Interesting People mailing list archives
Is competition likely in U.S. broadband?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:41:20 -0700
________________________________________ From: Robert J. Berger [rberger () ibd com] Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2008 6:41 PM To: Brett Glass Cc: David Farber; Dave Burstein; Dewayne Hendricks Subject: Re: [IP] Is competition likely in U.S. broadband? I've been involved with muni-wireless both on the hardware side and the service provider side from 1999 - 2007. I am a major proponent of opening up the spectrum to innovative uses. But my experience has proven to me that there is no way wireless is going to deliver 10's of Mbps let alone Gbps to the consumer anytime soon due the issues of propagation (the need for "basestation" densities far greater than what is economically afordable and/or the need for outdoor mounting and thus truck rolls for every deployment). I am no longer directly involved in the wireless industry because I have concluded that the technology is not ready for primetime and it won't be for several cycles of Moore's Law. Being able to build some one off Millimeter Wave (MMW) or LMDS radios is far different than getting mass produced radios with a parts cost of less than $50 (which is what is needed for viable mass market CPE). Note that all the existing MMW or LMDS radios are selling in the 10's of thousands of dollar range and are point to point. So there is quite a bit of a learning curve to get to a couple of hundred dollars CPE with mesh or Point to Multi-point. LMDS / MMW radios might be doable for a rural business network like Brett's but its not doable any time soon for mass market suburban / urban consumer environments. They are definitely viable (and being used) now for point to point backhaul links where there is no viable fiber, for applications like Cell tower backhaul or bringing bandwidth to office buildings. These kind of links can justify the $20k - $40k / link capital costs and fit in the 1 - 2 mile pure line of sight categories. The line of sight / obstruction issues make it unsuitable for suburban/ urban consumer deployments. Because of the need to have aligned outdoor (and probably roof mounted) antennas, each installation will require a truck roll to install the unit on each customer home. There can be NO obstructions between the home unit and the base station or relay unit. There are very little locations that would allow for clear line of sight between a large number of homes and basestations even assuming basestations are spaced in 1 mile radius cells. Rain limits range and/or reliability in these frequencies. Like I mentioned many times before, a super dense mesh of super intelligent, frequency agile (across Gigahertz of spectrum) cognitive radios that cost a few dollars or less to make could make it possible to beat out fiber. But we'll probably have nanotech or arfid clouds that connect us all via telepathy before that (See http://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/ :-) In the meantime wireless will still have to compete with fiber. In any case, both Fiber and Wireless are blocked by oligopolies that are in bed with the regulators. If that regulator / oligopoly blockade was broken, fiber is going to deliver more for less than wireless for suburban/urban environments anytime in the next decade. So we still need to figure out how to create the economic/political entity that can bypass the Telco/CableCo Oligopoly. Wireless is not going to give us a technological magic wand to do that. Rob On Jul 26, 2008, at 11:00 AM, Dewayne Hendricks wrote:
On Jul 26, 2008, at 10:47 AM, Brett Glass wrote:Now I'm all for breaking up spectrum and last mile monopolies, but wireless won't be the way to do it any time soon.I repeat: I could do it now. I see that you've copied Dewayne on this thread; he knows enough of the physics to confirm that it is not only feasible but easier than designing, say, a good 802.11a chipset. Get me some capital and some spectrum and I can do it.I go along with Brett's comments here. Everything he says is quite feasible. Amateur radio (aka hams) has been doing wondrous things in micro and milli meter wave for years now. Its one of the areas where you can still build your own equipment, like Brett suggests. It would be fairly easy to ramp a design up to low cost production. He's also correct about the spectrum issue. If the spectrum was there, so would be the capital to put it to use, which would also drive the development of better technology. -- Dewayne
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Current thread:
- Is competition likely in U.S. broadband? David Farber (Jul 24)
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- Is competition likely in U.S. broadband? David Farber (Jul 25)
- Is competition likely in U.S. broadband? David Farber (Jul 26)
- Re: Is competition likely in U.S. broadband? David Farber (Jul 28)