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Australian Researchers Push Near-Broadband IP Over VHF

Posted by timothy on Mon Dec 08, 2003 10:28 PM
from the verified-horse-feathers dept.
Wireless Networking The Internet Hardware Technology
Curmudgeon Rick writes "A research group at the Australian National University is getting symmetrical 250K bps at 20km, using "empty" 7MHz-wide broadcast TV allocations in the 45MHz band. Story here, project homepage here. Aim is to put some bandwidth out beyond the reach of the wires, where users are few and far between."
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Australian Researchers Push Near-Broadband IP Over VHF 50 Comments More /

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  • wow! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So now even my TV can get b roadband!

  • Cool and all (Score:5, Funny)

    by mphase (644838) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:34PM (#7665535) Homepage
    ...but doesn't this just mean one lucky bastard in the boonies will be getting good speeds or 50 unlucky bastards getting crap speed?

  • New slogan? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Silent Bob On Couch (669565) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:34PM (#7665538) Homepage
    I wonder if this will be marketed in the US for rural areas. I can hear the slogan now...

    "VHF... Australian for Broadband."

  • broadband ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2003, @10:36PM (#7665546)
    i allways thought broadband was at least 10mbit, this is 'only' as fast as 4 isdn lines, sure better than dialup but nowhere near broadband..

    • Re:broadband ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by motivator_bob (322365) on Monday December 08 2003, @11:00PM (#7665690)
      Narrowband: less than 2Mbps (POTS, ISDN, etc)
      Broadband: greater than or = 2Mbps.

      Most DSL lines work at under 1Mbps (home users don't need more and it's damned expensive if telcos offer it at all), but in full flight, it can reach around 8Mbps, so it's technically broadband.

      One man's *near* broadband is another man's 2B+D.

      • Re:broadband ? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Crypto Gnome (651401) on Monday December 08 2003, @11:35PM (#7665873) Homepage Journal
        I believe than in Australia Telstra urged the government to defind broadband as "128Kbps and up" so that they (Telstra) could then claim that (whatever the exact statistic is) the vast majority of Australians have access to internet at broadband speeds.

        Something to do with Telstra being legally required to provide said "broadband" coverage, by a certain date, or be subject to fines/limitations on expansion into other markets/or something.

        No surprises here, just Yet Another Big Business redefining reality so that they can wipe their hands of their legally bound responsibilities and rape their customers for further profits.

    • FAQ (Score:2, Informative)

      by foobsr (693224)
      FAQ [dslreports.com]...etc.

      CC.

  • Be nice (Score:4, Funny)

    by roninmagus (721889) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:39PM (#7665563) Homepage
    It'd be nice, but unfortunately my VCR does not support the Australian internet.

    ;-)

    That's coming from an ebayer embittered by NTSC purchases :)

  • near-broadband? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slavitos (666569) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:40PM (#7665567) Homepage
    Interesting term, "near-broadband".... If I am not mistaken, broadband is defined as a communications medium that can be divided into multiple segments that can be used for different purposes (e.g. voice, data, video, etc).

    Isn't "nearbroadband" almost the same concept as being "almost pregnant"?

    • Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mindstrm (20013) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:48PM (#7665617)
      But the term "broadband" has come to mean "fast" in the common language. Thank the media for that.

      In the olden days, the highest speed things tended to be broadband, so the meaning just got twisted.

      I'd say, considering speeds and waht is noramlly known as broadband in the US... 250kbps qualifies as "near broadband"... people usually think 1mbps is broadband.

      • Actually the highest speed things are baseband. Mainly because you don't have to waste bandwidth sharing it between different transmission methods.
    • Isn't "nearbroadband" almost the same concept as being "almost pregnant"?

      see below...

      But the term "broadband" has come to mean "fast" in the common language. Thank the media for that.

      well if yer that fast...you are far more likely to be pregnant, than not, no?
    • No, closer to being "slightly fatally injured."

  • Could be a nice alternative.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iantri (687643) <iantri@@@gmx...net> on Monday December 08 2003, @10:40PM (#7665571) Homepage
    This could be a nice alternative for those of us who still aren't able to get broadband (No DSL where I am and Rogers Cable never bothered to run cable to the last three houses. Guess where I am! GRR), without all the potential problems with broadband over power lines (signal leakage, interfering with ham radio).

    • Re:Could be a nice alternative.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zerocool^ (112121) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:50PM (#7665639) Homepage Journal
      This is my *one and only* problem with moving out into the country. My fiancee and I are casually looking at houses, expecting to possibly be buying next spring (house buying season). With interest rates what they are, and property values going up quickly where I live (my parents bought their house 1995 for $154k, now worth >$300k), we'd like to get a house of our own, but not on a zero-lot-line, no privacy, near all the people kind of land.

