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The Internet

Is The Wireless Internet Not Ready For Prime Time? 177

Posted by Cliff from the two-steps-backwards dept.
RabidMonkey asks: "As an employee at a high speed wireless ISP which has gone into receivership (Maxlink communications Inc), I've begun to wonder: Is there actually a big enough market for Wireless Internet access? After reading that Look Communications is cutting 300 of its staff and looking for a buyer, I'm a little skeptical. I'm wondering if there are any other big wireless service providers that are doing well out there, and if they are, what are they doing differently? What are the different technologies in use? Why do these ventures seem to be failing?" With the majority of users still connecting to the internet via phone lines and cable modems and DSL finally catching on, is it too soon to expect wireless systems to be successful in anything more than niche markets?

"I think that the technology and the need are there for this, but why does it fail? I know that our rates are very competitive, installation is the industry standard (free) and our customer service is good. And the same goes for Look. Two companies with good technology that failed. Is it just not the right time?"
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Is The Wireless Internet Not Ready For Prime Time? More

Is The Wireless Internet Not Ready For Prime Time?

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  • Don't confuse 3G & fixed wireless (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Howdy slashdotters,

    I think a number of respondents are confusing the much hyped 3G mobile IP wireless communications with the broadband fixed wireless IP solution that Maxlink was offering.

    What Maxlink were trying to sell was access to the internet to people like my self who do not live in a major metropolitan area. I live in the rural mid-west. It is impossible to get ISDN/DSL/Cable broadband access. In fact in most of America these services are not available and will never be available (DSL only works up to a few thousand meters from the exchange). The access is not mobile. It requires an antennae on the top of your house precisly aligned with the base station, with an ethernet feed to your computers/internet devices. I think a major part of Maxlinks business plan was also to muscle in on the voice revenue that the local phone companies monopolize via VOIP. It sounds like a lucrative business. Any idea why if failed? Bad management, bad technology (are there any Maxlink users out there that can comment)?

  • the answer is so damn obvious (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Wireless Internet FUCKING SUCKS!!! I have a fucking startac, what am I going to do, surf the web with 4 lines of text? Enter my password thru the digit pad? Whose fucking idea was this? The only people who think the Wireless internet will be a big deal are the people who will make money from it: Phone companies, perhaps content providers. Joe Shmoe, even techie Joe Schmoe like me who likes gadgets as much as the next guy (probably more) thinks the Wireless Internet is absolutely useless. I've heard people say "oh but it's so handy, I found an ATM near me by entering my zip code!" What they don't tell you is that it costs $3 for that little tidbit. I tried to get the score of the World Series on my phone during the game as we dined at Olive Garden. Nothing worked, Excite, Cnn, all of them had scored from at least 30 mins ago, and it cost me like $5 for that useless non-info.

    The internet (today's internet, anyway) was designed for a 17 inch 16-bit color monitor at 800x600, not a 1 inch monochrome dot-matrix display. I have yet to try browsing/email on Palm, if that's good then perhaps that will be the savior of wireless (or plugging the laptop into the cell phone), but internet on cell phones has struck me as one of the stupidest ideas I have ever encountered since the first time I heard of it.
  • I'm sure it's wonderful for you since you're amping way above what is FCC legal in this band. AFAIK Part 15 of the FCC regs dealing with 2.4GHz ISM do not allow you more than 36dB EIRP. At least 6dBi of this must be antenna gain. A 24dBi antenna only allows your radio to output 12dBm of power and with a 1W amp you're probably pushing close to 40 with the lucent radio. Add gain and you're talking maybe 60-70dB EIRP output.

    FCC fines will start putting wireless ISP's using 2.4GHz out of buisness when the band starts getting clogged and they have to hammer down.

  • tele2 has been around for around 2 years, if I remember correctly. Their roll-out to other areas of the UK is frustraitingly slow, unfortunately. It's an off-shoot of a http://www.tele2.dk/">Danish company, but my Danish is not good enough to determine if they're doing wireless there.

    The UK is interesting because of the relationship between BT, the cable companies and all the other phone companies. BT is moving as slow as possible in rolling out ADSL (it's only just become available in the last couple of months), and the cable companies are largely ineffective in providing cable modem access (largely thanks to the rapid consolidation in the industry, and the problems in integrating the different networks, I suspect). In the past 24 hours, however, the telecoms regulator, OFTEL, has started to put pressure [guardianunlimited.co.uk] on BT to speed up the unbundling of the local loop, which could change things dramatically.

    Anyway, the point being, the telecoms landscape in the UK makes it difficult to get high speed (and consumer level cost) internet access over fixed wire. Hence, options such as the service provided by tele2 are interesting. Or the grass roots consume.net [consume.net], or others.

    If BT was playing nicely, it wouldn't be necessary, but they may end up shooting themselves in the foot.

    No complaints there.

    ...j

  • I've been considereing starting a wireless ISP for a while. Here is my perspective:

    When a customers looks at internet they want it to work. The default is a modem, which works. Slow, but it works, most people start with it, and soon grow tired of the lack of speed.

    When they want to upgrade speed the havce several options: ISDN, DSL, Wireless, satalite, cable modem, in order of theoretical speed. However cost varies. In general ISDN is the most expensive, (maybe wireless is more depending on what I want my profit to be). Satalite is avaiable anywhere, but latency is bad. Web only users will love it though. DSL and ISDN are the only unshared system, which makes it hard to compre speed. Cable and DSL are only avaiable in a few places and you can't be sure of getting it. Satalite and wireless are affected by weather. In theory wireless allows roaming - great if you want to use your laptop under a shade tree.

    Where I live with one of the biggest ISDN tarrifs in the nation. ($60/month just for the line, plus ISP charges) DSL is not even in the plans. (My ISDN line is run from a switch at least 30 miles away, appearently with amps along the way, no wonder it is so expensive). Cable isn't in the plans, and the company isn't trusted even if it was - a lot of houses here have DSS dishs and have dropped cable. Perfect for wireless. (Unfortunatly the city has substadised T1s to local buisness for non-isp use, so a large crop of money is unavaiable to me)

    right now wireless is undergoing the upgrade from 2mbs to 11. Once the faster radios are stable it is ready. Links of 20 miles are achived all the time with wireless, without repeaters. Normally though smaller cells are desirable.

  • I read the article, and I assume the people who wrote it know more than I, but it seems odd to me that TCP would have so much trouble with wireless. Yes, wireless tends to lose more packets from data corruption, but I'd have thought this would be a common problem even over wires back in the days when TCP/IP was being developed.
  • While that is a fine solution (and I believe that's essentially a part of all the wireless protocols which are currently firing IP packets around), there are some obvious reasons why you'd like to deal with packet loss at the IP level. In particular, as you move to IPv6 you have lots of ways of managing packet flow at the IP level, and if your are also doing it at a lower level you end up with a lot of redundancy.
  • To throw in my own two cents here, there are several reasons why wireless companies aren't doing well (Failing, slugishness, etc).

    1) Infastructure. Most wireless services I'm aware of require quite a few receiving towers scattered around a relatively small area (Say, a valley 20m by 14m). Even the ones using microwave need several to cover something that small. Those towers are definately NOT CHEAP. And the funny thing is that the physical construction isn't even the majority of the cost. Running a fat enough connection to the tower to handle its users will cost both your testicles and your right arm in zoning costs and permits.

    2) Limited user base. For several reasons, the potential user base for wireless communications is significantly limited compared to cable, DSL, or phone service. How many people reading this message live in a dwelling that they own? How many live in an apartment building with restrictive rules about what they can do? The place I'm living now won't let me put a dish on the roof, and that's the only way I can get wireless. Unles my complex installs something for me and becomes my ISP, I'm stuck (And just for the record, they're not going to do that. I can't even get 56k in this place. They split phone lines into 32k chunks to save construction costs.)

    3) Cost. Half of the people I work with use "free" ISPs. They won't shell out even $20 a month for an Internet feed, let alone $50-$100. And NO wireless company can live on $20 a month.

    So in conclusion, we're going to see a major shakedown and hard times ahead for wireless companies. Some may survive, and once they start expanding, they should do extremely well. Until that time, there is nothing anyone can do.
  • I am on wireless service right now. I'll tell you just why there's little market for it. I used the service mainly because it's the only solution for faster-than-dialup internet access. I live in a town in southern oregon, and there is no competition. US West's DSL has been non-existant. Falcon (or whoever the latest company is) hasn't been rollingo out service. So basically, I live with crappy service. But then again; Do I have a choice?
  • I think wireless internet, much like cell-phones, will take hold first and foremost in countries lacking the solid phone/wire infrastructure of the US but having a solid interest in some degree of internet access. I'm thinking of China, Eastern Europe and places like that. They'll be more than happy to put up with expensive, slow and troublesome connections because that will be their only option.

    In the US, so long as it is slower, more complicated and more costly, wireless Internet will be nothing more than a curiosity. We have the worlds most dependable phone system. We don't really NEED wireless, regardless of how much the idea appeals to a significant minority.

