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Television Media

Cable Without Cables 215

Posted by michael from the reinventing-television dept.
dfinney writes "'Wireless cable, which uses a network of land-based antennas to carry signals to and from a small dish at a user's home, is supposed to be cheap -- or at least cheaper than wired cable or wireless satellite service.'" Another possible alternative for high-speed internet is always a good thing.
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Cable Without Cables More

Cable Without Cables

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  • Wireless cable? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All I get with "wireless cable" is ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, WB, UPN and some spanish station. :(

  • I Think My Parents Used This... (Score:4, Funny)

    by EXTomar ( 78739 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @04:52PM (#3438756)
    Rabbit ears and broadcast antenas! :-)

    It is strange and ironic how the wheel turns.
    • Actually, I know that in Huntsville, AL, (where there is a fairly good size hill/mountain), they have had a service similar to this a number of years ago. You pointed something that looked like a mini satelite dish at the mountain, and got your cable tv through that.
    • Reminds me of the klacks (reference to Terry Pratchett's Discworld).
    • I was thinking the same thing, but then again I remember when all tools were cordless.

      Perhaps a new project for http://freenetworks.org

    • Wireless cable uses the 2.7 GHz frequency. It was supposed to compete with regular cable until the satellite providers came in and provided superior programming at a much lower per-subscriber cost of transmission. (It's like the Iridium story backwards; their downfall was the proliferation of cell networks globally that deprecated their sats.)

      Here in Chicago, we have those frequencies for use as "Wireless DSL" by Sprint. Maybe you remember that article?
    • There was a service in Minneapolis in the very early 80s called, I think, "Spectrum TV" that was a LOS DBS service that transmitted from downtown on the top of the tallest building.

      I think you could get a very small, maybe even only 1, movie/sports channel(s), and it might have been HBO, too. It was before CATV was done in Minneapolis, so if you wanted movies you did this, put in a big dish or moved.

      It wasn't encrypted and there was controversy about people pirating the signal, either by putting dishes on the roof and just not paying and/or hiding the dishes in attics -- most of the houses in Minneapolis are built facing east and have steep peaked roofs with attic windows facing north and south, and for lots of people that was facing the transmit point perfectly.

      Of course it died as more people moved to the suburbs and when Minneapolis got its "advanced" two-cable CATV system. Every once in a while you can still see someone who still has a dish and hasn't taken it down -- mounted on a mast, connected to the chimney to clear obstructions.
  • Ive had speedchoice Now spring broadband for more than 3 years now.... WHen did this become new technology? OOps more than 4 words..
  • So, the telecom companies, which are "riddled with debt", but have "deep pockets" (there's one to noodle on!) will now enter a spectrum auction for wireless... cable. riiiight...


    Does this make anyone else think of "The Emperor's New Clothes"...?!

  • Wireless cable (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @04:53PM (#3438765)
    Or MMDS, or whatever they call it...
    is it not usually unidirectional?

    If wireless cable were so great, don't you think cable companies would be using it?

    • Re:Wireless cable (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This is the primary method of "Cable" roll out for a company called Chorus here in Ireland. They offer internet access over it as well with special kit for the return link. There coverage is crap however :-(
  • "This will be the Southwest Airlines of subscription television"

    Uh... has anyone else actually flown on Southwest? Talk about your bus of the skies. Frightening. But I suppose that would be the ideal metaphor for a TV/Net technology. Cheap, fast, and everywhere.

    Plus, if the network "goes down", it's not quite such a bad thing!

    Jason

  • Read it here [yahoo.com]

    No Login, No Hassle.

    ----

  • Article [majcher.com], linked with the NY Times random account generator...

    My first time karma whoring. Woa it feels weird. :) It really is annoying to have to register to read an article...

  • heh (Score:1)

    by bci10 ( 534641 )
    Now I can use my scanner to read your email.

  • Even stranger... (Score:3, Funny)

    by singularity ( 2031 ) <nowalmart@NOSPam.gmail.com> on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @04:55PM (#3438780) Homepage Journal
    Even stranger than "Cable without cables" is the idea that there is an alternative to "wireless satellite service."

    Do people actually have "wired satelite service"?

    /humor

  • my ISP already uses it. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JesseL ( 107722 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @05:02PM (#3438821) Homepage Journal

    When I signed up with my ISP [commspeed.net], they explained that the technology they used was originaly intended for delivering cableless digital cable. I certainly can't complain about it's utility as a pipe to the ISP.

