Verizon Promises 4G Wireless For Rural America 135
Hugh Pickens writes "A Pew study last year found that only 38 percent of rural American homes have access to broadband Internet, compared to 57 percent in cities and 60 percent in the suburbs. All that could be about to change with the announcement that Verizon plans to start introducing a new wireless network in the 700 MHz spectrum in 2010. 'The licenses we bought in the 700MHz auction cover the whole US,' says Tony Melone, a Verizon Wireless VP. 'And we plan to roll out LTE [high-speed mobile service] throughout the entire country, including places where we don't offer our [current] cell phone service today.' Because the [700 MHz] spectrum is in a lower frequency, it can transmit signals over longer distances and penetrate through obstacles, and because the signals travel longer distances, Verizon can deploy fewer cell towers than if it used spectrum from a higher frequency band, which means it can provide coverage at a lower cost. President Obama's administration is well aware of the high-speed Internet divide that exists today, and as part of the overall economic stimulus package passed by Congress, the government is allocating $7.2 billion for projects that bring broadband Internet access to rural towns and communities."
Welcome (Score:4, Funny)
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Not for the 38% of rural customers who have access to broadband, true. But for the other 62%, they're going from no choice to one choice.
Re:Welcome (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one would welcome a monopoly over a lack of any service.
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Let's see what you will say *after* you are bound to their contract...
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Let's see what you will say *after* you are bound to their contract...
Well maybe he will choose not to take their contract, he still has the choice to not use the service.
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Want to sell it? PowerPCs are cool. ;-)
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I for one welcome our new monopolistic-service-providing overlords.
Fixed that for you.
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The government backed service will eliminate the market for non-government-backed competitors.
In markets where, presumably, there isn't a competitor today.
Sounds like the worst kind of monopoly. A government-backed one that will own entire regions of the US.
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Actually monopolies that are regulated by government are very effective. Reference your electric company. It is only when the gov't decides to stop regulating the monopoly's prices that things go to crap (reference Comcast). Hopefully the government will either price-fix Verizon's Wireless Internet, or other competitors like AT&T or Sprint will enter the rural market.
>>>"Because the [700 MHz] spectrum is in a lower frequency, it can transmit signals over longer distances and penetrate throug
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Let us welcome our future monopolistic overlords! so... they're gonna cap them at 5 gigs of data transfer a month for 200$ ? gotta pay for the bills of the bran new network!
Some may swallow that plan but it'll take a lot more than bran to pass it.
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Indeed, if the US had enough dark fiber we wouldn't need this plan at all.
But will it be capped? (Score:3, Interesting)
I just hope it is a service with a reasonable cap or without a cap. The current 5GB limit to the wireless internet is way to small. If it has a 100GB or over cap I'd sign up today. Currently, I run about 25GB over Sprint Broadband and would expect more with a faster service. And yes it is all legal stuff...
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Just a big question, I think, is "will I be able to get a dumb pipe?" if Verizon will offer 4G accounts with high bandwidth and high allowances, without any kind of filter or "walled garden", then will there be anything to prevent hardware manufacturers from providing 4G VoIP handsets and killing the cell phone market? Will Verizon allow that to happen?
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Each 4g handset would have to be registered on Verizon's network. Verizon will still get paid.
Yeah, but the question is whether they'll try to force you (through some means) to pay for voice service on top of the data service that you'll be paying for. It's not as though they haven't put any effort into fighting 3rd party VoIP services on their DSL lines.
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I assume it will work in much the same way as the current 3g network. They sell USB WWAN adapters that will give your computer an internet connection anywhere you can get a decent signal. The service on these devices is already data only.
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Re:But will it be capped? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they will do something completely ridiculous and charge reasonable prices for metered bandwidth.
Everyone one wins, light users pay less, heavy users get the bits they want for a reasonable amount, the company has the resources necessary to expand the network.
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I 2nd this. Metered bandwidth is the way to go. Grandpa can afford to send his three emails a month and I can do my remote development 6 days a week.
Re:But will it be capped? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Everyone one wins, light users pay less, heavy users get the bits they want for a reasonable amount, the company has the resources necessary to expand the network."
That's what happens if companies play nice.
What really happens: Light users pay exactly the same, "heavy users" will pay a lot more.
My proposition: do NOT oversell your capacity. You cannot sell what you do not have and if the network grinds to a halt, it's not the rightful users who are to blame.
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Yeah, hence the tone of the part that you didn't quote.
On the upside, moves towards sane usually seem to have some traction.
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You already have this option... call up your local provider, and ask for a dedicated T1 line. Depending on your location, you can probably get one for only a few hundred dollars a month. You get a quality of service agreement, that guarantees 1.5 Mbps all the time with no limitations and some specific up-time guarantee.