    This is one of the main reasons that the US always seems so 'behind' in these things. Other countries embrace and run with cellular/wireless communications because their existing services are a.) too complicated and expensive (Japan) or b.) of a tech level barely above the Iron Age (China/Eastern Europe).

  • Thinking of the long-term is very much a part of capitalism. Just ask Alan Greenspan. It is only rarely a part of VENTURE capitalism, which is essentially a form of legalized gambling too often mistaken for actual capitalism.

  • DSL and cable are not used for backbone links (e.g. provider to provider) - they are access links, linking the end customer to the network.

  • Re:TCP/IP Not Right? (Score:3)

    by Cato ( 8296 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2000 @04:20AM (#578689)
    This isn't why wireless companies are failing, but TCP does have problems over wireless - e.g. packet drops are interpreted as congestion, when they could be due to a burst of data corruption.

    There's a good article on TCP in the latest IP Journal that covers TCP over wireless, see www.cisco.com and search for IPJ. Issues are downloadable or you can sign up.
  • Everyone is so goddamn confused it's ridiculous. There is a huge difference between wireless and roving wireless. If you are talking about 2/11Mbps or pcmcia or airport then you are talking about roving stuff. o.w. you are talking about fixed point to point bandwidth. Here in Tucson, there's like 4 options for BW, cable/xDSL/microwave [gainwireless.com]/and microwave(from uswest i think, they put a transmitter on the mountain and stick a dish on your house.). None of these 4 options are 802.11 ethernet. Just look at the dish on the gainwireless website, that'd be pretty damn big for a laptop don't you think?

    If you are asking the question "Why isn't technology not succeding against xDSL or cable modem?" Then the answer is to strip off all occurences of xDSL/cable modem/wireless from the propaganda and then tabulate the features. Most consumers don't know don't care what they are using to get net access. They are asking questions like:

    How much does it cost?
    How fast is it?

    That's it. There are of course additional considerations like having to put up a dish/antenna for wireless stuff but that's a side issue. Now if the comparison comes up that wireless costs $10 more per month then it loses. Simple isn't it? (Oddly enough, most of the wireless providers require a separate ISP, that pushes their cost up another 20 bucks usually. )

    Most people don't know jack shit about wireless stuff can be snooped on (no worse than cable stuff). People on /. who say "I would examine their technology first" have absolutely zero affect on a wireless isp. Sorry to deflate your ego but if people like you actually had a lot of influence then AOL would not be AOL.

    For the examples I gave above, gainwireless is failing (for non-businesses) because it is damn expensive. (Personally I don't think they care that they are not popular with non-businesses). The uswest(?) option is succeeding however, mostly because the existing phone lines and such are ultra cheap here and stuff is somewhat spread out so the actual number of people who can get xDSL is limited. Cable is also not doing well because they are morons.

    Rant: I've been here a damn long time, longer than my 4 digit id would indicate since I didn't actually get an account until rob put in "features" that made my reading /. easier. But back to the rant, the reason that I feel /. is so dammned messed up is because of...

    * The questions to begin with are vague. If you wish to start a discussion then you must focus it. E.g., you need to state that you are comparing wireless to xDSL and that you are not talking about sticking wireless access onto your laptop so that you can read /. while you crap.

    * People skim and start spewing. The best way to help this is to better state the question. Perhaps put a one sentence summary in huge ass bold so that if you miss it then you are clearly a moron.

    * The people who post the question in the first place are rather sloppy. This is your chance to get a huge audience. State your questions clearly if you want it answered. O.w. you get what you ask for.

  • Well, not quite, but close enough.

    I've gotta say that most of what I've heard about the "wireless web" is deep into gee-whiz just-because-we-can territory and real short on actual usefulness. Grotesquely truncated web pages on the tiny screen on my cell phone? Pass. Net access while I'm driving? Stupid. Check the latest stock quotes if I bring my PDA out on a date? Whatever. Maybe some people dig that stuff, but I suspect that's a permanent niche market.

    Wireless access is not a bad idea inside buildings. It's probably of dubious value for desktop machines in a 600-desk cube farm, but it'd be nice to be able to use my laptop for net access down in the cafeteria or in conference rooms without trifling with cables. Having spent the weekend stringing Cat-5 in my WWII-era not-even-electrically-grounded house, I'd much rather plug in a wireless hub and be done with it. Maybe then I could browse the web while I'm on the can, or whatever it is they expect people to do with webpads.

    --

  • You would want wireless for your house if you lived in the midwest. The fastest line I can get for my house is a $65/month POTS line. The telco doesn't offer ISDN, DSL. The cable company doesn't offer cable modems.

    I have heard of local parties laying they're own cable, but other than that wireless is the only solution.

    Joe
  • I've been using the internet for quite a few years now, since 1994. Quite a lot of other people have been using it that long too. I consider myself to be pretty acceptive of the internet. For me personally, I LIKE to be able to see webpages in full color though, at the sizes in which they were meant to be seen. Wireless is good for what? .. email? .. great, I get enough emails and check it often enough with my cabled connections to not feel the need for it. I'm not an investor yet, so stock quotes don't interest me either. The idea of wireless access to me just isn't appealing in the least.

    If I had a laptop, that might be different and it might be something I'd be after, but I think the number of people that are interested enough to want to 'get the internet' (or those that have it already) and of THOSE the ones who are interested in getting *wireless* access for their PDA, laptop etc. is a much smaller margin than 'regular' ISPs target. I myself am very happy with dialup access at home and a T1 at work. I would like to have DSL at home instead of the dialup, but that's not wireless either. Laptops and devices larger than PDAs would have become cheaper and more useful (in terms of battery life) for me to want to consider it.

    That's just how I feel about it anyway.. I've never felt the need to change, and I've been playing with the internet for a while now.

    --
  • You must be 15 or fresh out of high school, you've never started a company or tried to do something to make you money. You don't make your company profitable by making a business contract that looks like the American Constitution. Being "just a company" doesn't mean you're the great white devil to have a Jihad thrown against you. Don't think for a minute the internet has anything to do with individuals. You've been reading far too many papers written by Karl Marx. The internet was originally a military project (government) and then when major communication companies were allowed to use it it became quite the big business. It was AT&T and the like that researched high speed optical circuits. Do you fucking think there would be OC-48's if there wasn't money to be made with them? Everything you own or see was most likely made by a company. The internet is all about business, providing access to it is a business. Don't think you've got any sort of right to use the internet, you're just paying someone to access something they own.
  • There seems to be some confusion in all of the responses to the article.

    Is the author referring to "wireless" as "companion to cellular/PCS/digital phone service?" Or is the author referring to "wireless" as "high-speed or broadband service delivered without wires?"

    I've been a user of SpeedChoice (now Sprint Broadband) for about a year and a half. Sure, the MMDS connection has its problems compared to DSL or cable, but it has one *distinct* advantage: I don't have to deal with US West (now Qwest) or Cox Communications, two of the least customer-friendly corporations in the world, staffed with the most incredibly inept personnel.

    US West (now Qwest) was the deciding factor in my realization that unions exist to insure that stupid people have jobs, too.

    In going with a wireless service, I don't have to deal with the fact that US West went *decades* without upgrading their physical plant (I'm in Arizona) and has yet to discover that wrapping copper in something called "insulation" will prevent increased line noise during a rainstorm.

    In addition, nobody offers DSL or cable in my current location, and in all probability will *not* offer such for at least another two years.

    As such, Sprint's Broadband Wireless service is *perfect* for me.
  • Ok, I need to split hairs here.
    Violence in places like the Balkans and Rwanda is not racial. The Serbs and friends are the same race: they have the same skin tone, speak the same language and wear the same clothes. Tutsi's and Hutu's are less similar, but still show fewer differences than, say, the Polish and English.
    When you see people in the third world shooting their neighbors, it's mainly just because they enjoy it and not because there are any real differences.
    Sometimes there are religious differences too, but since the religions in question all frown on slaughtering your neighbors, chances are that the participants aren't all that religious.
    --Shoeboy
  • Good to see you again Dan. I haven't run across your posts in a while. Anyway, you're wrong:

    Historically the majority of violent acts have been perpetrated by one racial group against another very similar one
    Yeah, that's because you have to travel a lot further to wage war against a visibly dissimilar racial group.

    With the current spate of violence in the Congo (a continuation of the Rwanda ethnic violence in many ways) being just one example of similar racial groups embroiled in bitter conflict.
    Te use of "racial" is problematic since "race" simply means a group of people sharing a common ancestry. So a "racial conflict" can be anything from a family feud to the second world war. Again, it's more unlikely that you'd get racial conflicts between dissimilar groups because of logistics.