    • ADSL was originally intended for digital TV (and pay per play movies/timeshifted TV) over telephone lines, and look what it is used for now.
      These [tele2.co.uk] people do something similar over wireless in the UK ... I nearly signed up for them, though my leasehold agreement forbids external antennas ... With ITV Digital going titsup.com it looks like cable for me.

      Oh yes, can someone give me a job? :P
  • ...competition will. If the winner of the spectrum auction in your area happens to also own the local cable company or satellite provider, then there'll be little incentive for them to pass the savings realized from the cheap infrastructure along to the customer. Blindly handing the spectrum over to Northpoint sounds stupid, but hopefully the spectrum will wind up in the hands of a company that will compete with other providers. If that happens, then consumers might actually see better prices, better service, and better product offerings.
    • Cheap(er) technology and competition are not mutually exclusive. Competition breeds innovation and, hence, cheaper ways of doing things (technology).

      One problem is this idea of a "spectrum auction". As soon as the government gets involved in ways like this, it is no longer a free market, and true competition goes out the window.

      Of course, someone is bound to come along now and explain to me all the technical reasons why we MUST have the spectrum controlled by the government and auctioned off (or rented...or some other method of distribution). But that person will be missing the bigger picture, which is that people are really good at finding solutions to problems, and without government involvement, bandwidth is just another problem.....even if you don't yet know the answer to the problem.
  • It's called the dish network.

    And we also have satellite internet, too. It's Here [starband.com].
  • Old man: I remember back in my day, we had this thing called "broadcasting". Yeah, those were the days.

  • Bandwidth vs. Latency (Score:3, Insightful)

    by levik ( 52444 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @05:04PM (#3438837) Homepage
    OK, so maybe they can build it so that the bandwidth will be high with this method of broadcast, but what about latency? Will this be any better than sattelite? If this technology cannot offer low latency in addition to high throughput, it will be effictively unviable in large sectors (such as any realtime financial application, or online gaming).

    Also, they don't seem to mention anything about end user equipment, though I imagine the ISPs would give that with the service.

    One cool application of this is roaming wireless ethernet (ala Ricochet) for laptops. Imagine if you could get a PCMCIA card that would keep you online anywhere in your city for $40/month!

    • The latency problem with satellite based internet is almost entirely due to the distance the signal has to travel to the satellite and back. Look up how far out the geostationary orbit is and you'll find the speed of light takes several hundred milliseconds to complete the roundtrip.

      There is no similar reason that these signals should be delayed, so unless they screw up the implementation, it should be as fast as any other broadband technology.
    • Latency is an issue with satellite because of the huge distances involved
      in going from the ground to the satellite. With a nearby (within a few miles)
      antenna, latency should be no worse than with a landline.
      A friend of mine had Sprint's wireless service for awhile, and it was pretty nice,
      faster than my DSL line most of the time.

      However, rain or snow can negatively affect microwave signal reception, so
      your network may go out or get really slow at times.

      As for equipment, chances are you'd rent it, maybe with the option to buy.
      It's usually pretty spendy gear ($500+) so rental would prolly be the norm.

      As for a mobile service, I'd guess it'd be pretty unlikely, since the antennas
      have to be aimed fairly precisely, much like with satellite.

      :wq
  • This is great! Now I can get cable internet from the car. But this does make me wonder, I thought the FCC was running out of bandwidth slots. Where are they going to dig up the huge amount of bandwidth necessary to support this?
  • How cheap/expensive is broadband for people around the world? They're always moaning as to how expensive it is here in the U.K. (and wireless broadband is ludicrously expensive). Could everyone write a price in U.S. $ too for comparison?
    • I am in Michigan (USA).

      Wireless Internet (a-la Sprint) is $49
      Cable with your modem $34.95
      Cable with thier modem $39.95
      ADSL 1.5M/256k $49
      Satellite (?) ~$45

      Not really that expensive, but not for everyone either.
    • My ISP [commspeed.net] has MMDS service for $39.95/mo for 512Kbps, and $59.95/mo for 1Mbps.

    • My cable service is about $30/month, and I regularly get 300KB (as in 2.4 Mbits) bandwidth. Reliability has been excellent. The only bummer is that they block incoming port 80 and 25, but otherwise it rocks.

    • I pay $80/mo for 1.5Mbit DSL, to me it's worth every penny (and is more or less a necessity, rather than a luxury), but I know others would disagree.

      Oh, I live in a suburb of a rather large city in the US, we've only had broadband of any kind for a few years, and options are still very limited.

    • I only pay $35 a month for my 1 Megabit Up/640Kbps down ADSL. Cable Modem through the local cable company is the same price, but DSL holds a larger market share where I am from, Minot, ND.
    • I'm paying $49 for Earthlink DSL, and typically get 1.5Mbps, except on those days when Earthlink says nothing is wrong and then I only get 9Kbps. And everyone in the world blocks your address. It sucks.

