RSSRural America, your WiMAX is waiting
By Tim Conneally | Published April 27, 2009, 3:38 PM
Soon, funds from the 7.2 billion dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be available, with $2.5 billion going to fund rural broadband projects through the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS). This funding is intended to be used in the construction, improvement, or acquisition of facilities to provide broadband to unserved and underserved locations in the US.
The 2008 Farm Bill (1.5 MB PDF available here) defines eligible rural communities as any area other than a city, town, or unincorporated area with a population greater than 20,000 inhabitants, or a city, town or unincorporated area with fewer than 50,000.
For those of us living in areas served by fiber-to-the-home and 3G wireless, any venture outside of our coverage blanket feels like a journey into the past. But in truth, if you cover your eyes and point to a United States map, the odds are in favor of your finger hitting an underserved rural area where the adoption of new technology is hampered by its lagging infrastructure.
The FCC categorizes the possible rural broadband options -- and certainly those in the whole of the US -- as: DSL, cable, satellite, fiberoptic, BPL (Broadband over Power Line) and wireless. A crucial debate thus far has been over which method of connection is the most advantageous, but wireless has been getting strong support in recent months.
Thanks to test deployments of WiMAX in extreme locations like the remote Ta Van village in northern Vietnam, and in under-connected African countries like Benin and Cameroon, deployments can begin quickly, cheaply, and in spite of harsh conditions. Unlike fiber and copper, no digging is required in a WiMAX network. Base stations can be set up, moved, or upgraded with relative ease.
Because the guidelines for receiving stimulus grants are still very unclear, and Congress has stressed that it wants practical solutions as quickly as possible, WiMAX is in a unique position. American WiMAX supporters like Airspan Networks are eager to show that it is "ready to roll" with both back-end and CPE hardware available, economically viable, flexible, and able to support the capacity and speed minimums that will be laid down by the government in the upcoming grant programs.
Even though early supporters of the wireless standard such as Nokia have grown skeptical of its potential as LTE has gained major support in the mobile sector, WiMAX still has much to offer and could experience a big boom as early as next month.
While I appreciate what WiMAX offers, we have it in this town of 35,000 with 1 tower.
Apparently, the signal is so weak that they would have to mount the "portable" device above my house in order to receive a clear signal. I wonder if they'll plan minimally. There is definitely a need in the more rural areas since HughesNet (DirecPC?) is the only high speed service available and it's very very pricey.
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|What??????????????
I don't care what technology is used. It still requires that those who deploy it have a clue as to how to do it correctly.
That has NOTHING to do with the technology.
You have OTHER more fundamental issues.
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|The minimum of having 20,000 people doesn't make it very good for rural people at all since that's the size of a decent sized town. I am not sure there are much more than that in my parent's home county, total.
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|"rural communities as any area other than a city, town, or unincorporated area with a population greater than 20,000 inhabitants, or a city, town or unincorporated area with fewer than 50,000."
Notice the words "other than".
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|Regardless of whether it can be a place "other than a city, town, or unincorporated area," it still requires 20,000 people, so the question remains, "What use is it for rural people?"
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|Clueless, the program is for smaller communities in more rural areas.
There are still minimum density requirements, as it makes absolutely NO sense to install a transceiver for only, say, 2 households in the transceiver coverage area!
A little common sense goes a long way. Except in your case where the minimum threshold seems not to have been reached.
;-)
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|There is too much focus on the "last mile" as if that's all you need to give everyone high-speed internet. My experience shows that the ISP's backbone is as important as the "last mile" speed. I am a "barely served" rural dweller whose "narrow-band" internet use is via cellular 3G. My connection supports up to 800 Mb/s during low-use periods, but can slow to dial-up speed (or less!) during high-use periods. My daughter experienced similar problems with her former cable ISP. So just giving everyone fast "last mile" speed doesn't get them real broadband when they get throttled by the ISP backbone.
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|The "last mile" is usually the weakest link in the chain, hence all the concern.
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|"There is too much focus on the "last mile""
Not at all, as all the options mentioned are approaches to addressing the issue!
FIOS does it with hard wired fiber drops. WiMax does it with broadband wireless. The real advantage of WiMax is its relative low cost and its much larger radiative coverage radius.