      The only problem is: Move into the sticks, no always on internet. This would be a godsend for me - I don't want high speeds, I don't do online gaming, and I don't download a bunch of stuff, but I do want it to be on *all* the time. I want to be able to sit at my desk and see who's online on IM, and to check my mail or look at the news.

      This would be *perfect*. Hope they can figure out the details in the next few years. In the mean time, I may be investigating satelite internet.

      ~Will

      • Re:Could be a nice alternative.. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by anethema (99553) on Monday December 08 2003, @11:16PM (#7665770) Homepage
        If you have a some high land nearby...or a small tower, you could set something up with a friend to use some of his/her bandwidth via a laser or WiFi connection. I'm setting up a 2 person laser lan with a friend of mine, and hes 20 km away. I've got to bounce it back across one hill because i dont have line of sight. 10mbps. It's doable.

        You also dont usually have to be too far from town to get a nice country home. I rent a place on 2 acres of green grassy land, 3 gardens, etc, for 950 a month. Of course I'm in canada, and there is probly a lot more nice available real-estate up here, but still, I live like 30 seconds drive from town, and 10 minutes from down-town kelowna.

  • Wait a Minute (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2003, @10:42PM (#7665578)
    Does Telestra know this? Surely they'll want to put a stop to any competitors of theirs.

  • There's a problem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by carambola5 (456983) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:45PM (#7665600) Homepage
    where users are few and far between

    Sorry, but speaking from purely a capitalist's point of view, the keyword here is few. As cool as the technology is, it'll never take off.

    • Re:There's a problem (Score:5, Informative)

      by martinX (672498) on Tuesday December 09 2003, @12:00AM (#7665978)

      That's not entirely true.

      In the land Down Under, Telstra [telstra.com.au] is the dominant telco, and it's currently 51% government owned. The current Liberal Party [liberal.org.au] (think: nice Republicans)-National Party [nationals.org.au] (think: farmers) coalition government really wants to flog off the rest. The problem is that Telstra provides many services to the underpopulated areas (aka "the Bush", who are generally represented by the National Party half of the Coalition) that really don't make much economic sense but make a lot of political sense. Also, it's sort of halfway decent that the outback farmers get at least a phone service. Anyway, every man and his dog knows that if Telstra gets fully privatised, *bang* there goes any semblance of service to the bush, since it is just not econmical.

      To that end, the government has brought in a Service Guarantee (including Universal Service Obligations [dcita.gov.au]) that says (amongst other things) Telstra must provide certain minimum standards to all subscribers, and if they don't they get smacked. The government hopes that after a few years we'll all see what a good corporate citizen Telstra is and give the Libs the OK to flog off the other 51% of Telstra.

      Now, one big complaint from the bush is that they get bugger all access to broadband. Even getting net access at all can be tricky for them. Satellite (if available) is very expensive. This would almost certainly not improve under a toally privatised Telstra. However, if Telstra could provide near-broadband to the bush without having to string up hundreds of miles of cable, things would again be looking promising for the privatisation thing to be on the agenda again.

      Speaking from a purely Australian voter/taxpayer POV, the keyphrase is the National Party might be the junior member of the coalition but they can wield a fair amount of power over the Libs when they want to.

      .

  • This story is wrong. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bruce Perens (3872) * <bruce@pe[ ]s.com ['ren' in gap]> on Monday December 08 2003, @10:46PM (#7665605) Homepage Journal
    The stuff about VHF following the curve of the atmosphere and bouncing off of the ionosphere isn't quite right. That's HF. The frequency in use for this experiment, 45 MHz, would bounce during sunspot maxima but you can't build a communications system with it if you need it to bounce. Also, the choice of frequency is strange - 45 MHz rather than microwave, where there would be much less of a problem. Do they mean to run a star topology rather than point-to-point? 7 MHz for 250 Kbps is not so great. You should get 28 250Kbps channels in there. Multipath would be the main problem.

    Mesh networking would be a better idea than all of this. More bandwidth, more parallelism, less power.

    It doesn't sound as if they are really ready to talk about frequency coordination with other users. I hope they don't go about asking for spectrum for anything but experimentation this early in their project.

    Bruce

    • 250bps mesh isn't all that great bruce, having worked at ricochet tech support and having sat right underneath the main los gatos WAP and being able to see at least 6 other WAPs from that spot I can tell you the performance was crud.

      Even at double the bps, it still would be crud performance...

      The only place mesh seems to work well is over high speed, low latency copper wire or fiber, since the number of transmission retries are zero to nil.

      I'm not trying to troll, i'm just trying to point out an inherant

  • Actual Link to Story at ANU (Score:3, Informative)

    by LuxuryYacht (229372) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:47PM (#7665612) Homepage
    ANU... go to bottom of page [anu.edu.au]

    Conquering that 'last mile'

    Pioneering work by physicists and engineers at ANU to build a cheap, simple and robust wireless communication system may soon see regional Australia getting a workable connection to the Internet. The system is called BushLAN, and it's all about bridging that 'last mile'.

