Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > Matthew Gillen wrote: >> Another option: >> http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/satellite-internet-15mbps-no-matter-where-you-live-in-the-us/ > > ...latency is about a half a second. > > They say that's not good enough for gaming... Rightly so... But > they say for voice, it's perfectly fine. Which is ... bogus.
Right, not to mention that it only has 1 or 2 Mbps upstream, so it is another "entertainment focused" solution. Satellite Internet has been an available option for a while, with coverage for most of North America, yet does anyone know anyone who has it around here, or seen any marketing for it? (Ed might be the only person on this list who has used it. Did you have it while in the greater Boston area?) The big expense is getting the satellites into space, and once you've done that, you would expect them to aggressively market the service to all of the US, as more subscribers spreads their fixed costs, and lower cost per subscriber means they should be able to undercut terrestrial ISPs. But that hadn't happened. Because it isn't a viable option. When I visit rural parts of Canada they make some use of satellite Internet (although even there I've only heard about it 3rd hand; no one I know has it), but it's a 4th choice behind cable, DSL, and fixed wireless. Satellite only makes sense when the population density is so low that even fixed wireless, which can serve a radius or 10 or 20 miles per tower, is not cost effective. I have some experience with fixed wireless in Canada, and it seems to be a pretty good solution. They used cell phone-like towers, with multiple transceivers mounted in a circular, omni directional pattern around the tower. The equipment I've used is made by a company acquired by Motorola, and is related to WiMax technology (might be compatible with the standard). It's marketed as being usable with a mobile end-point, but I've only seen it used for fixed point-to-point links. The infrastructure is relatively inexpensive, quick to install, can offer speeds exceeding DSL, low latency, and seems to be impervious to weather (the outside transceivers seem to have a small heater built in to them). (A link I've been monitoring for 12+ months seems to have downtime comparable to DSL service - a few hours per year.) It makes you wonder what happened to fixed wireless around here? People were all excited about it back around 2000. I think there are still a few companies in the Boston area doing expensive fixed-wireless links for medium+ businesses. Nothing for consumers or small businesses. It seems like we got distracted by Wimax, which had more technical challenges dealing with mobile end-points, was undercut by cheap cable Internet, and increasingly cheaper 3G and now 4G cell data. About the only wireless option you hear mentioned these days is 4G cell data, such as Clear, mentioned earlier in this thread. This is more complicated and expensive than the fixed-wireless I described above, and by the sounds of it, less reliable. Has anyone heard of any efforts to create a community owned fixed-wireless ISP? -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss