access may be the next Internet revolution

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
> Subject: Broadband A Go-Go / In city after city, high-speed wireless
>  access may be the next Internet revolution
>
>
> WIRELESS
>
> Broadband A Go-Go
>
> In city after city, high-speed wireless access may be the next
> Internet revolution
>
> By Steven M. Cherry
>
> I've got a Dell laptop on my knees and the wind is in my (very short)
> hair. I've got as many windows open as a beach house in summer-Google
> searches and instant messages to my wife; in the background, a new
> batch of e-mails downloads and my hometown public radio station
> streams on. It's the usual cruise down the information superhighway
> at 2 Mb/s.
>
> But I'm also hurtling down an actual superhighway-U.S. Interstate 4,
> at a very real 115 km/h. I'm in a Ford Mustang convertible, under
> cotton-ball clouds and a postcard-blue Florida sky. The Dell is
> outfitted with a prototype card that communicates with a test network
> set up by broadband wireless start-up MeshNetworks Inc.
>
> Earlier and a few miles away in Mesh's Maitland headquarters, outside
> Orlando, I had asked Rick Rotondo, whose business card calls him
> Mesh's "director of disruptive technologies," how fast we could go
> and still retain a broadband connection. After all, laptops using the
> best-known wireless Internet technology, IEEE 802.11, will move
> beyond an access point and lose their connections at mere bicycle
> speeds. Rotondo had grinned impishly and asked, "How big a speeding
> ticket do you want to pay?"
>
> Even at speed-limit speeds, the Mesh network held up, with download
> data rates of at least 500 kb/s. That's faster, on the road and in
> the air, than Aerie Network Inc.'s Ricochet service, which blankets
> Denver with 128 kb/s coverage, maintaining connections at city-street
> driving speeds of about 45 km/h. Though slower than Mesh, Ricochet is
> no experiment-it made a highly publicized but failed attempt to go
> national in 2000, and now lives on in the Mile High City with several
> thousand subscribers. One, the Denver Police Department, uses it to
> put squad cars on the department's internal network.
>
> ...
>
> http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jun03/bb.html


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