    In a similar vein, black on black violence in America has reached endemic levels, with such cases outstripping other kinds of violence. For some reason it seems as though people are more disposed to hate those that appear superficially similar but aren't actually the same than they do those that are markedly different.
    No, it's much simpler than this mysterious hatred of yours. If you're going to indulge yourself in a bit of recreational rape, murder and pillage (preferably in that order), you'll pick someone who's not too far away (thus probably racially similar) yet not close enough that you'll run into their surviving relatives at church. Presto, instant "racial" conflict between peoples that an outsider can't tell apart.
    --Shoeboy
  • So why would I want wireless net access?
    Wouldn't want it for my house - I don't see why a land line isn't appropriate for a box that's too big to move.
    Wouldn't want wireless access on a hand held device - they don't have the cpu, screen or memory to be useful. That should change, but when market penetration is sufficient to support broadband wireless is anyone's guess.
    Don't need it for my laptop - I can usually connect to a land line when I need to sync with the office and don't need to transfer anything too big.
    It looks like the only market for wireless net access is mobile users who need more bandwidth than can be provided by a 56k modem and/or can't depend on being able to dial in.
    The big question is why anyone would have invested in broadband wireless before a use was found.
    --Shoeboy
  • Perhaps it is the wireless infrastructure that will help them to become succesful capitalist countries?

    I think it is a chicken and egg issue, you can't address one aspect without addressing the others(technology, poverty, democracy e.t.c).

  • I live in a technically starved area. No DSL, no cable. Currently the best I can do is on-demand ISDN, which is expensive as hell.

    One ISP offers wireless in my area. This is great. However, at $1000 install and $200/month for their lowest level of service (256k) I'm probably not going to bite.

    They think they are competing with dedicated connections like frames and T1s, not the cable and DSL crowd. The problem as I see it is that anyone whose looking for a fractional/full T1 who would consider wireless would probably opt for a cheaper cable/DSL connection (home users, small business etc.).

    Those who would buy a wireless connection at those rates probably wouldn't mind getting the real deal for a little more and not worry about wirelesses pitfalls.

    I think these guys will fail if they don't figure that out.
  • There are two situations I know of where tcp has difficulties. (Not tcp/ip, I mean tcp itself).

    One: This one I've seen personally and studied a bit. In wireless connections where the wireless MAC does not do any sort of reliable delivery (in other words, frames can get lost, and the radio units don't know it). This might be due to say, radio noise (and the design of the radio mac layer, of course). Say there is a 5% packet loss due to noise. TCP will continually back down because it was designed to assume all packet loss was due to network congestion.

    Two: largely assymetric connections. You know.. stuff like lots of the 'wireless cable' stuff where the outgoing goes over landline and the return path is over radio, TCP can get confused (by confused, I mean it will attempt to back off to dela iwth congestion that's not there, etc). I'm not up on this too much, but noticed many research papers out there on this topic while looking into point number one (a while ago).

    The real reason wireless ISP's as they are called, have failed, and this is from hearing from techies inside the companies, is simply a lack of knowledge about both wiress & the INternet in general (as separate entities).

    Most large-scale wireless operations using MMDS and such (do I have the right acronym? I mean all that 'wireless cable' shit) that fail or are failing are failing because those running them underestimated, or simply did not understand, the business they were getting in to.

    THe second reason might be that, although wireless is pretty cool, it can't compete with cable & DSL. IN urban areas, these are just too easy to set up by comparison.

    FOr example... I can think of one small city (80,000 people) who had no dsl, no cable.. because there was no competition. Then LOOK announced it's plans. Bang. Instant cable & DSL, with look nowhere in sight. IT's too much setup time.

  • This effect goes away though, if your radio layer does guaranteed delivery.

  • Well, I DO know a thing or two about the OSI model.

    OSI layer 2, the data link layer ensures that there are no duplicates and that transmission is error free (dropping a packet *is* considered an error). It's designed to guarantee that it makes it across the underlying physical medium intact.

    Think about it. If Layer 4 (Transport) is supposed to do this, why does ethernet bother with collision detection? I mean, you think that should be dealt with at a higher layer, no?

    The fact is, layer 2 is supposed to make sure that a message is delivered to another layer 2 device.. and it DOES, if you look at ethernet. Where packets get dropped is at a router, or something that can't process them fast enough, and that's where tcp comes in.

    TCP is designed around the premise that any packet loss is due to congestion. Therefore, any packet loss for any OTHER reason, and it doesn't deal with it well. It gets very SLOW if you have a constant packet loss, as it keeps slowing down.

    There are many research papers out there on the topic. Look for one by Hari Balikrishna, it was his PH.D thesis from Berkeley, I believe. Good paper about using tcp in half-duplex wireless networks that covers a lot of these issues.

    Also... several current wireless offerings have reliable delivery mechanisms, and what the hell are you talking about, most tcp/ip neworks over wireless only ever use UDP? I sure as heck think the wireless connection to my office building uses a lot more than that, as do the thousands of other clients out there with wireless access.

    If you want to verify this, rig up a router with linux or something to drop every 100th frame (inducing artificial 1% packet loss) and watch how badly tcp deals with it. Then try it at 2%, etc. You may be surprised what happens.

  • The solution is to use a link layer protocol that improves the reliability of the RF link. There is nothing in TCP/IP that prohibits the use of sophisticated link or network layer protocols to transport IP packets.
  • Why should I adopt wireless for my home PC when I've already got the wires running into my house, thanks to the phone companies, power companies, cable companies, and the government (for subsidizing the companies to wire the country) for whatever connection I might need? On the other hand, in Japan and Asia, more people access the Internet via wireless than wired, somewhere near 18 million users, or 1 of every 3 cellphone users [jetro.org]

    The 4th generation wireless devices will be powerful, high bandwith (up to 2Mbps), XML-based, and, sorry CmdTaco, run Java. It's not time to bail, it's time to rethink your target.
  • I am not a user of this service but it looks very interesting to me. It falls into the category of fixed-location broadband wireless internet access. It might be worth a look if you are outside the range of DSL/cable providers in the US.

    http://www.sprintbroadband.com [sprintbroadband.com]

  • Good point. I'll have to remember to change my TCP/IP code when I go wireless.
  • In Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy, the computer was asked to calculate the Answer to life the universe and everything. After 10 million years, the computer came up with the answer: 42.

    The problem, the computer explained, is that nobody figured out what the question was.

    Wireless is the same way. You've calculate that the answer is "wireless", and you haven't figured out what the question is. I've noticed other posters have been describing AirPort/802.11, HomeRF, Bluetooth, CDMA, and 3G, though none of these services has the slightest relation to the wireless you are talking about.

    The problem with maxlink is that nobody wants a wireless ISP -- they just want a normal ISP. They don't care if the ISP uses a wire or not. There are some cases (Ricochet, CDMA) where ROVING is important (and then wireless is natural). The question with maxlink is: is it a good ISP? If you are asking if it is a good wireless ISP, then you are asking the wrong question.

    You may be concerned that customers might be afraid of adopting wireless technologies vs. traditional technologies. Again, that really isn't the question. Customers are afraid of unproven technologies. If you were using some weird wired scheme, then customers would still be afraid. For example, some companies are dropping fiber to the home. Most customers will stick with the proven older DSL rather than take the risk of unproven fiber. In other words, customers might be afraid of your technology, but it isn't because it is "wireless", only because it is different.

    BTW, a lot of wireless technologies can easily be sniffed (eavesdropped, wiretapped), despite assurances by vendors. I wouldn't use it unless I was able to thoroughly review the technology.

  • I own a Palm VII (I didn't buy it, I was part of the developer seeding group). But, I don't really use it. To me, it's nothing more than a toy. I use the cheapest plan available ($10 a month for 50 KB) and rarely come close to 50 KB. I think the VII is a nice device, but not really practical. I have taken it on trips but never used it for anything more than checking my e-mail.

    Wireless net access is a cool concept. The problem is that most people could care less. If I'm at work, I can surf via my desktop machine. Same thing at home. When I'm away from the office, I don't want to get e-mail, voicemail, or even phone calls. I only give out my cell phone number to friends and family.

    Wireless is definately overrated. Why limit yourself to low-bandwidth, small-screen devices when you can use a real PC to connect to the net. I'm sure that business travellers would disagree with me, but most of them carry laptops and can get land-line access to the net.

    One of these days, wireless might take off, but I'm not going to hold my breath. There are too many hurdles to get past right now.
  • I don't know of anything national curerntly. As for sattelite, it certainly has to be a fixed base... They are coming out soon with sattelite based internet access (bidirectional), but the packet latency is something like 500ms so you don't wanna ssh, telnet, play quake, or any other real-time activity...
    As for the wearable, it's a 486sx class machine, 66mhz. I'm currently using an M1 display from www.tekgear.ca I intend to use a new CPU core (similar, but lower power and with pcmcia support) at some time (when i can afford it mainly), and eventually use a different display solution. I want to move to a head mounted camera and a video overlay character generator going to something like the sony glasstron if i can manage it. I'm also playing with the idea of using a dallas semiconductor TINI board for something, idunno what though...
  • I've been shopping around for a wireless solution for my wearable. Right now, my local ISP is putting in an 802.11 network that is starting to cover all of my town (Ithaca, NY). This is a good option, and about my only option.
    Most of these services only cover places that are very densely populated, but ignore the fact that those places are very radio-wave unfriendly, with lots of gorunded steel structures everywhere.
    Also a lot of them try to force you into a proprietary browser/client/driver/etc... I think if people can't use _all_ of their normal software they won't do it. Another thing is that the bandwidth charges are astronomical. Sometimes up to $1/meg for some of the services, or they will charge you cellphone rates per minute "connected" even when you are on a digital section of network...

