universal broadband

[daniel49]

What real solutions are there in the next 10 years for those stuck with dialup?

 

[piddlefoot]

probly have to wait till private companies throw a few more satellites up, and as they become aa dime a dozen, we may end up with wireless in a decade or 2, at a really high end bandwidth, relative to downloadable this i see getting cheaper in the long term.
competition.

 

[timswim78]

THe prospects for broadband over power lines is pretty promising. A small town (about 1,500 people) in Texas owns its utility company. They invested 200,000 in equipment, and now the townsfolk get broadband for about $25 a month.

 

[daniel49]

yeah have heard a little about that you got any links for that tim?

nm was easy to hunt down

http://www.80211-news.com/publications/page207-961028.asp


doing a little research this has actually been approved in my state...Washington...
and there are 3 pilot projects on the board, just not in my county


My county they are messing around with fiber optics at the local utility but people are so spread out seems like it would not be cost effective to me. BPL sounds much more practical maybe I will nag them

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

yea i feel for you guys out in the country. 56k must be a nightmare these days.

 

[imported_digitalelegance]

I finally bit the bullet and went with Verizon's BroadbandAccess. It isn't cheap, and it only gets about 60kb/s down, but it's the only option where I live.

 

[xxXXDeathXXxx]

BPL is and should always stay illegal in this country if one takes existing FCC regulations literally. All of those power lines will make great antennas at the frequencies present in broadband internet traffic signaling. Not that I am opposed to the idea, it's just that they need to fix it first before rolling it out.

 

[Rainsford]

The problem with a lot of solutions, as I understand it, is range. Putting in the head-end equipment is expensive and works best with economies of scale, so you need a lot of people attached to each head-end to make it worthwhile. More rural areas are pretty low density, so a head-end office needs to cover more physical area to get the same number of people. Getting a technology that covers enough area is the difficult part.

That said, wireless almost has to be the answer. Sure, cables of any kind aren't TOO expensive to run, but again it comes down to economy of scale. Running individual lines to every person in a rural area is expensive, but combining lines (like they do in urban areas) is difficult due to the low density. Wireless solves this problem, the issue now is increasing the range and lowering thecost. A lot of research is being done in that area, I think that will be the next big thing with broadband.

 

[xTYBALTx]

I lived out in Wilson, Wyoming last year, population ~200. There was a wireless transciever on the hill, and you could get a stellite-dish looking thingy mounted on your rooftop to communicate with it. For $40/month, you got normal cable speeds, and you could go all the way up to uber-fast speeds if so inclined.

 

[natto fire]

Will satellite always have latency problems? While this isn't really a big deal when browsing the internet, and checking E-mail, it is devastating if trying to play an online game. My brother has two-way satellite and he has never seen his pings go below 800. I was always told that this was due to the signal having to travel such a long distance before even getting to the actual internet.

 

[BespinReactorShaft]

How about WiMax all the way to the rural areas? Would that be the day?
Maybe broadband commoditisation is still very much a bogey word to most operators.

 

[Torched]

[google] fttp [/google]

 

[daniel49]

that appears to be more just replacing exsisting technology...ie copper wiring with fiber optics. thats an upgrade for areas that already have it not a way to get it out to people where it isn't available.

 

[coomar]

canada has completed broadband with atm

 

[Spencer278]

I would guess at some point the universal serivce fee for telephones will apply the same way to broadband.

 

[daniel49]

Originally posted by: coomar
canada has completed broadband with atm

From what little I can glean on a google of ATM this would seem to be merely a more efficient way of sending packets on an exsisting broadband network? ie isdn.
not a way to get broadband out to aunt sue who lives outside tree_stump, Oklahoma.
Please correct me if I am in error.

 

[daniel49]

Originally posted by: Spencer278
I would guess at some point the universal serivce fee for telephones will apply the same way to broadband.

One would hope so they certainly suck enough money out of us with such fees

 

[coomar]

atm is simply a more efficient way to send data, it takes white light and spreads it out, getting 8 channels essentially (one for each color of the rainbow), its used as the government/ university backbone in canada

it was also developed privately by nortel, but the point is that we atm and our normal backbone as well as the 2nd generation of atm which is close to being finished

if we can get broadband to most of our country which is far more spread out, the US with its more favourable population distribution should be able to do it as well

 

[Elif Tymes]

My dad currently works for a small private company, which is working on setting up a wireless internet service for our town, the goal is to cover our entire town so that anyone with a wireless network card can connect @ 56K speeds, but if you subscribe, you can connect at anywhere between 128-1.5Mb, depending on how much your willing to pay.

