Re: The embarrassment of American broadband

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Sean Berry <berry () housebsd org>
Date: April 27, 2009 2:30:55 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   The embarrassment of American broadband


The Bay Area is not flat: there are many little corners, up hills, or  
down in canyons, where wireless isn't practical, and even telephone  
and electricity doesn't benefit from much shared access.  If a winter  
storm takes out a particular power pole, there can be a half dozen +  
houses out for days while 100' of utility gets re-rigged.

With these costs of infrastructure, it's definitely harder to get high- 
speed broadband (anything more than 100kbps) into these areas for a  
"reasonable" price.  Of course, in areas like central Iowa, where a  
grain elevator is a relatively common occurrence, and the surrounding  
geography is not complicated, wireless broadband starts to make a lot  
more sense.

Some of the earliest modern (802.11b) long range (3+ miles) wireless  
internet access in the Bay Area was done line of sight to an office  
building in downtown San Jose, but that site did happen to be in one  
of the flatter areas of the South Bay.

--
Sean Berry
berry () housebsd org
414 339 1033

> From: Joshua Tinnin <krinklyfig () gmail com>
> Date: April 27, 2009 6:20:17 AM EDT
> To: bill.stewart () pobox com, David Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: Re: [IP] The embarrassment of American broadband
> Reply-To: krinklyfig () gmail com
>
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 06:26:33AM -0400, David Farber wrote:
> > Begin forwarded message:
> > From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart () pobox com>
> > Date: April 26, 2009 11:17:40 PM EDT
> > To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
> > Subject: Re: The embarrassment of American broadband
> ...
> > The reason Brett objects to the cost of wholesale bandwidth
> > he has to buy, and therefore to heavy bandwidth users,
> > has a lot to do with why he's standing out on customer
> > roofs in bad weather installing antennas -
> > it's because he wants to provide good service
> > but lives way out in the middle of nowhere
> > instead of somewhere warm and civilized.
> > And he's visited the Bay Area often enough
> > that it must be out of stubbornness, not ignorance :-)
>
> I understand this is sort of a friendly jab, but I've lived in the Bay
> Area, and now I live in Taos, NM, with a greater metro population of
> around 20,000 - Taos itself is only around 5000. I work for an ISP
> which provides fixed point wireless as well as DSL (the latter is over
> the Qwest network). In the middle of town next to the CO, you can get
> 6-7Mbps with DSL. We can provide a 3Mbs synchronous connection over
> wireless in most cases, though it's not cheap, but all our plans are
> without caps. I'm not aware that the Bay Area is able to provide  
> faster
> connectivity than Taos at this point, which is surprising, but I also
> recall that there are holes in the broadband coverage in the Bay. Not
> everyone there can even get a high speed connection, at least last I
> checked (a couple years ago). IIRC, parts of the peninsula in  
> particular
> lacked broadband. Heck, even in podunk Questa north of us (much  
> smaller
> than Taos) they have 1.5Mbs DSL.
>
> - jt
>
>
>
>
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