      But that's America. Home of the megacorp. We didn't invent it, but we improved it. If you want Broadband here in the middle of Silicon Valley you either have to go with some frickin huge corporation that hires mandrills to admin the network and baboons to answer the phone. If you're not running their current favorite version of Windows, they won't even talk to you on the phone, so you have to lie.

      I'd go with someone else, but Earthlink has me locked into another nine months on the contract I never signed, which they say I agreed to by using software which I have never used. But even If I got out of it the only other choices are Monopoly A (AT&T), Monopoly B (Pacific Bell), or the Three Stooges (Larry, Curly and Moe).
  • wireless music? Some sort of internet radio, without ethernet? One can only wish.
    --
    insert <sig.h>

  • Cheaper, not Cheap Enough (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) <bittercode@gmail> on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @05:07PM (#3438853) Homepage Journal
    I tell you I am not paying a dime to watch T.V. or have broadband.

    I wan't them to pay me. It's kind of like how I am buying a football stadium for a local multi-millionaire to bring money into our county.

    The same logic should apply to the businees I bring to the web and cable t.v. I expect to be paid a minimum of $50.00 a month to participate in these activities.

    Until then - now way.

    .
    • I wan't them to pay me.

      And I want Laetita Casta to deliver my new Ferrari to me naked, so I guess we are both going to be disappointed.
      Only in America would someone expect to get paid to sit on their ass and do nothing.

  • We implement cable service to our customers that are not wired to directly to our plant via Microwave signals carried from the nearest headend unit beamed to a small Dish Network style dish. We are able to support all the digital services as well as our advanced services like cable internet. These systems work fairly well however weather does play a fairly large roll in the reception, snow being the worst. However, it is much more cost efficient that running fiber optic cable through rural communities that in some cases don't even have basic copper wire laid. We estimate that in order to run a line 1 mile it's about $20,000.

  • Had in Hawaii (Score:4, Informative)

    by nolife ( 233813 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @05:11PM (#3438880) Homepage Journal
    I had this service similar to this for a few years when I lived in Hawaii. One inline conversion box and a splitter could easily run at least 3 televisions, broadband internet was not an option. It was excellent service and was priced about 5 bucks cheaper then the local cable company for roughly the same channels. The topography on Oahu allowed for decent line of sight coverage to many areas (round island with peaks in the center, hell its an old volcano). I do not know what frequency it used but the antenna was not dish shaped, it was an 18in directional pole aimed at the source. It did degrade slightly when it rained but still far more reliable then the wired service that we had. Thier service ended rather quickly though, must have ran out of money or the cable company bought it out. They never even came back to get the ant or the converter and my last months check for service was not cashed.

  • I have this. (Score:1, Informative)

    by DamonCanine ( 571713 )
    I live in a rural area and we've had this kind of service for a couple months now. Our service is advertised as 256Kb down/64Kb up, though we have been able to get faster speeds under certain conditions. And it uses a standard cable modem.

    We live about 20 miles away from our ISP, so it has good range potential, though admittedly we got lucky because we live on a big hill... If we lived in a valley a mile closer we wouldn't have been able to get it.

    It's a good service, especially considering our only options here are "wireless cable", and crappy dialup service through the phone company.

  • IIRC, Bellsouth did this with its Americast TV service years ago when I lived in New Orleans.

    Not a sattelite dish, it was more of a... horizontal bar on a pole with a tiny reflector. Looked kinda like a microwave antenna.

    They were always horizontal pointed towards the same area of the city.. led me to believe it was local, not space based.

    Anyone else know more?

  • Hooray for timeliness (Score:2, Informative)

    by kidterra ( 259392 )
    I just signed up for this yesterday. your isp sends out uni-directional from some high point in the area and your directional antenna picks it up. all 802.11, so you can get up to 11Mbps(i get that ten miles out) and any bottlenecks would be due to your isp's connect. latency is good, but you need Line of Sight to the tower or your just screwed. if you have that many obstructions, you can probably get cable or dsl anyhow.
  • "wireles cable" isn't that an oxymoron?

    If its wireless why even have the cable?

  • infrastructure... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Capt Dan ( 70955 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @05:21PM (#3438933) Homepage
    How is this cheaper than existing cable system, which alredy have infrastructure in place and paid for?

    Customer premise equipment is cheap compared the head end server/transmission equipment.