    I'm looking forward to the 802.11 from my local ISP because the bandwidth charges are going to be the same as for wired connections, and he has hired a bunch of progammers to write drivers for windows, linux, etc... for a tunneled secure protocol to keep sniffers off. It ought to be cool =:-)
  • I myself am in Markham, and can honestly say that SHAW cable are a bunch of 'no talent ass clowns'. For 3 weeks my gatway was dropping packets, and for 3 weeks I called to tell them ... and they continually insisted it was me. Then one day when I called they said 'oh .. there was a problem with the gateway'.

    On top of that, they cut my service for too much bandwidth usage (unlimited .. HA!) ... avoid them!

    We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
  • it depends on the technology ... the technology that maxlink uses can (and IS) blocked by trees, buildings, roofs, rain and heavy snow. Because it's high frequency, it's pretty easy to block.

    You're talking 2.4GHz .. I'm talking 28GHz .. big difference.

    We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
  • i'm sure they'd be MOST interested in an anonymous coward calling them :)



    We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
  • the latency is really low actually ... 30ms ... as long as you are withing range of the transmitter.

    We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
  • Maxlinks technolgoy (I can't speak for Look) is LMCS - one transmitter at the station can broadcast to many different customers using different frequencys. This isn't for mobile customers, as it is only LOS and fairly short range (between 2 and 5km). This isn't service for your laptops or PDAs etc.

    The service is offered as a competiter to Fibre/Cable/ADSL (Bell, Rogers and Bell in Toronto).

    Our primary market are areas not serviced directly by fibre etc, or where its very expensive. The backend network is all ATM, which allows varying bitrates easily.

    We use all Alcatel and Cicso gear ... if you have any questions about it, email me, and I'll guess.



    We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
  • well you'd better hurry if you plan on taking us over, whoever you are oh 'mythical saviour of maxlink'.



    We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.

  • Come on. Think logically, not emotionally. Business works on logic. Emotions never made a business a dime.

    To squash the competition, they have to beat them. To beat them, they need to sell more. To sell more, they have to offer something that consumers will like better. Consumers are always the end judges that make or break a new company. They have the right to buy whatever they want. Power to people, man!

    There is ALWAYS a financial reason to innovate. Innovation means you can offer more to the customer. See above.

    As long as a company stays private (or is majority held by one entity), they can't be bought out. It will be their choice to be bought out. Power to the little guys!

    The best part about the wireless revolution is that there will be very little regulation. The prime reason we have telco regulation today is because it is a sanctioned monopoly. Only one telco gets to bring copper to your house, so regulations ensure that competitors can get to that copper and the consumer isn't held hostage. Anyone can bring wireless to your house. No need for regulation!

  • Wireless will happen (Score:3)

    by garver ( 30881 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2000 @07:09AM (#578719)

    The reason wireless "last mile" internet will happen is simple: competition.

    Nowadays, the only options are DSL, cable, ISDN, or analog dial-up. Most people are lucky to have 2 out of the 4 and they all suck in their own unique ways. Analog dial-up is just slow, ISDN is still too slow and too costly. DSL and cable are the only ones to provide sufficient bandwidth for reasonable $, but they have little legs. Their days are numbered, especially DSL, since they have horrible bandwidth/distance restrictions.

    Now imagine that you are a new company that wants to offer service and get a subscriber base. You are really faced with only two choices today: buy a cable company or resell DSL. Buying a cable company is a hell of a proposition and most companies aren't going to be willing to take the plunge. If you resell DSL, someone else is holding your balls (be it Covad, Northpoint, etc). Sure, you could install your own DSL equipment, but when faced with that cost, you might as well buy a cable company. Even if you go this path, you are still subject to the phone company's whims. If your little company doesn't controll its own destiny, how can it be sure to compete?

    Competition is severely limited by our current technology. The magic bullet to that is wireless. The technology isn't there yet, but wireless systems are potentially cheaper to implement and faster to deploy. Cheap and fast are the key words. It means a small company could put up a single receiver in a neighborhood, be operational in a matter of weeks, and grow from there. They don't have to bury lines, deal with Telco's that move at a snail's pace, and deal with endless gov't regulations (most are needed for monopoly-busting, but not needed in wireless since there is no monopoly). In other words, they deal directly with their customers, realizing all of the profits and controlling their own quality levels.

    As a consumer, I want choices. Right now, my choice is between the cable company that sucks or the DSL reseller that sucks. I would jump at the chance to be able to choose between a few different wireless providers in my neighborhood.

    I also feel that the technological hurdles left to jump are nothing compared to the potential market. In other words, there is too much money to be made to let something as simple as "its not technologically possible" to get in our way. We will find a way, we always have in the past.

  • I'm Glad someone likes what we're doing! :)

    -Max (sysadmin TELE2 UK)
  • Here in ithaca, DSL/Cablemodem's cost about 40-45 a month (maybe $5 cheaper if you get cable (at $30 a or so, or sign up for some LD plan that you don't want).. However lightlink is offering (line of sight) highspeed wireless based on the 802.11 set at $20 a month. (At least thats what they told me when i talked to them). I believe the connection speed is 2mbs up/down (depending on your antenna). The first gigabyte is free and its $7 a gig afterwards, which at $20 a month is still pretty cheap .. I haven't gotten this yet, but keep thinking about it. (These are residential rates, the business rates are much higher). Incidentally Cornell is beta testing 802.11 wireless around campus and we've managed to good sections of the campus hooked up (engineering quads some of the dorms, our coffee shop across the st :)), The linux drivers work fantastic and its awfully cool to be able to walk around campus and still access your stuff. Okay admittedly this happens once a year but it makes going to boring talks/lectures much more productive :)

    -avi
  • As far as technology goes, a lot of computer technology was adopted before it was useful. In the early 80's when management started just dumping a PC on peoples desks computers were not useful, many people were given a PC, told to be more productive and just left.
    Until people learnt to use them, which took years, and until the net came, some 15 years later, how useful were they ?
    Even now there is a question as to how much these devices have improved productivity. There have been a number of articles in The Economist and a very good one in the current New Yorker about this.
    As for wireless net access, the uses are, as you say, dubious, but one day they will become important. Personally I quite like SMS and am looking forward to the day when I have an integrated PDA, GPS and phone on me. But I accept that until the 3G networks come up it won't be useable.
  • When you say "Third World" are you referring to a specific place... like... Cleveland?
    --
  • But so will the other other endpoint that you are connecting to (remote servers and what not). Since the greater amount of traffic flows *to* the mobile connection than from it (images/webpages vs. HTTP requests), it's the code on the other end that you need to worry about, and that you usually have very little control over... The receiver can set some options (segment size, etc) for controlling the window, but it's the sender who ultimately does the work.
    --
  • 3 lines? Have actually seen a rim Blackberry?

    The 957 has the same screen size as the Palm, but BETTER resolutions. The 950 is half that size, but even with that, it is still large enough to read comfortably.

    As for which are better, I know from my experiences in this emerging (consumer wireless) industry that all the product offerings lack badly in some way or another.

    Blackberry != Phone
    Palm + Omnisky == Blackberry - nice email
    handspring == palm
    iPaq != wireless
    WAP Phone != Uasability + Email + Everythign else.

    The only hope is to either to modularly seperate the wireless protocol aspect from the handheld, or to make a unified wireless protocol.

    Both of these seem VERY unlikely in North Amarica.
  • On point 2: The digital medium still uses circuit switching techniques in North America for most digital protocols.. CDMA, TDMA, GSM, and many of the soon to bees like GPRS. The only commin packet based digital networks are Mobitex, and CDPD, which are both archaic 20+ year old protocols, soon to hit the dust. This is another reason why TCP/IP and wireless do not mix well, simply because they are not packet, but circuit switched. On point 4: Any standard modem does not change speeds because the standard modem protocols do not have alternating speeds in the protocols. The wireless networks that you talk of probably wouldn't simply "switch" the speed of the connection.

  • Re:WTF?? (Score:1)

    by M-G ( 44998 )
    I can get DSL at my house, but since I'm on the fringes distance-wise, it'd be slow. And I don't want to give any more money than I have to so SBC.

    I can get a cable modem, but we're familiar with the problems that presents. And I don't want to give money to AT&T.

    Services like Ricochet provide ISDN speeds for under $100 a month. The portability is great if you have a laptop and travel. And if you move frequently, you don't have to wait around for a new install and pay the setup charges...just take your modem with you and you're set.