There is currently the tech that if you put a tower up, it can cover a 3 mile radius in a 120 degree angle, per "antenna" you could easily put up 3 antennas, and therefore cover 360 degrees in a 3 mile radius, however this tech requires a reciever that can return the signal at that range, even though it uses 402.11G/B/A technology to transmit, therefore the practical range is really only as far(per antenna) as the users wireless card can reach. Now, they will propably wind up putting "access points" at strategic locations throughout downtown, etc. in order to provide an open wireless network/internet connection.

Anyways, about the different methods of data transmission, such as ATM and ISDN. Yes, they do increase speads/amount of data carried per line, but there is a limit to the technology, especially due to the fact that ISDN has a range(and a quite small one, tbh)

This is, of course, the same problem with wireless. Hopefully, however, bandwidth will come down in price(as it already has) and increase in availability(as it continues to do).

 

[BespinReactorShaft]

Originally posted by: coomar
atm is simply a more efficient way to send data, it takes white light and spreads it out, getting 8 channels essentially (one for each color of the rainbow), its used as the government/ university backbone in canada

What does ATM stand for in this case?

From what I've heard, ATM = Asynchronous Transfer Mode which isn't a transmission medium technology, rather a networking protocol. And the only optical transmission technology I've heard that uses multiple channels is WDM = Wavelength Division Multiplexing. WDM doesn't use visible light, though.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: BespinReactorShaft

Originally posted by: coomar
atm is simply a more efficient way to send data, it takes white light and spreads it out, getting 8 channels essentially (one for each color of the rainbow), its used as the government/ university backbone in canada

What does ATM stand for in this case?

From what I've heard, ATM = Asynchronous Transfer Mode which isn't a transmission medium technology, rather a networking protocol. And the only optical transmission technology I've heard that uses multiple channels is WDM = Wavelength Division Multiplexing. WDM doesn't use visible light, though.

I'm not sure what he's talking about, either. It does sound like he's confused ATM (a type of fixed-size packet networking commonly used by the phone companies and some ISPs) with a combination of WDM and multi-mode fiber optics (which may often be used together with ATM, but you can run ATM over copper as well; it's a link-layer protocol, not transmission-layer).

Will satellite always have latency problems? While this isn't really a big deal when browsing the internet, and checking E-mail, it is devastating if trying to play an online game. My brother has two-way satellite and he has never seen his pings go below 800. I was always told that this was due to the signal having to travel such a long distance before even getting to the actual internet.

Links through geosynchronous satellites will always have bad latency problems -- the transmission distance up and down is a significant fraction of a light-second.

LEO satellites might not have the latency problems (since they're only a few hundred miles up), but putting up a satellite network like that (similar to what was used by the failed Iridium satellite-phone network) is very, very expensive, since you need a lot of satellites to cover a large geographical area. And satellite launches are not cheap.

For geographically dispersed communities, the best option in the near-term is probably some sort of MAN solution (possibly something along the lines of WiMax). If you positioned the transmitters decently and used directional antennas on both ends, you could probably get enough range to cover most rural towns with only a handful of towers. You'd still need to run at least one long-haul fiber line, though, or have some sort of long-distance high-speed wireless link to a real Internet backbone.

 

[daniel49]

have talked to the telecommunications manager at my Public utility they see potential in BPL and Wi Max but could be a long ways off.

 

[daniel49]

Wahoo! Qwest just brought dsl to my neighborhood. pricey but am going to do it anyway.

 

[bobdole369]

[/quote]THe prospects for broadband over power lines is pretty promising. A small town (about 1,500 people) in Texas owns its utility company. They invested 200,000 in equipment, and now the townsfolk get broadband for about $25 a month.

And should you ever need the services of a ham radio operator in that town, (you know, if the unthinkable happens, hurricane, big tornado outbreak, flooding, massive fire, a breakdown in the normal communications network, 9/11, plane crash, etc. Even if you wanted to talk to your son/daughter overseas for free,) you are pretty much done for. If you wanted to listen to shortwave radio, or monitor government frequencies, you're also screwed. See BPL (Broadband over Power Lines) essentially is a wideband transmitter using the powerlines as a transmission medium. They utilize HF almost exclusively (between 3-30 MHz, some of the most precious frequencies. And thats because those seemingly "low" frequencies can travel around the globe with no trouble.)

Unfortunately most of the implementations are poor, the equipment is in lackluster shape (the power lines), and every BPL "experiment" leaks HF like a sieve. Essentially blacking out worldwide communications in the community it is meant to serve!

As you can see, I'm rather opposed to BPL in its current form...