    Maybe this would be cheaper in an area that does not already have cable lines buried under every street.
    • First, most 'existing' cable systems aren't paid for. They are heavily leveraged. Often two or three times. Tech and channel demands call for more frequent upgrades than the cash flow from subscribers can pay off. Second, unless a plant is already two way, only the cheap part of the plant doesn't need to be replaced (the cable). All the stuff that makes a cable system work (amps, line extenders, fiber terminators) are incredibly expensive.
  • My local ISP [getultra.co.nz] in New Zealand uses this type of land based system for more than 3 years.

    It is a good solution for sparsely populated country. In cities, they set up land based stations. For rural area, users point their disk to the satellite...

    But, it has its own catches. First of all, it is unidierctional. You still need to use your dialup modem for upload. They claimed that they were testing the bidirectional option 2 years ago. But, there is no progress since then... Second, dependent on the terrain, reception of the signal can be tricky... The land based tower should remain line-of-sight for the user. Hard to manage for hilly terrain or cities with lots of high-rise bldg...
  • Too bad my first experience with it was less than rosy.

    If you want to see a losing business strategy, check out lookTV [www.look.ca].

    These doofuses seemed to think that the best way to make money is to stop gaining customers. I would say the best way to make money is not to have such a losing busines plan.

    They don't list their wireles service on their website anymore, but I remember this quote from heart (it still gives me a chuckle today):

    "Due to increasing demand, we can no longer offer the look ultrafast wireless internet service to new customers".

    LOL
  • This new digital wireless cable technology poses a grave threat to intellectual property rights. According to the article, this new infrstructure will be built within two years. By then, most Americans will have broadband internet access. Digital convergence of television makes it all the easier for people to pirate from the media. This will subesequently hurt the consumer in the long run. So, if we're going to spend the time and effort to set up a new nationwide communication infrastructure, we must also implement a digital rights managment scheme to accompany it.
  • It's called People's Choice there, though it (was) a 36 channel analog service that used ITFS and MDS channels in the 2500 MHZ range. One by one, the channels were being removed to be used by Sprint Broadband Direct, a high speed wireless Internet service. This stopped late last year, when Sprint discontinued allowing new customers to sign up for Broadband Direct (though existing subs still have the service). To my knowlege, People's Choice still exists with about 20 or so channels, though I have no idea how many subscribe to its service. It's my understanding that 10 or more digital channels can exist in the space of one analog channel, so this means that if people's Choice went digital then 200 channels wouldn't be out of the question....

  • Water bonds carry! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @05:25PM (#3438952)
    I guess I'm privilaged or something because I nearly choked on a life saver when I read that some people were paying anywhere from 80 to 100 bucks for cable internet. I pay about 30$ a month for Charter. My pipe my not be a John Holmes but it ain't bad, no one who uses it seems to complain.

    I think it is actually a good idea for the FCC to auction off rights to wireless cable to local operators, it will only provide due competition to the incumbant cable operators. There's a wireless company around here that while isn't terribly popular does have enough of a presense in town to keep Charter on their toes in terms of pricing and availability. Widespread situations like that will on the whole be good for consumers, they'll have more options than AOLTW, Adelphia, and COX for pay programming and broadband internet services.

    However I do foresee a problem which is sort of inevitable with auctioning off so many small markets. There will be two generations of wireless "cable" availability. The first generation will happen in the next couple years after the spectrum is auctioned off. A huge number of small companies will be providing cheap(er) pay television and broadband internet initially. Logic will follow that because the material cost is so low since they don't have to run hundreds of miles of fiber or coax they will have a higher margin and can charge lower prices. THis will keep up until reality sets in and the debt from the spectrum allocation catches up with them. They'll go under and be forced to sell their aquisitions at a far far lower price than they originally paid, along with their subscribers and equipment. Who will buy this? The local cable and telcom companies who already have a veritable monopoly on those services anyways. Hughes and EchoStar combined have the market penetration of a small cable company. Local wireless operators hooking up with them to provide local television and broadband internet won't be able to provide service cheap enough (in my estimation) to keep themselves afloat and their assets will be passed on. The DBS guys could always aquire the wireless assets in order to grab a huge market for a pretty low cost.

    Either way the first generation of companies will band together or get aquired by bigger players in the industry. Sound familiar though? It is what happened to most of the DSL and cable internet companies in the past year or two. The cost of aquiring customers and overhead from their debts was far higher than the money they raked in from subscriptions and selling information to direct marketing companies. They were then aquired by the big boys. Hopefully this doesn't happen but unfortunately it is likely. I would be happy if I were proved wrong though. Being able to get DirecTV and cheap broadband access would be badass.