    Network Computing has a good review of Ricochet. [networkcomputing.com]

  • Re:WTF?? (Score:1)

    by M-G ( 44998 )
    Hmmm...I never said I was in the middle of nowhere. Just in an area of 30+ year old development, so the phone lines suck.

    The 'problems' I refer to with cable modems are the peer nature of it, so that when all your neighbors hop online, your bandwidth suffers. Further, there are all the usually sneaky restrictions they keep throwing in on cable modem service. Read the gripe line on InfoWorld.

    I don't consider having an objection to paying a monopolistic company money to be weird. And I wasn't bitching about not having access to broadband. Only stating that even if you live in a populated area, your choices are limited, and Ricochet provides another choice.
  • I agree that TCP/IP per se is a little bit tricky over high-speed wireless, but AX.25 is NOT the answer.

    AX.25 is a variant of LAP-B, the X.25 layer 2 protocol. It is optimized for 300-1200 bps local links only, and if I felt like wasting the space, I could recite a litany of what's wrong with it. Indeed, AX.25 is even prone to congestion collapse, because it lacks even the most basic congestion control mechanisms. Been there, done that, back in the 1980s, on 2-meter amateur packet radio (both "raw" AX.25 and TCP/IP over AX.25, which btw usually used "unassured" mode, which worked better).

    It is indeed possible to design a wireless subnetwork/datalink protocol that compensates for the problems of wireless. But AX.25 ain't it. I'm somewhat embarassed when I see commercial products still attempting to use it, although it's workable for the simple one-hop mobile dispatch application.
  • I have a similar situation (in Silicon Valley, no less). The best I can get with DSL is 144Kbps, Sprint Broadband Direct has a 2Mbps connection for $50/mo. Of course, they bought a small company called WavePath that went out of business trying to sell it first...
  • you can complain about the price of Ricochet, but it is very much in the market. When you have At&t wireless charging $50/mo for unlimited CDPD at 2.4-19.2kbps (more on the 2.4 side). Ricochet's $75/mo 128kbps is well priced in the market and could be called cheep when compared CDPD. If you look at the differences between CDPD and Ricochet has the clear advantaged.

    I would like to see Ricochet's price at $30/mo, it would save me a couple bucks. But they are still in the middle of a huge network build out. Although there network uses the un-lincsenced ISM band and a new microcell technology they have been able to build there network at a fairly low cost.

    A report from Adventis compares all 3G cellular technologies (Report can be found at http://www.ricochet.com/ricochet_advantage/resourc e_center/3g_comp_rev.pdf). The report makes the choice clear for wireless data between now and 2005.

  • Let me get this straight.

    Many of these 'places like Africa' you talk about don't even have electricity, and you want to give them PDAs? To turn them into global capitalist countries brought to compete against such noble adversaries as China and the USA?

    Dude, you got a strange set of priorities. Try living in the real world, sometimes.

  • It's a business model problem (Score:3)

    by Enoch Root ( 57473 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2000 @04:16AM (#578733)
    Ok, I'm gonna talk a language that not many Slashdotters relate to, but it needs to be said.

    What's happening to the wireless companies is the same thing that's happening to all the dot-coms: the venture capitals are getting fed up with seeing their money thrown to the winds, and they're starting to demand return on their investments.

    From a commercial point of view, wireless is perfectly viable. It can be marketed and sold no problem. But the companies that are trying to build these are the same ones that lived on venture money for two years. It's the venture capitalist's fault, really: they bought into the hype so much, they gave away money without thinking.

    Regardless of technological problems (there's always technological problems, and you just have to throw manpower at them), what you need is a vision and a business model.

    Until these companies stop acting like teenagers getting free lunch money from their benevolent parents, and start planning ahead, keeping their growth in synch with their vision of the market, and constructing intelligent, sensible business approaches and revenue models, the thing is never gonna get off the ground.

    It seems to me all those hip CEOs who managed to live off somebody else's money for the duration of the Internet business boom are trying to do so again by throwing in the word 'wireless'. Well, tough luck, guys. The investors are up to your game.

  • Thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize there was that big a signal difference.

    Matt Barnson

  • Trees are not an obstruction with any decent wattage and reasonable range. My antenna is in my attic, and punches through the attic walls regardless of snow. Wireless antennas need not be like satellite dishes: they are a grid of widely-spaced metal bars that do not collect much snow if mounted out-of-doors.
    You are *almost* correct saying that if you can't see the antenna, you can't get great service. If there is a large hill in the way, you are sunk. If it's a small hill or houses, trees, etc. that is no problem at all for 2.4GHz wireless at sufficient wattage. Just sticking an unamplified PCMCIA card on your computer, though, you are certainly right; it has barely enough power to make it through the walls of your house out to a few hundred feet.
    I'd have to agree, maintaining a big antenna would stink. My ISP stuck a 20 foot antenna on the roof of their building; they are uphill from most of town, but not enormously so. Works great.

    Matt Barnson

  • Wireless *can* be extremely reliable; if your providers tower keeps going down, something is totally whacky with your provider. My problems are rarely related to my wireless link; they are usually due to DOS attacks on my ISP or one of their T-3's going down.
    802.11 latency is typically 10ms, usually 3-5ms. 30ms would be a worst-case scenario; the WaveLAN card uses a collision avoidance algorithm. Latency to the rest of the world depends on your ISP; I regularly get game time pings of less than 100ms.

    Matt Barnson

  • I have been using a Lucent WaveLAN 802.11 adapter hooked up to a 1 watt amplifier and 24db antenna to hook up to the Internet through my local ISP for the last year.
    The good:
    1. Wireless is easy to install. If you are close enough to your nearest access point, just pop in a pcmcia card with a pigtail, install drivers, and you're done.
    2. Wireless is extremely reliable. The link itself basically never goes down. The only times I've had a bad signal to noise ratio are when I screwed up my internal wiring to my antenna and during very high winds.
    3. Wireless is very fast. At up to 11Mb/sec, it's one of the fastest access methods available in the price range.
    4. Wireless is cheap for the ISP. Initial setup cost for your ISP is lower than some comparable technologies (DSL particularly). They can hook up 30 customers to each access point using the same frequency-hopping spectrum, and add cheap additional hardware for each new group of 30 customers.
    5. Wireless is cross-platform. Many drivers are free software.

    The bad:
    1. Wireless can be very complicated to troubleshoot. It's easy for the customer to screw up their link; when something flakes out, it is often tough to tell whether it is you or your provider.
    2. Wireless is very expensive for the consumer. While setup costs for people very close to an access node is relatively small (less than $250 for the card and pigtail), costs range up to $1000 for people further away.
    3. Wireless can be very slow. 802.11 is designed to slow the link as the signal to noise ratio drops. You may connect as slowly as 64Kb/sec.
    4. Wireless can be tough to install. Setting up my link involved several hours of attic and drill time.
    5. Wireless competes in common frequency ranges, and has the usual problems with radio transmissions. As the so-called "medical band" (2.4GHz) becomes more cluttered, you're going to notice higher packet loss and latency, conflicts with cordless phones, etc. Also, hills, trees, and bridges can all interfere with your line-of-sight to your ISP's antenna.
    6. Wireless has trouble scaling over distance. Your ISP will need a repeater every mile or three in order to broaden their service. DSL and cable have other, similar costs, such as upgrading local loops.

    My take? I believe wireless is a great technology, and will continue to enjoy a strong and growing *large* niche market. I know I love mine : )

    Matt Barnson

  • Here ya go:

    http://www.siig.com/usb/usb_plus_serial_adapter.ht ml

    As for the usefulness of wireless access, how about those many millions of people who have crappy, overloaded, filtered phone lines that won't support DSL? How about my parents, who have said crappy phone lines and are too far out in the sticks to get cable? That leaves only satellite, which is going to be here Real Soon Now.

  • Well, here's an Australian viewpoint.

    I might be seeing a skewed view, since I'm in Brisbane, not Sydney or Melbourne, but I see no wireless data of any real significance in Australia. At this time, the only viable wireless data choice is 9600 baud over GSM.

    For those who are interested, here is how I see the Australian data situation:

    Australia has two mobile network technologies (GSM and CDMA) and two major telcos (Telstra and Optus - there are a bunch of smaller ones as well.) WAP is currently only supported on GSM, and there are few WAP phones available (I have tried most of them, and they are all crap.) There are no analog phone networks remaining. Digital phone coverage is mostly pretty good. In home data, DSL only started rolling out in August of this year, and the Cable network is not expanding (although this could have changed recently.) Cheap cable charges are around AUS$70 per month with some form of bandwidth or usage cap. DSL was supposed to be around AUS$100 per month, but that might change depending on the current bunfight between Telstra and the ACCC.

    I don't think too much should be read into the deployments of 802.11. Universities are putting in 802.11 networks to avoid cabling costs. Small companies will most likely do the same. They're all doing it to run their existing applications on laptops. In the long term, this is the same business model as for current networks - I buy equipment and deploy for my private network. I'd expect it to be dominated by the incumbents (Cisco et al).