Thus, with WiMax, you eliminate the material and labor investment of extending feeders and installing drops to each address, as well as the subsequent ongoing maintenance and pole rental charges that come with a wired solution. And you effectively converge landline and wireless services with the most expeditious application of both trunk and, in the case of wireless, a virtual 'drop'.
The WiMax transceivers are nodes attached to a fiber trunk.
Not sure I understand what you mean - or that you necessarily understand what you mean - by the reference to an "ISP backbone"?
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|I have to admit..some of the cynical posts about this bit of the porkulus package had started to make me concerned. However, if the qualifying criteria are actually adhered to, I'd say there's little chance of entrenched landline ISPs pocketing this money and giving nothing back for it. This a good thing because the only way you'll get any short-term "stimulus" from this program is by opening the door to new players in the ISP business. The real benefits of conquering the Last Mile won't really be seen for a number of years.
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|Far too many questions remain.
WiMax is definitely a 'disruptive technology' that offers A LOT of potential.
But fundamental issues of interoperability, openness, etc. etc. etc. have not been adequately addressed regarding how this will be implemented.
On the surface, it sounds great - and the potential is there. BUT, the devil is indeed in the details. And at this point I fear the details will render this - as stated - little more than lots of attractive hype. And as such, it will either simply become public money spent to augment already proprietary systems, or a network that has far less potential than it could have had...
Oh, and WiMax effectively removes the last mile as an issue issue.This is precisley why it is disruptive.
The other issues of its use versus such competition as LTE-A and HSDPA (for 3G), is simply the control of the network. And the other baby bels are desperately trying to retain absolute control, and thus their adoption of alternative technology. .
Verizon is saddled with going forward with its financial boondoggle of an investment in FIOS, as WiMax effectively provides broadband from the transceiver to the house, where any 'WiMax' compatible device, be it your telephone, fax, whatever, can be activated on your 'home' network account wirelessly, and devices such as phones can effectively function as a cell when you take it from the house. The distinction between home and remote network becomes moot (aside from outside the network roaming issues which have other considerations).
Conversely, Verizon sunk billions into working on solving the last mile issue with issues inherent with fiber splicing and decided, more due to inertia and lots of folks refusing to abandon their vested interest in their career focus effectively being deemed a failure, decided to effectively overbuild their wired network with fiber to EVERY house with its exorbitant labor and materials cost and prohibitive payback period simply to have their own broadband network.
I other words, WiMax leverages the exisiting hi-speed, hi-bandwidth fiber trucks to do more cheaply, what Verizon is doing the hard and expensive way. Complete with ongoing pole rental expenses! Whereas all WiMax need due if capacity is reached, is install an additional transceiver. And both are faced with the same issue if the trunk capacity is reached, and that is simply to overbuild with additional trunk - which is relatively simple to do.
Thus WiMax effectively does to cell and landline and FIOS exactly what cell did to landline and satellite did to cable. Greater throughput with less overhead in terms of plant, labor, routine maintenance and associated infrastructure costs ranging from material, active devices and their maintenance, and perhaps most importantly, pole rental costs and continuing plant maintenance due to exceptional causes such as storms, car/pole accidents, tree damage, etc.
But, Verizon aside, some major issues remain! There have been calls for a single standard in wireless since the early days, especially by Ericsson, who one might think would be better served building equipment for multiple technologies. But we've never had a single standard in the history of cellular wide-area communications. Different analog systems, and then CDMA, TDMA, and GSM. And then two key standards in 3G today, UMTS and CDMA2000, in addition to a variety of others including WiMax.
Can we converge to a single wide-area-standard for 4G?
My gut feeling is that this is doubtful. And if we did, the standard would most likely be LTE. And WiMAX would be frozen out. Whenever two technologies perform the same function, the one with the larger installed base wins. And the parent companies who have settled on LTE do. And technological excellence has little to do with the outcome. Marketing is more important than engineering, as illustrated by the global GSM community sticking together like a flock of proverbial ostriches and not having to think about such issues with their heads stuck up their ... in the sand.
Indeed, more issues remain.
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