    • Re:Water bonds carry! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by papasui ( 567265 )
      Well seeing as how I work for Charter Communications in the high speed data department and assuming your rates are comporable to what we charge in Wisconsin, then your paying $30 a month for a 256kbps/128kbps line. Where as lines that offer 1.5mbit/128kbps run $49.95. I personally don't really consider 256kbps a broadband connection, ISDN could pull close to if I remember correctly. However, Wisconsin is not the mecca of the tech world so perhaps your getting a better deal than what we offer here.
      • Actually that is what I'm getting. I consider it broadband because before I got it my dialup was poking along at 24kbps. I don't see how a 256kb line is not broadband, I may not be pulling down T1 speeds but it suits me fine. The lag is low and I can run Red Carpet or Software Update while playing CS on a different computer with no perceptible detriment in either download speed or lag time in the game. Sure ISDN can get those speeds if you bond a couple channels together but that is pretty cost prohibitive for most people. The higher speed lines are tempting but I dont really don't have heavy throughput so the 256kb line works great for me. Warez kiddies, ISO downloading zealots, and Gnutella whores on the otherhand might see my connection as paltry and unchic.
      • I don't live in a Tech Mecca either, Cedar Falls, Iowa, to be exact, but we've got awesome and cheap cable service from CFU [cfu.net], our municipal utility company.

        I had $30/month residential service, which was about 1300kbps/down 192kbps/up. But, I just upgraded to the business class service for $25/month more ($55 total), and that gives me 4000kbps/down and 1400kbps/up. Extra IP addresses are $5/month, not sure what static IP addresses cost yet, I think it's another $20 a month for one of those, but it removes the ban on ports 80 and 23 too. The best part is that they have a 100Mbit bridge between the ISP and the University [uni.edu] where I work, it's great for sending stuff to and from my servers.

        I'm looking at buying a house right now, and even though I can cross the river into Waterloo and get a house cheaper, I won't buy one outside the Cedar Falls city limits, so I can keep my CFU, it's that good compared to Mediacom. I've had two outages in a year, one was for 5 minutes, the other was when my modem died. I noticed that the modem was out at 6:50 p.m., and they had a guy to my house and me back online by 7:30 p.m. Now that's customer service!
    • They didn't mean 80 to 100 bucks just for internet access. It was for the whole ball of wax: cable tv AND internet access.

      80 dollars seems about right for my market area.
  • And there still won't be anything worth watching.
  • The infrastructure may be cheaper, but putting content on the air opens them to being hacked as the Dish folks are already painfully aware of.
  • You mean I could get wireless TV? Wow. What if this service were based on some kind of advertising system and not subscriptions... And you numbered the stations from ... oh wait a second.

  • sweden (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GutBomb ( 541585 )
    Whe have something like this in sweden. basically we attatch a little box to the bottom of our tv antenna (the roof mounted one) with a cable leading to a set top box. we point it at the transmitter (which is on top of the water tower here) and we get about 20 different cable channels. What is the most interesting part is that you can also hook up a modem or ethernet to the back, and interact with other people also watching the same programs (specific interactive shows only). there was a game you play with the remote control, trying to touch people's asses. (the pointer was a hand) You connect with the box, play around, and try to win. you can still play without connecting the modem/ethernet, but you can't compete.

    Anyway, for more info on this stuff, check out boxer.se [boxer.se] but be warned, it's all in swedish.
    • actually, some more info...

      The picture quality is great but if it starts to rain, or it gets any condensation on the antenna you can kiss your signal goodbye. the picture is either perfect, or non-existant.

      The box is made by nokia

      a company called powernet [powernet.se] also uses the same antennas and recievers for high speed internet access.

      Ans in swedish the technology has a catchy name anyway... DigitalParabol
  • Here in the Virgin Islands we've had high speed wireless internet for quite a few years about three...Here's [wdsl.net] a link it works really well. They've recently added MMDS digital cable with around 30 channels. This is pretty much the only option down here since the telco/cable co has a lock on all the copper on all three islands. For $100 a month i get 3MBits sdsl and 30 channels of digital cable it's great..I'm not sure of the brand of digital cable boxes the use Genstar? but the 802.11b radios for the internet are made by breezecom and are pretty sturdy hardware.
  • We have this. We used to be paying around $60/mo for our 144k DSL (with additional IPs for all of our computers). This was the best we were able to have for a long time, because the phone lines on our hill are too old (think Oakland hills, and built in the early 60s). But now with Wireless DSL, we get insanely fast connections at something close to this price. I can get almost T1 bandwidth, on a good day.

    The antenna is small and round, and is so invisible on our roof that I had to look for where it was installed.