    This gets to my big issue with Wireless.... What's the application? Okay, so I've got a data pipe that goes with me... what do I want to do with it? Now, once I find an application, where's the money in it for a provider? Until I see an application that both really meets a consumer problem/desire *and* has a believable revenue model I don't feel that wireless is going anywhere. This is true regardless of the market.

    I was at CTIA recently in Santa Clara, and it seemed to me that the US wireless "boom" has been fed by companies giving roving salesmen PDAs and using wireless data networks to access their E-mail from these PDAs. Of course, people attending CTIA are again a biased sample! For at least the Bay area, there would be sufficient size in this market to support some providers. I don't see such a critical mass forming in Australia, or if it does, it'll be in Sydney only.
  • Normally I'd agree to the above, but after reading the other comments I'd say it's ack of advertising. Everyone here seems to believe what look offered was for WAP, or other devices intended to roam the city. Very few people realize that the service was the equivelent of DSL or Cable in that it was high speed to a single location via bi-directional dishes. Looks television service is superbe. Rarely (in a cable television sense) goes out and it's always a clear picture. TV in general has nothing on, but they can't fix that. Anyhow, think point to point wireless where neither of the points moves. Kinda like people with satalite dishes, only looks were significantly smaller. My parents dish is 5 inch's across.
  • I disagree with a lot of what is being said. I would jump at the chance to have a good, reasonably priced fixed wireless broadband service to my home, here in the U.S.

    I live in a moderately large city (metro area pop. > 1 million) in a modern neighborhood (house was new in late 1993). I cannot get ADSL from my telco - I have been requesting it over and over for the last two years. I could get cable internet access, but I have checked with those who have tried it in my area and it totally sucks.

    The telco will not provision my area with the equipment necessary to provide ADSL. I cannot understand why. It is a densly housed, well-to-do neighborhood with over 200 houses.

    I have heard that the same cable company does provide decent internet service in other areas of the city, but they haven't yet upgraded the facilities in my area, so they give inferior service at the same prices. I refuse to subscribe.

    So, wireless would be extremely attractive, to me.
  • Look wasn't just a victim of the lack of maturity in the wireless service space. It was a victim of it's major shareholder not supporting them fully. You see, Look is part owned by Telesytem Ltd. and Teleglobe Inc., who in turn were recently bought by BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises, the Canada's largest telco). BCE never really gave look the attention and the cash it needed to survive. Prior to BCE being involved, Look was very competetive in the Internet and TV space. Since BCE got invoved, they seem to be less of a threat. Maybe that's because BCE already has a number of divisions that do some of the same sorts of things that Look does (minus the wireless access). There's more on this angle here [plesman.com] if you're interested.

  • I think partly wireless is not yet in 'full force' because of a lack of hardware. People want a do everything, go everywhere device that last all day on a single battery. They want full color, crisp sound, and no worry of storage/etc. They want it to be connected to, ready to do anything anywhere.

    Cheap hardware like this doesn't exist but when it does I think its then we will see an explosion in wireless demands.

    You can argue than WinCE, PalmOS, etc. can do this now but I would disagree. I want something that can do everything my desktop can do with little or no sacrifice. Wouldn't it be great to have a pen based webpad sized machine, playing mp3z, streaming video, downloading Q3 all while you are doing your 'work' under a tree out on the lawn? Now do all that for 10 hours straight.. Thats what I want.

  • There is a european company called Tele2 [tele2.co.uk] which is currently rolling out wireless DSL in the UK and in europe as well. The UK version uses a licensed setion of the 3.6 GHz to 4.2 GHz spectrum. Network architecture is regional central access nodes with backbone connection and microwave links to more local "Tele2 Access Nodes".

    Quote from the site :
    "Superior Security
    The Tele2 network has been designed to provide maximum security. Originally designed for secure military operations, the system uses the latest spread spectrum CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and frequency hopping radio technology."

    On the users end the antenna plug into a LAN router type of thing, with an ethernet connection for the LAN/PC.

    Up to 150Kbps both ways, supports linux (basically supports anything that does TCP/IP), coverage is currently only 4 cities, major expansion in Q1 2000, residential version £9.99 per month (on trial), buisness ones £39.99. Loads of adverts at the moment on local radio and stuff.

  • One problem is that a lot, probably most of what would want to do with the wireless internet is to use the Wireless Application Protocol [wapforum.org] on something like a web-enabled cell phone.

    However, the WAP Usability Report [nngroup.com] which you can purchase for download from useit.com [useit.com] (which is an excellent site for learning how to write good websites) says that people just don't like WAP.

    From the report summary:

    When users were asked whether they were likely to use a WAP phone within one year, a resounding 70% answered no. WAP is not ready for prime time yet, nor do users expect it to be usable any time soon. Remember, this finding comes after respondents had used WAP services for a week, so their conclusions are significantly more valid than answers from focus group participants who are simply asked to speculate about whether they would like WAP. We surveyed people who had suffered through the painful experience of using WAP, and they definitely didn't like it.
    The other thing folks might want to do with wireless is get on the net from a laptop while they're out and about, but I don't think that's as big a potential business as it might sound. It's hard to use a laptop standing up and you can't really carry one with you all the time like you can a cell phone.


    Michael D. Crawford
    GoingWare Inc

  • Cell phones are suprisingly popular in the third world, because you can get a telephone without anyone having to string a wire to everyone's house.

    In many third-world nations, the fraction of the population that have cell phones out of all phone owners is higher than in industrialized nations for this very reason.


    Michael D. Crawford
    GoingWare Inc

  • Don't feed the Trolls!

    ----------------------------


  • Where I live (just south of Houston), I can't get cablemodem access and I can't get DSL.

    Exactly!!!!

    I'm in the same boat. I live on the fringe of a large metropolitan area in a semi-rural area on a 2 acre lot. I'm about 1/2 mile from the cable provider (so I get DSS TV) and my local telco is not in any big hurry to wire up my CO for DSL since it is a much better investment for them to go for the higher population density areas first.

    Therefore, for your market, look to the fringe where they are not.

    The key hurdle for me and most other consumers is cost. If wireless net access gives me significantly more speed than ~33kb/56kb and does not cost more than say $60/month, then I'm game. But, so far as I can tell, the charges for wireless net access are higher than that, putting it out of my reach and limiting your market size.

    High bw and reasonably low latency (hard, I know) would be a real boon for me - I'd start looking into using VoIP for long distance

  • I just want to comment on this one piece of the last comment "Wireless is extremely reliable." I work for a company that has had a wireless T1 (Don't know name of company that provides it) installed for almost a year due to other Services not available at the time, The link goes down an average of half a day every work week (no one watches saterday or sunday) Now that we are moving we have all intentions to changing to a buisness grade DSL at the new location. The response from our provider is usually that the tower went down, so this is not anything that is our fault. I think when you have repeaters spread out instead of at a central Location it makes it hard to keep an eye out on everything and respond quikly. Our company is not a "net based" company, but alot of our customers contact us through E-mail so if it is down we lose money. I think wirelesses main problem is that it is less reliable then any other connection form. P.S. My home DSL has yet to go down
  • The Company I mentioned in the post above is Innetix www.innetix.com
  • Oh, goodie, now I can pay another $75-100/month for 128Kbps Ricochet wireless service, which isn't anywhere near as fast as my DSL landline, for which I'm already paying $50/month. Now, if they price was reasonable I'd sign up for Ricochet service (or a competing service)in a heartbeat, but, for crying out loud, that's highway robbery.

    Oh, and while I'm whining, how about the cellular plans, that let you use your cell phone with a data jack to surf under your regular plan? Those would be great, too, except the dumbasses who designed the data links used a fricking serial port, which my laptop doesn't (and never will) have! It's USB or nuthin' bay bee.

    Now, you've probably guessed by now that I have been trying to find a good way to get wireless internet access, and you're right. But the fact is, I'm not going to sign up for a service that is too expensive, too cumbersome, and/or too redundant with my current internet service. Hope you providers out there are reading this right now, I'm curious what you think...

  • I think that too many of these wireless companies are targeting businesses when they should be targeting the unconnected residential users. I live in Kansas, and there are currently no high-speed options for me. I would jump at the chance to get a high speed connection what ever form it came it. Wireless is perfect for connecting many disparate users with little infrastructure. There are very few companies that have targeted us. The only bright spot I see is that the Satelite TV companies are getting in to it. It's a little more than DSL or cabel, but it's fast. SIGN ME UP!!

    Nate
  • What I keep hearing is that wireless is sure to be huge in the USA because it's so big in Japan. However, I've always wondered whether this is based on economic and lifestyle factors that are pretty unique to Japan, such as:
    • Lack of living space favoring small portable gadgets
    • Extreme urbanization and population density makes wireless infrastructure very cost effective to deploy
    • Very high cost of "conventional" internet access
    • Lots of "hands-free" time (e.g. commuting in trains)
    • High percentage of pre-existing cellular users
    That ain't the situation in the United States. You can't get decent wireless access driving down I-5 from San Francisco to Los Angeles, much less in the thinly populated middle of the country. The popularity of those Blackberry things indicates that there's some market for instant messaging among young people and/or drug dealers -- but will average Americans do much on wireless devices besides AIM and checking the weather?
  • I agree. From the tone of the article, it sounded like Look was targeting the residential market. The average consumer isn't willing to pay more than $50/mo for a highspeed connect.