The rest of us are quite happy to share a fat pipe with a ton of other users. We realize that most people aren't using the pipe simultaneo
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Because it worked so well last time (Score:1)
Didn't Clinton throw a few billion down the same hole?
We don't really have much to show for it, do we?
Re:Because it worked so well last time (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is giving subsidies to private companies without anything that tracks where that money goes. Building Internet infrastructure is a worthwhile investment. Giving Verizon billions of dollars and saying, "I hope you build something good with this," is not such a great idea.
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You have two traffic lights? They took our single blinking caution light down about ten years ago, because it was a waste of electricity. ;) And, like you say, wireless broadband was available in town several years ago, but the tower just didn't reach me, 5 miles out of town. FINALLY, the telco offered DSL, and that's what I'll have til something better comes along. IF I CAN AFFORD IT!! 39.95/month for 300MB, which is really only about 200MB on good days just sucks.
Prediction: (Score:3, Funny)
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"Farm related porn will flood the interweb"
But think of the boost in tourism!
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"Farm related porn will flood the interweb"
But think of the boost in voyeurism!
This is great news if it happens -- (Score:3, Informative)
Verizon merging with Alltel [cnet.com] will be a big factor as Alltel has had a presence in a lot of rural and small city suburbs.
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Thanks Obama! (Score:2)
(I hope no one tells him that many rich people are going to get a lot richer thanks to this. Or that it would have been done anyway without the "stimulus" because it's a huge fat cash cow!)
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You just keep sucking at that teat.
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Eh, I wouldn't be giving crap to anyone who's actually producing somehting useful for a living, even if some bailout dollars do fall their way.
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New LTE service also means that someone's going to have to support that network. Sales, customer service, tech support, network deployment, etc. etc. While the moderately well off get richer,a nd the obscenely wealthy get even richer, there's also the result of new jobs being created.
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I hope no one tells him that many rich people are going to get a lot richer thanks to this. Or that it would have been done anyway without the "stimulus" because it's a huge fat cash cow!
The thing is is incumbent broadband providers are fighting tooth and nail to stop competition. I wouldn't surprised to see the same thing here.
Falcon
High Speed Internet Availability (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty terrible...
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The main source, if you happen to be located near the downtown area, is the cable company, who offers UP TO 2Mbps. Sadly, where I live, they don't provide service, so I'm stuck with DSL from the phone company with a maximum down speed of 512 Kbps and a mere quarter of that up.
There's another company starting up that claims to be planning to offer up to 12Mbps connections over DSL fairly soo
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I do miss my "sticky" IP, it changes alot more w/ DSL, but that's easy to work around.
Really? (Score:1)
I just tested my cable broadband at 10.9Mbps down, 3285Kbps up. Usually it's much faster, but tonight 5 other users in the house are dinging it pretty heavy with games and downloads and such. I've seen 20Mbps down, 10Mbps up but to do that I have to kick everybody else off and use my best box and the Java benchmark because the flash one isn't reliable that high up. Cross-country latency can be as low as 27ms. At work I'm sharing a couple T1's with a crew of tech geeks, so if I need to download a DVD ISO
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when I had cable I was on the 10M down / 3M up plan and I never tested above 2M down and 1M up. However when I actually downloaded things it would start fast and slow down fairly quickly. Torrents rarely exceeded 10k.
I could be spoiled bec
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It depends on the area you are in and how oversold the cable is. I have experience cable that is pretty fast (3,000kb/s downloads 5 years ago). Even though I'm only 1.5 miles from the local central office, I was too far away in the way they snaked those lines to get any DSL.
Now, with Fios, it doesn't matter so much. But cable internet was the first decent internet I had. It was a way big step-up and much cheaper than the ISDN we had previously, which itself, was only marginally faster than dialup at tim
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What are those other people stuck with, dialup? That's beyond terrible...
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You know, I read somewhere that in rural areas they don't have the device density that they have in urban corridors serviced by the standard Cellular tower density, so in practice congestion might not be as much of an issue. Also I hear that cows don't put out a lot of EMR interference and a cornfield doesn't have as many massive obstructions as a city core.
Which leaves holes. And if you're in a hole in the ground and you're expecting good cellular reception, it doesn't matter whether the hole is in the
New network on phones? (Score:3, Insightful)
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here you are. [htc.com]
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i can tether my phone to any computer for $15 extra bucks a month. whether that's reasonable enough to drop [insert bane of your existance home provider here] for the drastic speed difference and limited cap is debatable.