    Our reception is super good, so other's mileage may vary. We live behind wirless DSL antennas (which are on top of our neighbours house), so we get good reception no matter what direction our antenna is pointing. :)
  • Yeah, this'll be secure, and I bet the ping times will rock my socks, too.

    On the one hand, it will be nice for extending reasonable (ie, better than StarBand or something) broadband and cable TV services into rural areas where cabling is annoying at best. On the other hand, even Cisco Aironet wireless gear has frequent hiccups (and by hiccups I mean 4ms pings jumping to 600ms for a couple seconds every 5-10 minutes).

    Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am, but every wireless option I've ever seen leaves a lot to be desired in terms of both security and latency.

  • What's next? (Score:2, Funny)

    by chriton ( 29476 )
    Cabled Wireless???
  • I'm paying $400 a month for dual channel ISDN with static IP. There has to be a better way. SBC adds more money each month to my bill. Its costing more than my house payment.

    I'm really looking into some kind of wireless option. I may even get a T1 and supply the town.

  • I took a look at the proposal. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eschatfische ( 137483 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @05:42PM (#3439039)
    http://www.northpointtechnology.com/

    Basically, all Northpoint is doing is DSS from land-based antennas. They're using the same frequency spectrum (ku-band), just broadcasting from a land-based transmitter. They're aiming the signal, essentially, at the "back" of the existing DSS dishes (which are all facing south) to avoid interference.

    There's no way this would work in urban areas. DSS is line of sight whether the transmitter is in space or closer to the ground, and the fact is that for most people in urban or developed areas, the northern view towards the land-based transmitter is likely to be blocked. It's hard enough to get a clear shot of the southern sky in many areas, it'll be even harder with a target at a much lower elevation.

    Will it be cheaper? Not from a client gear standpoint. It'll use the same gear as existing DSS systems, which is very heavily subsidized. You'll still need not only the dish, but also the converter boxes. Again, same deal, different target.

    The big question is: will the cost of going out and putting up thousands of community DSS transmitters really be less than the cost of leasing time on one of the birds in the sky? In the long run, possibly, but certainly not in the short term. The provider will also have to pay the content providers, the HBOs of the world, the same prices for their content. There's no way that they can do it for the $20 price -- especially, if as the article states, they're going to have to bid for the local ku bandwidth as well as build out the transmitters.

    As for the "high-speed access" for $20, well, it appears to be telephone return -- you'd need a modem to connect back to the ISP. It's like the old DirectPC product. Put simply, I don't think there's anyone out there who has ever been truly satisfied by one-way data systems.

    I don't see them being able to actually price this out more cheaply than Hughes and Echostar, Hughes and Echostar have availability across the country via just a couple of satellites, and Hughes and Echostar have two-way data as opposed to Northpoint's one-way. It's good to have competition and all, and I can see how the technology could actually work, but they're full of it when they say it's going to be some sort of cheap panacea. It'll be just like satellite, on the ground... if they make it off the ground.

  • A Company called Warp-one.net in Jackson, MS (although their page seems to be down right now???) has been providing wireless internet service here for atleast 5 years. It is not as cheap as you would think...about $150/month for ISDN speeds. It did use equipment very similar to wireless TV and they also provided Wireless cable through their other company Wireless One. They also served many apartment compleses in the area with a wireless T1 and then used 802.11B to connect to an access point that was fed from the T1 for about $40 a month but you were restricted to 30kB up and down, and the server was always up and down (cheap equipment?, I was told they used non-cisco routers to save money and that caused a lot of their problems).

    The service wasn't that great in the apartments, but was good with the home use because it used different equipment. But it was slow and not any better priced then today's cable and DSL. The range on home equipment was 30 miles, so this would be good technology for rural areas, but I don't see rural areas being that profitable because of the limited users for the distance and equipment costs.

    • No kidding. I've had this in the bat cave for like 20 years. At least.

      The main antenna sits on top of the mansion.

      Right after inventing cabeless cable, Alfred got to work on dehydrated water. Mmmmmm. very satisfying on a steamy day in the bat cave.

      .

  • Bellsouth did this years ago (Score:3, Interesting)

    by batkiwi ( 137781 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @05:44PM (#3439049)
    It was called "americast."

    -It was cheap (30$ a month for everything but hbo/etc).
    -It was amazing quality (better than my digital cable by a mile)
    -It had TONS of channels

    -It was canned, due to limited possible penetration. :(

    You have to have line-of-site from your antenna to the transmitter, and if you don't, you CANT get it.