    One of my clients is a wireless company (which also happens to be based out of Ontario), and they are only targeting the business market, where there is no qualm about paying $500-700/mo for the equivalent of a T1. They have been extremely successful.

    If you look at how successful technology has been introduced in the past, first you build up your infrastructure with the high-paying customers, and once that is in place, then you go after the residential market.
  • Given that TCP/IP is designed to be used reliably over the dodgiest connection you can imagine, I highly doubt that this is a real problem. Also bear in mind that Uni of Hawaii had a wireless packet based network way back when (And is where the basis for Ethernet comes from).

  • The wireless internet is coming along nicely as a piece of technology. TCP/IP works quite well across wireless. Big questions are

    1. How well will mobile IP addresses work in practice?
    2. Have operators (esp in the UK) paid too much for the 3G licences? Probably so. Vodaphone has certainly lost its gold plated credit rating as a result. This leads to the next question
    3. Is there going to be a bloodbath in the telcos? The operators are desperate to claw back the licence fees. I read recently that some operators are looking for revenues of $250/month average per user. That is up from an average of probably $50 a month at present. So there are some stupid penalty clauses around to the manufacturers...who are desperate to win contracts because of their position on Wall St. It may well all end up in tears...
    Keep that resume sharp... Tree_frog
  • Oh, of course, everybody knows that capitalist democracies are the only government system under which the population can be prosperous.

    Yeah, that's right. Name a single prosperous country on earth that is not at least nominally capitalist and democratic.

    Sure, much of Europe is pretty socialist, and of course also much of it has double digit unemployment and a failing currency, but there are still major capitalist elements, and it's still moderately prosperous. Anywhere else I can think of that is in the same wealth neighborhood is even more capitalist.

    As for the democratic part, again, countries that do not at least elect most of their representatives are not successful. Whether it's a parliament, an American-like congress, or what have you, I can't think of a single industrialized nation that is not governed by elected representatives.

    So I didn't mean that they had to establish a libertarian capitalist society governed by a pure, classical Athens style democracy, but they can't be governed by fascist dictators and become sucessful.

  • Wireless still needs infrastructure (Score:3)

    by Galvatron ( 115029 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2000 @04:32AM (#578758)
    Unless we're talking about Iridium based wireless, you still need an enormous network of transmitters and recievers in order to get coverage. It it were easier to make a wireless infrastructure than one with wires, nobody would be investing in fiber-optics. Think of wireless as being like radio transmitters (sure, the details vary from scheme to scheme, but they use some portion of the EM spectrum). A handheld radio simply does not have that much transmitting power. You need lots of recieving stations to pull it off. This is why cell coverage is still so shoddy in rural areas, it's costly and a pain in the ass to put these antennas up everywhere.

    Maybe, once these african countries start getting the majority of their population into urban centers, we can talk about the best way to wire them up, but as it stands there's just too damn much area and not enough people packed close enough together. I think you're going about it ass backwards. First they establish stable capitalist democracies, then they start wiring up an expensive information infrastructure. When you've got a country with a GDP per capita below $5,000 (or $10,000 even), you have got much more pressing concerns than obtaining a fast net connection.

  • I used a wireless ISP in Austin, TX as a beta tester. The company was named Nobell [nobell.com]. They rule. With them, the only limitation to my bandwidth was my 10Mb ethernet hub. Apparently their repeaters/routers could handle 11Mb and before I moved out here to San Francisco 6 months ago they were testing 25Mb wireless repeaters. Each repeater covered a radius of a few miles and they had coverage of a few key places in Austin. What's best is that it was cheaper than the Roadrunner cable modem service. I paid for 8 static IP's and hosted my domain and a few for my friends. The service was extrememly reliable, though a couple of times when it rained I had outages of a few minutes at a time while it was coming down. Apparently the microwave signal can go through 10ft of concrete but not a wet tree leaf!

    The equipment they used looked like all off-the-shelf wireless networking stuff you could find in the Black Box cataloge. Some of the equipment was mfr. by them though.

    Their setup was a small box (router running one of the BSD's) at my home that had two nic's. One went into my ether hub, the other went into the wireless radio (slightly bigger than a pack of cigarettes). A cable from the radio went out to an antanne on my porch. The antenna was no bigger than those small digital satellite TV dishes. The antanne was pointed to the nearest router which, in my case, was the one on top of their office building!

    All of the IP traffic was 3DES encrypted from radio (repeater) to radio (my home), and they also used spread spectrum which if you are not familiar with, frequency hops like every half second or something to that effect. What's best is it operated in a free band.

    If you want their service, and things are like they used to be, good luck. They told me they turned down on the order of 60 requests for service a day because they just couldn't set them up fast enough.

    Update: I just checked their site, and it looks like they just got pretty expensive, oh well.. it was good while it lasted.

  • I agree, at least to the extent that you say that the question should be whether a wireless ISP provides good internet service. I don't agree with consumers being scared of new technologies. Savvy tech consumers (which I think means at least 50% of the people who are out there looking for computers and an ISP) are willing to jump onto the next best thing in internet service. For example, as a consumer of internet service (meaning a connection from my home computer to the internet) I am interested in three things (not necessarily in order of importance): speed of the connection, reliability of the connection, and cost. DSL is just starting to become an affordable and reliable option in my area, and I am just starting to consider switching to it. I would switch to wireless if it offered faster speed, more reliability, and lower cost than DSL. I would switch to fiber optics if it did the same. I am not scared of these technologies, but they just aren't viable options yet. DSL has just recently come to my area, and even more recently I found a company that offers what I want for the right price. So until another company comes along that can offer better, I'll go with DSL (and if DSL doesn't work out, I'll go back to my phone line).

    For the unsavvy tech consumer (those people using AOL and iMacs), until DSL, or fiber comes preconfigured with the internet connection device (like a computer or PS2) and their houses come preconfigured with whatever hardware is necessary (like DSL jacks intsead of plain phone jacks, or fiber optics outlets/connections in the walls, etc.), they'll stick with phone lines, because they need to have it all spoonfed to them (PlugNPlay). Basically, until broadband is about as easy as hooking up a TV, those people will not switch.

    However, I'm not sure that complexity is an issue for wireless, which is why I think it has the most potential. What could be easier than simply plugging a wireless modem into your computer and connecting? The problem with wireless is not simplicity, but the dearth of companies out there who are selling it to the average ISP consumer, which also means that the cost is out of line with current services.

    To sum up: service is key, complexity is a block for only about half the market, and technology is not scary. :P
  • Wireless is great and there are tons of applications for it. WAP on the other hand is worthless at best and I can't say enough bad things about it. I'm currently given the task of making a commerce site fully WAP compatible through MS SiteServer... and it sucks... with a capital SUCKS! Text messaging is about all that today's phones are good for when it comes to text display, but as devices get more sophisticated, then the wireless stuff will be pretty cool... but WAP sucks balls. big hairy ones.
    ------------------------------------------- -------
  • ...is to avoid doing business with an Incumbent Local Exchange Provider (ILEC) like USWest!

    Even if you order DSL through a CLEC, you're still using a Baby Bell telephone system for which DSL is a huge hack (and a limited one at that). As wonderful as I've found DSL to be, many people are out of range, subject to artifacts of the legacy phone network, or in some way unable to get DSL.

    Cable modems use a backbone designed for broadcast services, and limit your choice of ISP to your local cable company (If they can't get TV right, what makes us think they can do 'net access?)

    A well planned wireless deployment bears an infrastructure designed from the ground up to distribute data. Reinforced with redundancy, it should also overcome availability issues.

    Most importantly, with a wireless connection, you're not as likely to have 3-5 companies making money off just the last few miles of your connection, which should make a significant difference in price once infrastructure is established.