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It would be nice if we could use this new wireless network on our smart phones and then let us tether our phones to our computers so that we could use it on the go and at home for one "reasonable price."
Yea, I read in an article on CNet [cnet.com] broadband will be fixed not mobile.
Falcon
New Qualcomm Technology (Score:2)
I've heard they're going to use Qualcomm's new dynamic network of Wolfpigeons to get as much coverage as possible - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3agYeT-T9co [youtube.com]
Fios or Wireless (Score:1)
I wonder what path this will take?
I can't help but wish Google had won the auction. Yes their a corporation like the others, but I like their products and prices better than Verizons' products and prices in general.
Meh (Score:1)
My sister can't even get FiOS where she lives.
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Neither can the vast majority of the country, dude.
Why is everyone ignoring the latency issues? (Score:4, Insightful)
Latency that's even half that is useless for many applications, and just frustratingly slow for just about all the rest.
Are we just heading for a new definition of the digital divide whereby some people don't have access to *useful* broadband?
-Nev
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Because with EVDO there are no bad latency issues. ATT 3G is not very good. HSDPA and UMTS in their current form are less capable than EVDO, which has ping times under 100ms. If ATT would support HSUPA, then they would get 3.6 Mb/s on the link.
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I feel your pain. I was with wild blue and those latency times made my internet use almost useless. I got a sprint mobile on USB and my d/l is typically 1.2mbps but latency is usually around 100 and has never been over 200. Yes its 60 bucks a month but wild blue was 80 so get outta that contract homie.
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Video conferencing (Score:3, Insightful)
Latency does not matter for media streaming
It matters for video conferencing, which as far as I know has a similar bandwidth requirement to YouTube in each direction.
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What desktop applications significantly deteriorate as a result of high latency?
I suppose it'd be annoying for video conferencing and gaming, though it seems like it'd be adequately tolerable (ie. still way better than dial-up) for most web browsing.
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What desktop applications significantly deteriorate as a result of high latency?
SSH, X, VNC, Remote Desktop, GoToMyPC by Citrix, etc. Or even web pages that use XMLHttpRequest.
Re:Why is everyone ignoring the latency issues? (Score:4, Informative)
It seems as though everyone's excited about "wireless broadband", but the speedtest app on my iPhone says 416ms ping while I'm on 3G.
Speedtest.net from my PC when it is connected to my Cradlepoint WAP, which in turn is connected to Verizon's 3G EVDO network, shows me 150 ms latency all the time. Xbox360 games, EVE Online, other PC games, they all work great over my 3G service.
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I don't know what is with the Speedtest.net service but their latency calculation is terrible.
If I manually ping a server based in London I can get pings of down to 20ms, when I do it on the site I get a ping of 300ms minimum.
I don't know if their servers are struggling or it's just the site has been terribley written, but it sure isn't accurate.
Re:Why is everyone ignoring the latency issues? (Score:4, Informative)
From http://mobiledevdesign.com/tutorials/lte_next_step_cellular_3g-1027/ [mobiledevdesign.com]
"Network latency will also improve, from as much as 200 ms today to 5 to 10 ms with LTE."
What does "have access to broadband" mean? (Score:2)
I interpret that as meaning "can get broadband of some sort if they chose to pay for it"; if that's the case, then the numbers given for cities and suburbs are shockingly low -- so low, in fact, that I don't believe that the phrase means what it appears to mean. I'd guess they mean "actually have broadband in their home," in which case the figure cited for rural areas in meaningless if we're talking about potential broadband penetration.
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I interpret that as meaning "can get broadband of some sort if they chose to pay for it"; if that's the case, then the numbers given for cities and suburbs are shockingly low -- so low, in fact, that I don't believe that the phrase means what it appears to mean. I'd guess they mean "actually have broadband in their home," in which case the figure cited for rural areas in meaningless if we're talking about potential broadband penetration.
Even in New York City [broadbandcensus.com] broadband [citylimits.org] isn't available everywhere [nycfuture.org].
Falcon
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Even in New York City broadband isn't available everywhere.
One of your three articles is about NYC nixing municipal wifi (a stupid idea anyway), and the other TWO are from five years ago.
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One of your three articles is about NYC nixing municipal wifi (a stupid idea anyway), and the other TWO are from five years ago.
So, I didn't limit the tyme. Try this, from 7 August 2008: "New York City and State Each Craft Broadband Policies [benton.org]". "Cheap New York High Speed Internet... [isp1.us]" dated April 2009 says "Most New York high speed services are available in New York City." As for the muni wifi article, perhaps you didn't read where it says "August 7 - New York City should not create a comprehensive munici
America? (Score:1)
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It is in U.S. English.