    You have to have a very specific geograpy for this to work. They got like 10% penetration in atlanta, ga, then gave up (number made up off the top of my head, i'm sure someone will correct me).

  • People's Choice TV (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @05:49PM (#3439068) Journal
    People's Choice TV did this in Detroit and Phoenix. Then they adapted it to do broadband Internet, and changed their name to SpeedChoice.

    Brilliant stuff. 10-mbit performance over a microwave link direct to my house.

    Then Sprint bought SpeedChoice, because they wanted the bandwidth to start Sprint ION service, which was to be business telephone over wireless link. Sprint ION went bust, and afaik the original television service was ended (I never had it).

    The internet service (Sprint Broadband Direct [sprintbbd.net]) still works great, and was even improved a few weeks ago by the replacement of some hinky equipment up on the mountain. I'm getting 400KB+ download rates, which translates to a really well-performing 10-mbit Ethernet link mediating TCP/IP traffic.

    But Sprint refuses to add new customers. So attrition will mean that eventually--and this is likely their plan--the Corporation Commission will let them pull the plug on it, and they'll sell the band, and leave me quenched until I can get something else.

    What's apropos here is, anyone doing terrestrial wireless "cable television" will need to find the RF bandwidth in which to implement it. Not easy to do, especially when Evil Empires want to take it over to implement their own nefarious and ill-planned escapades.

    --Blair
    • The plan isnt to shut it down...the plan actually is to relaunch a second generation product that will offer better reliability and non line of sight...in other words no more pizza dish. With the first gen product, sprint actually lost money with each install. Gen2 will hopefully give them the ability to turn a profit.
  • I bet the next big thing will be wireless TV with cables...
  • Am I the only one who finds the name wireless cable humorous? Damn, are they trying to confuse people with blatent oxymorons?

  • LMDS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Pedrito ( 94783 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @06:00PM (#3439120)
    This sounds like LMDS, a technology that I actually wrote propagation prediction software for about 6 years ago when they were just talking about LMDS. If that's the case, then there has been a test system up in NYC for quite some time.

    It does offer high bandwidth for internet and Cable TV. The only real problem with it is that, like Satellite, it requires line of site to the transmitter. Unlike satellite, unfortunately, the transmitter isn't in orbit, meaning local topology can have a big effect on who can and can't get it.

    I can almost guarantee that I'd be out of the running. I'm in a bit of a valley and no line of sight to anything but trees and a tiny bit of sky. When I say line of sight, it's real line of sight. No trees (except maybe in fall, after the leaves have fallen), nothing can be in the way between you and the transmitter.

    Hope it works for other people, though. It should be able to provide excellent downstream bandwidth and close to what most cable providers are giving for upstream.
  • and so is your picture or internet service. As anyone with DirecTV can attest, Ku-band is horribly affected by bad weather.

    Would this situation be improved with the transmitter on the ground instead of in space?
    • I live in Seattle, and in 2 years of DirecTV I have experienced rain fade only one time.The closest I have come to being afected by the weather is when a windstorm 'realigned' my dish. I just twisted it back and voila! I have a pretty random sampling throughout the day since my two Tivos record at all hours...
  • There's some whitepapers, patents, and other PR info available on their website, http://www.northpointtechnology.com/ [northpointtechnology.com]
  • basically figured out a way to reuse spectrum already in use (for DBS -- DirecTV and Echostar/Dish) by having customer antennas face north instead of south as the dishes do.

    Anyway...the idea of wireless cable is nothing new. Many if not most old MMDS wireless cable systems have been adapted for broadband by a combination of new technology and looser FCC restrictions (i.e., allowing two-way transmission.) Sprint (Broadband Direct) and WorldCom (who, in typical Bernie fashion, offers only business-class service via MMDS) have bought most of the small analog wireless cable companies (Wireless One, Heartland, etc.); BellSouth and PacBell had digital MMDS TV-only systems but they've shut them down. The Northpoint idea just opens up more bandwidth...

    -SC
    • South points towards the geosync orbits of the satellites.

      I'd say that north might work, but it's more of an issue of dish inclination also. On the tops of gas stations you see the Dish-network sized dishes, but their inclination is almost perfectly horizontal-these are beaming stuff to a central tower, not a satellite.
  • I donno, I mean with the fear from everyone and their mother that communication signals cause cancer (mostly cell-phones), would people actually want that much more radiation being beamed toward them 24/7? Anyone with half a brain could probably see that its harmless low-level, but the public generally lacks that half. I wonder if they can guarantee safety with this system, I doubt they can get the backing of the populous without it.