  • Here's what happenned [courier-journal.com]to one local provider. I have several clients who are using their wireless solution, and they were having serious latency issues for a while that I could tell were occuring over the wireless link. What I later found out, was that there was another wireless provider with equipment on the buildings roof and their frequency ranges were bleeding into one another or something like that. It sounds a little bit like the wild west, insofar as I'm not sure who's going to be there to regulate that stuff. Also, note that in Louisville, where spring can bring some fairly ridiculous storms, foul weather is know to adversly affect the wireless link quality, as well. I think it's most due to the wireless equipment being tossed around. At this point, I'm WAY more comfortable recommending traditional connectivity solutions.
  • Personally, whoever gets to me first has me. If that's DSL, I'll probably stick with DSL. If it's cable, ditto. Wireless? Only if you're within a few miles of downtown. I think the LOS requirement for wireless might be why it just never took off, at least in my area.
  • I love my Ricochet on my laptop. It is affordable , convenient, and reliable. I currently am cellphone less since I can't find a cell phone provider with reception in my new apt (Santa Cruz, CA). I've tried Verizon, Sprint, Pacbell, SC Cellular One, Cellular One. It's not worth it if people can't always get ahold of me on my cellphone. However, my richochet gets reception in my apt and everywhere else in this area. I haven't had my Ricochet for too long but I couldn't be happier with it. It has been more reliable than most ISPs I've used.
  • Well mostly because companies like Look, for example, aren't really offering wireless to home. They offer wireless download but rely on a modem for upload. Gag! I heard they were supposed to be offering 2-way wireless but as far as I know it's still vapourous. Then again I could be full of shite since I haven't looked into this for some time.

    Wireless is bound to be FUCKING HUGE one day, it will be as ubiquitous as radio. Hopefully sooner. The problem with companies like Look is that they are entering a market that isn't quite ready for prime time. The hardware for wireless laptops and palm devices or cell phones is just around the corner for widespread usage.

    High speed wireless is the answer to the goddamn phone companies and cable companies (even though I have no real beef with my cable provider)

  • I've been dealing with Air2Lan, a wireless company providing service in Mississippi. As of right now I don't think I could recommend it to a single person.

    The first problem is there are no real sys admins or network techs. It's mainly RF guys. Everytime we've had a problem of not being able to get out they send an RF guy with a laptop to check the signal, but not the network! We get the same reply "it's goin' from this antenna to that one so it's working, must be you computer" Finally after much frustration they realized our crapply lucent router died.

    I've also found out we've had bandwith restrictions put on, because their backbont is only a T-1 and can't handle much more from it's current customers, I've been told a DS3 will be put in, but that was 5 months ago and nothing, they advertised a gauranteed 2.5Mbs and I'm lucky to get 1Mbs.

    I've even had as much as a week downtime because it took them that long to change an antenna and router at the main location. Also my company bought a new billing office in a location that we were promised they could give us service in. We thought it was fishy since it wasn't line of site, but they said it would work. Well after spending $130,000 on the building they say "can't do it" This was the best thing that could have happened, because instead we got SDSL. It's cheaper, faster, and more reliable than their crappy wireless service.

    Basically, I think it could work, in the right hands. But with customer service like this and network management like this, I can't expect too much. If you decide you want to try this then besure you aren't contracted if you decide it isn't what you're looking for.

  • "The Internet" is verily a nice marketing buzzword, but it is not truely something thou canst sell. The Internet is a platform. Ye shepard! Heed mine words: Thou needest to sell applications. A lame wireless application that happens to useth The Internet is still lame. Doth thou really thinkest sinners shall payest $20/hour to playest cribbage?

    Be thou realistic. Ye shepard! Heed mine words: Thy cannot browse the sacred web upon a screen that displays 20 characters at a time. Sinners who are set upon by 100 emails a day dare not read them upon a cell phone. If the tech hasn't caught unto with the app, do not plague us with the app.

    Behold: the killer app may be something simple and low tech. In the great wide world, providers art makingest a smoting selling SMS messages at $0.20 each. In the Philipines, the humble users send 50 million SMS messages a day. This in a land with only 81 million sinners!

    Stop treating thine customers like idiots. Forbear from selling them obsolete tech pasted upon with meaningless buzzwords. Yea, thy network is digital. Big deal.

    __________________

  • Reasons why Wireless Internet is troublesome (Score:4)

    by Thax ( 189063 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2000 @04:55AM (#578804)
    The first thing that needs to be clarified for this article is that it is talking about non-WAP, non airport wireless. What it is talking about is direct competition wireless to DSL and cable, something in the order of anywhere from 256k/s to over 11 mbps/sec for laptop/desktop/corporate lan. After looking into this, there were a couple reasons we found that were not favorable. 1) Line of sight. Most of the high speed wireless internet equipment on the market today uses the ISM unlicensed 2.4 Ghz range and spread spectrum. The biggest drawback to using such a high frequency is that it is pretty much line of sight. If you can't see the transmitter, you're likely to not be able to get service. Water is also another factor, trees in the way? The water in them obscures the signal. Snow on the dish? Plan on an outage. These two points come after many hours of reading mailing lists and from word of mouth of another ISP in the area that is now doing wireless and experiencing daily outages measured in hours. 2) Location We are in the midwest. Its flat out here and to get any height on a antenna you have to erect and maintain huge expensive towers. There have been several wireless sucess stories, most of them coming from mountainous areas where the ISP places the transmitter on a mountain and serves people in the valley. This work very well. However in the midwest, without a lot of height, you find that there are shadows in any major metropolitan area (regions where the signal just will not reach due to obstruction) Those are the reasons why we decided against a wireless implementation at this time. Hopefully solutions will present themselves in the future that address these issues.

  • With the majority of users still connecting to the internet via phone lines and cable modems and DSL finally catching on, is it too soon to expect wireless systems to be successful in anything more than niche markets?

    In my opinion, if you can answer these questions, you might have an answer.

    A)How cheap

    B)How useful

    C)How well it works

    D)How cool

  • Violence in places like the Balkans and Rwanda is not racial. The Serbs and friends are the same race: they have the same skin tone, speak the same language and wear the same clothes. Tutsi's and Hutu's are less similar, but still show fewer differences than, say, the Polish and English.

    Your understanding of the origins of these conflicts is somewhat lacking. Historically the majority of violent acts have been perpetrated by one racial group against another very similar one, with the current spate of violence in the Congo (a continuation of the Rwanda ethnic violence in many ways) being just one example of similar racial groups embroiled in bitter conflict.

    In a similar vein, black on black [sistahspace.com] violence in America has reached endemic levels, with such cases outstripping other kinds of violence. For some reason it seems as though people are more disposed to hate those that appear superficially similar but aren't actually the same than they do those that are markedly different.

  • Why as why (Score:3)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2000 @06:24AM (#578821) Homepage Journal
    "I think that the technology and the need are there for this, but why does it fail? I know that our rates are very competitive, installation is the industry standard (free) and our customer service is good. And the same goes for Look. Two companies with good technology that failed. Is it just not the right time?"

    Simple economic principal. If the demand for a commodity is low, often a seemingly bargain price just won't drive demand.

    Cel phones work because they are on demand service of a single media type: voice transmission. They are easy to use and moderately interfer with the ability to do other things (such as walk and chew bubble gum.)

    As for wireless internet, it could be the same rate, or cheaper than at home, but won't appeal to as many people for the requirement of devoting effort and attention to a laptop or whatever. Saturation of the market happens with a small population, it doesn't mean the value isn't there, Iridium was a high value service, but not for Joe on the street.

    Expect consolidation and slow growth. Best of luck.

    --

  • Re:WTF?? (Score:3)

    by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Wednesday December 06, 2000 @06:08AM (#578823) Journal
    So why would I want wireless net access? Wouldn't want it for my house - I don't see why a land line isn't appropriate for a box that's too big to move.

    Maybe some people DO want it for their house. Where I live (just south of Houston), I can't get cablemodem access and I can't get DSL. I'm not holding my breath to see either of these - I live too far from the exchange, and I don't see the cable company ever putting in cablemodem access in before I leave. It wouldn't surprise me if more people are incapable of being DSL wired/cablemodemed than are capable at this moment in time.

    If wireless broadband was in my area right now, it would be my only option. As it stands, living in the technological backwater that I do, I'm stuck with a 56k modem that only gets 42k on a good day.

  • They are:

    The slow-as-hell transfer speed (similar or less than that of a 33.6K modem)

    The speckled coverage map (in the Northeast U.S., it's covered everywhere, but in the Midwest it has no chance at all)

    The moronic companies marketing the devices (Novatel is by far the worst: their product names are "Merlin" (PCMCIA) and "Minstrel" (Palm V); come on, what's so magical about an ultra-slow connection that fails in certain regions?)

  • Wireless just does not seem like a good idea for the United States. Here there are phone lines everywhere and ethernet jacks spread across campuses, and hotels. For the money, the temporary convenience of being able to move around in a limited area that comes with wireless is not that wonderous

    Countries that are technologically strong, but dont'have the people-base that the United States has are good candidates for wireless ISPs. Take, for example, Australia. Australia's population is concentrated in a few major cities. With wireless, a company manager can take his laptop in essence to any other venue and know for sure that he will be connected. Without wireless and with the limited spread of LANs within cities such as Sydney this would not be possible.

    Large universities in Australia are already taking advantage of wireless. Large campuses (they have the space over there in Australia) provide their students with wireless (take for example University of New South Wales [unsw.edu.au]. Acting like a wireless ISP, UNSW does not have to spread ethernet jacks around its many buildings for the limited number of people that use the service while on campus. This saves money for the school.

    I'm interested. For those slashdotters that live in countries with large populations centered only in a few cities, how common are wireless ISPs?

    ---
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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