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Which one?
The northern one is referred to as "North America."
The southern one is referred to as "South America."
Both together are referred to as "the Americas."
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Actually, you would be incorrect. There is no "Central American" continent.
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I usually say North America to refer to the continent. This has the added benefit of distinguishing it from South America.
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You want the US to annex the rest of North and South America? That's nut, but you did ask nicely, so I'll see what I can do.
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The continents are North American, South America and Central America.
America is short for the United States of America which is the only country to use the America on its own. So saying America is no different than saying Britain despite the fact the nation's actual name is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Britain is a good example too because, speaking of mistakes with locations, it's often referred to as a country but Britain is not a country but a nation or stat
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'Chaval' is Spanish, so I wouldn't be surprised if gp is from Central or South America (or has such roots), rather than Canada (you loosely implied that they were from Canada, or, at least, I read your post that way).
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Yes it is.
The continents are North American, South America and Central America.
America is short for the United States of America which is the only country to use the America on its own. So saying America is no different than saying Britain despite the fact the nation's actual name is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Britain is a good example too because, speaking of mistakes with locations, it's often referred to as a country but Britain is not a country but a nation or state made up of countries. But British people seem to have less of an issue with this than Canadians do with the term America even though it's 100% correct to abbreviate the USA as America and Canada has nothing to do with America as there is no continent America.
I'm not sure where you went to school, but there are only 2 "American" continents. They are North and South America. Central America is a region, not a continent.
How are we of service? (Score:2)
This question has been on my mind and it's relatively related to the topic of the article, so I'm interested to hear you folks feedback. How can we as computer scientists and IT pros be of service to society?
I've had some people tell me medical applications of CS are where it's at, others point to projects like OLPC, others say get rich and give away your money. Others still tell me to just do my work well and let the rest take care of itself. As a computer scientist, I feel like I have training and backgr
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Deja Vu... (Score:2)
If Verizon does as well with this as they did with Net Day and E-Rate, they'll get all $7B+ and deliver some moderately-broadband service to some of rural America.
And get rural Americans to pay for it all over again. And again.
Our patriotism at work, finally!
Lack of widespread demand ... (Score:2)
Broadband penetration in rural counties is likely to plateau around 50% in the foreseeable future not for lack of supply but for lack of strong demand, especially when technical challenges will push the price considerably above dialup.
I know that /. is the wrong place to say this, but many people (myself absolutely not included) can get by with minimal internet usage. Insisting that they must secretly want to be like us is flattering, perhaps, but it's delusional and paternalistic.
Followup:
http://techlibera [techliberation.com]
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I agree. The upside for Verizon, though, is that this will also provide voice services to rural America of which it is heavily lacking now (just view AT&T's or Verizon Wireless's coverage maps on their website). The users that want this for broadband is icing on the cake.
Win / Win situation (Score:2)
Haha Yeah (Score:2)
Just wait til they try to erect yet another tower in yeat another 'pristine' park that is just too close to someone's backyard.
Australia (Score:2)
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Huh - all of 'heavily populated' Australia has 3G and even most of rural Australia has it. Telstra's NextG network covers 99% of the population (and yes, it's 3G/HSDPA, on the 850 Mhz band). Sure it's overpriced and Telstra is evil ... but virtually ALL of Australia has it available, and it's damn fast too as wireless services go.
What you probably meant is the other carriers (Vodafone, 3, Optus etc) don't have 3G coverage in some heavily populated areas. Which is true. But it's not true to say there's no 3G
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What you probably meant is the other carriers (Vodafone, 3, Optus etc) don't have 3G coverage in some heavily populated areas. Which is true. But it's not true to say there's no 3G service at all.
Yes that is pretty much what I meant. Thanks for clarifying.
Been there, done that (Score:1)
I'm posting from my PC, tethered to my cell phone, so I'm getting a kick out of these replies...
Live waaaay out in the boonies, surrounded by evergreen trees
At&T (or are they cingular again?)
HTC tilt via the "hidden" internet conection sharing & usb (winmo & windows xp (yeah, I know - boo, hiss!)) - standard internet plan
13 dBi antenna from ebay (cellgear-usa)
Went from 30-60kbps & 650+ ping, to minimum 150kbps(edge max) & 2-300 ping, popping up to 1.5mbps(3G) occasionally. On their advi
Antenna size (Score:2)
It's important to recognize that the size of the antenna is bigger at 700mhz. Remember the old phones with the antenna you extend? 1/4 wave at 700mhz is 4.2 inches. Compared to the 1.2 inches at 2.4ghz, I don't think manufacturers would be able to conceal it within the device and still get good performance.