    • Re:Safe? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2002 @07:41PM (#3439621) Homepage
      Most of the EMF fears are driven by a need to spawn a legitimate excuse to avoid some insufficiently legitimate harm. Power lines don't cause cancer, but *are* ugly and distasteful. Those who complain loudest about the lines are often pretty heavy power users, so they can't say power overall is bad -- but by claiming a health risk, they get to legitimize their desire for...well...somebody else to get sick. Just not them :-)

      Cell phones are about in the same boat. Human social behavior evolved all sorts of methods for a third party to enter a conversation in the immediate geographical vicinity -- the sheer number of entrance rituals through the world's cultures is astonishing. Cell phones block this ritual quite effectively -- the speaker only works well for one listener, and the microphone ain't much better. Three person conversations become impossible; the person with the phone at best may alternate between two semi-independent two person conversatoins. This is really annoying to the third person, who likely has geographic proximity and thus a "greater" right to be talking to the person he *has* to be hearing (but not able to understand entirely, due to the one-way nature of the phone conversation).

      Long story short, the third person needs a legitimate way to express his illegitimate complaint -- you're not paying attention to me, you're paying attention to this other, far away person. You should be paying attention to me. But we can't say that, so instead we say "You should stop killing yourself."

      It's really not that much different than "Keep touching yourself, and you'll go to hell."

      Anyway, once cell phone manufacturers make it trivial for third parties to link phones into geographically linked party lines (over bluetooth ideally, but probably with cell-tower multipoint aggregation for charging purposes), a decent amount of the cell phone angst will dissipate. Not all, of course -- conspicuous outrage is a decent method of gaining attention in and of itself, and those who discovered they could get attention by keeping their immediate neighbors off phones also discovered they got attention for that specific action.

      Hell, if nothing else, it's something to talk about.

      Yours Truly,

      Dan Kaminsky
      DoxPara Research
      http://www.doxpara.com

  • Why don't we all get to the punch on this wireless stuff, and get laser networks going? Aim a laser at your neighbour on the network, have a pulser 'modulate' the signal, and have a readout system sensitive to the level of light.

    No more band allocation troubles! :-) And the signal would be very directional avoiding all sorts of interference. CON: A hefty lawsuit if you aim it into someone's eyes.
  • So we've gone from TV broadcast by radio (or micro) waves, to Cable,Satellite, etc., back to TV broadcast by radio waves? Only difference is it's not local. This is good?
  • Sprint [sprintbroadband.com] tried this approach for a broadband ISP and abandonded it due to limited profitability. "Sprint remains hopeful that the advantages of the next-generation of fixed wireless technology, which includes self installation, no line of sight limitations, increased capacity, and the ability to offer voice services will make fixed wireless a viable consumer broadband product."

    Nokia [nokia.com] is making a go at building wireless broadband solutions. OK, so the original article was about wireless cable distribution with data as a bonus. The "business plan" of going head to head with the cable companies just on price seems unlikely to work, especially with the FCC deciding the spectrum would be auctioned off.

  • "This will be the Southwest Airlines of subscription television,"

    So, long lines, no reserved place, crappy service, lousy food if any is provided at all, the worst lounges and the farthest gates... And I'm supposed to want this why?

  • I have been using WLL (256Kbps) for over a year in Venezuela and can honestly say it sucks. The technology is way too fragile for reliable always-on internet access. Granted, it can be that the morons running the service (Telcel Bellsouth) are just that, morons. But they have to continuously tweak the power levels in my antenna that is in a line of sight with their repeater and well within the distances allowed by the technology. Expensive (as everything in this country), slow, badly-supported. I have to live with it as its the only option in this place. Run, not walk away from wireless high speed internet.
  • MMDS and LMDS were originally designed to allow remote locations receive cable television years ago. The idea failed as the equipment cost and technical requirements were exhaustive. Sprint brought it back with their Broadband direct which is a MMDS implementation using 18" square panels for tranmission. A base station (usually on the tallest building in an area) costs about $600,000 plus the FCC license (plus kickback moneys). The base station can cover about a 35 mile range with bidrectional bandwidth in the 10 megabit range (it can scale MUCH higher). These cost are miniscule compared to a cellular or cable broadband network (which can run into the $10 million range for the same area). Why Sprint got out of it I have no idea. For dense urban areas like NYC it is a godsend where running cable underground can run into the millions for less than a mile.
  • Not to belittle the concept, but the term "wireless cable" reminds me of a mysterious product I once saw advertised on the side of a bus: "Oil-free Oil of Olay."
  • "Wireless cable." An oxymoron with emphasis on "moron."

    Hm. What's next? Seedless corn? Genuine baby oil?

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