problems delivering to their customers. The first step was to put the Motorola 900mhz gear up and abandon the 2.4.
I do agree with Mike's assessment about satellite though. We largely compete with the satellite folks, because obviously we're not going to beat things like cable, so we don't serve there. The latency situation and the lack of consistency due to overloading makes it easy, as well as the high startup costs of satellite. If you are FAPed, your speeds can go to slightly above dialup. Many customers only ever see that slow speed. Its advantage is 'always on'. I forget who it was that said something along the lines of 'the worst thing you can do with a Satellite is provide Internet with it.'.
If Echostar wants to be an ISP, they should be making use of the 700mhz licenses they bought. They bought coverage for most of the USA.
WiFi doesn't work for crap anywhere that has trees or ground based obstructions. Here in the sticks of Maine, a tree would take out a distance WiFi connection quite quickly. 2.4 is also extremely polluted thanks to consumer use. The WISP I work for acquired a 2.4 WISP last week that has had consistent problems delivering to their customers. The first step was to put the Motorola 900mhz gear up and abandon the 2.4.
I do agree with Mike's assessment about satellite though. We largely compete with the satellite folks, because obviously we're not going to beat things like cable, so we don't serve there. The latency situation and the lack of consistency due to overloading makes it easy, as well as the high startup costs of satellite. If you are FAPed, your speeds can go to slightly above dialup. Many customers only ever see that slow speed. Its advantage is 'always on'. I forget who it was that said something along the lines of 'the worst thing you can do with a Satellite is provide Internet with it.'.
If Echostar wants to be an ISP, they should be making use of the 700mhz licenses they bought. They bought coverage for most of the USA.
Around here there is not a lot of tree problem. Trees tend to be under 30' tall. Wireless internet is big here. We are a Clearwire market, but they surprisingly only provide service in town, not the surrounding countryside where there would be real demand. They try to compete with DSL and cable which services the entire area they are running the 4G. But, outside of town there are a couple providers that do tower based wireless internet. I used to have it at my house before cable/DSL arrived here.
Everyone has dishes that look like they are pointing at the ground aimed at the towers. They use directional antennas on the towers so they are able to do wifi in a bunch of directions at the same time without interference. Everyone I know with it is pleased. They get 5-10 mile range from the towers. It works out in the countryside since population density is low, so not a lot of competition for the bandwidth. The rates are low, around $40/month. Small towns are putting the antennas on top of their water towers.
Everyone has dishes that look like they are pointing at the ground aimed at the towers. They use directional antennas on the towers so they are able to do wifi in a bunch of directions at the same time without interference. Everyone I know with it is pleased. They get 5-10 mile range from the towers. It works out in the countryside since population density is low, so not a lot of competition for the bandwidth. The rates are low, around $40/month. Small towns are putting the antennas on top of their water towers.
Instead your problem is a lack of coverage per tower because of distance to the site then. At 2.7ghz you need more power to cover the same area as at 900. Licenses usually prevent you from playing the power game.
Most of the Clear markets are in places with people. I'm talking about Rural America. They're not hurting for options in Atlanta or Vegas...
Proving my point that places who have those options shouldn't be wireless Internet markets...
I suspect they're using Sectored antennas, like we're using in our higher capacity 900 markets.
It helps concentrate the signal in a given direction, but it doesn't make the issue problem-free by any stretch. When you're dealing with the unlicensed band, it's basically a free for all. The licensed bands aren't super big either and the cost is generally prohibitive.
In the rural areas that I'm talking about, 5-10 mile range may get you 10-20 customers. Our 900 sites have a max of 20 miles and some of them have 20-30 customers. These are places that the only major slice of Internet is a T1 line.
It's not worthwhile to cover 10-20 people at a cost of 10 grand (for the site, plus CPE, installations, etc.), unless there are grants, unfortunately. It's a very front-loaded business.
That's around what we charge (45$).
We install on water tanks, municipal towers, sometimes co-location with radio stations or cell carriers as well. It's a good situation, if the town is willing to be accommodating.
This is also why the local companies can do it better than a national company. It's a different situation when it's Bob down the street instead of AT&T.
Wichita Falls was a test market for Clearwire, we have had it a couple years now. A town of 100k. As soon as you get out of town the population per square mile drops dramatically. I know one county adjacent has less than 19 people per square mile (they just got put on the list for 75MPH TX speedlimit where 19 is the cutoff). Cable/DSL only goes to the edge of town. There are a ton of cell towers in the surrounding countryside, but they only put it on 6 towers here in town. People 1/2 mile out of town were not able to get the service. The point I was making if they put it on the cell tower surrounding the town they could have picked up a lot of people that had no other choice. Instead the wifi folks moved in.
If they were to get stimulus money to pay for fiber out to the surrounding towers they could get all the rural folks nicely covered with internet.
We have no town or city in this state with 100K people. At best we have a place with a little more than half that. My native town that I work in has 8000 people (and they, have ADSL2+ 20/1mbit service, Cable Internet, and we have some wireless presence there for the fringe folks) . Where I live has about 40K and is the 'other' major metro area.
Ideally they get fiber where they can get it cheap, and backhaul it into the places that don't have cheap fiber (which is what the cell carriers often do). Fiber is expensive compared to backhauls in these rural areas I speak of. The word fiber is very foreign in most of this tri-state land area.
I generally think it's a poor idea to pay hundreds a month per loop mile for fiber to the sticks when you can get fiber to a mountaintop for cheap, pay 300 a month in tower rent, and backhaul 50+ mbit to the sticks with 10-15 grand in hardware.
As a general rule, at least in my experience, bandwidth is cheap, the method to get it somewhere is where most of the cost is.
OMG! at 2:41 a.m.
So you think I'm in Oz just because I put that there. Some people don't want their location discovered. I will tell you this though, I'm further North than you are.
There is already infrastructure in many areas but getting tapped into that infrastructure is demanded a premium such as fiber and the cell towers. As many cell towers as there are, if there were wifi equipment on each one of them, that would serve most of the unserved population.
I'm not so sure I agree with that. There are plenty of rural places where there is a 850mhz-only cell tower every 15-20 miles. That certainly isn't good enough to cover any given area with WiFi.
The cell towers have a much better footprint and coverage area than WiFi, partially because they are licensed band and compete with no-one for their spectrum.
I would agree with you that this would be vastly different on 700mhz, which is also a licensed band.
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In many cases the cell towers of single rural carriers were sold off to tower lease companies. If you really want to get on a cell tower, you can usually rent your way on there.