    Regional Australia has never had adequate access to the Internet. It's either not available, too expensive or unreliable. A major part of the problem is the 'last mile' of access. This 'last mile' is the connection between the central communications hub in a local town to individual residences and businesses. Unfortunately, the 'last mile' is usually much more than just a mile. In rural areas such as Cowra, for example, the last mile has been measured to be anywhere from three to 100 kilometres from the town centre. In more isolated areas it can be much greater.

    The cost of cabling to only a few customers over these distances is prohibitive and current wireless solutions aren't practical. Satellite connections are expensive and usually require a cable connection for a user to send information out (ie they receive downloads from a satellite but send information out via the telephone). There are ground-based wireless connections commercially available but these operate in microwave frequencies using directional antennas that require a clear line of sight to function. Given Australia's sparse population and frequently hilly terrain this would require a large number of repeater stations.

    Dr Gerard Borg is a plasma physicist at the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering. His work with radio transmission has convinced him that the last mile could be effectively bridged using the low-VHF radio spectrum. This part of the radio spectrum has much longer wavelengths than the microwave frequencies used by other wireless systems and this allows signals to be transmitted further without the need for expensive repeaters or satellites. What's more, it doesn't depend on line of sight as the signal has the ability to go around mountains and other large obstacles in the landscape. At the moment the low VHF radio spectrum is used to transmit TV signals but with the decommissioning of some analogue TV bands in 2008 (digital TV uses higher frequency radio) there's an opportunity to switch this unused spectrum over to data connections for regional Australia.

    BushLAN (Bush - Local Area Network), as the system is called, has the potential to provide remote users in regional Australia with a permanent, high-quality Internet connection (at more than 100 kb/sec) at an affordable price. However, to get BushLAN up and running, many technical and marketing aspects of this multi-faceted system have to be developed first. To achieve his goal, Dr Borg has enlisted the assistance of a wide range of students from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology who have taken on the various jobs associated with the system as part of their Honours, Masters or Doctoral projects.

    "The practical nature of BushLAN and its relevance to regional Australia really attracts the students," says Dr Borg. "Once they're involved, they become highly motivated about what we're trying to achieve. Quite often they finish the formal part of their work for their thesis, but then they stay on working on the project through the Christmas vacation."

    The next step for BushLAN is to set up local trials to test transmissions, and then work with interested Internet service providers to see how BushLAN can be integrated into existing information systems. The hope is that with BushLAN as part of the system, the 'final mile' will no longer be an unbeatable hurdle.

    Science Reporter is brought to you by the National Institute of Bioscience, the National Institute of Engineering and Information Sciences, the National Institute for the Environment, the National Institute of Health and Human Sciences and the National Institute of Physical Sciences. Written by David Salt.

    For more information on any of the stories presented here please visit http://ni.anu.edu.au/

  • BB Speeds (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dylancable (718004) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:48PM (#7665616)
    In Australia the ACCC defines BroadBand as 200kps and over.

  • Downtown areas. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jfisherwa (323744) <jason.fisher@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Monday December 08 2003, @10:52PM (#7665644) Homepage
    As a frequency this low will generally pass through buildings and obstructions much more effectively, it's probably a more likely candidate for inner-city wireless broadband than 802.11 -- on a commercial level.

    If some ISP can obtain the correct licenses and find an existing 802.11 chipset with firmware-programmable frequency, they'd be the winners of all time.

  • There is a market (Score:5, Insightful)

    by F'Nok (226987) on Monday December 08 2003, @10:57PM (#7665681)
    I think that the market is UNDER estimated for this than anything. with 20-40k coverage, it is fantastic for rural coverage. And for a country where the majority of the population are active online, this means for rural areas that are spread out over large areas, it is feasible. The expense to cable an area with 10,000 people over a 20km radius is very prohibitive. However, the market for internet of 10,000 people, where network expansion means grabbing a bit more spectrum and setting up another station, is relatively small. I think this is fantastic for our rural areas here in Australia, because FAR too many cannot even support decent dialup. Who makes long distance calls for a 56k connection? Or worse, an unstable one?

  • Yes!!1 (Score:3, Funny)

    by riotstarter (650328) on Monday December 08 2003, @11:00PM (#7665689)
    Finally, Pr0n on the TV...oh wait...
  • Generally the problem using VHF is that its pretty limited to a few miles unless you are pumping some serious Watts with a gigantic antenna. Also I am pretty sure 45MHz is used for Military VHF communications(I believe the band to 30MHz to 87.975 or some such) but I am not sure about Australia and its Military freqs. I seem to remmember we could send "data" over VHF when I was in but it was hardly used(I just don't think anybody knew how) We did a bunch of teletype stuff that was pretty annoying.

    Back to th
  • Just imagine how far you could transmit during E layer band openings. Hehehehe
  • Let's see them push this streaming chrismas carol [pquinn.com] over their VHF connection :)

    Also, the article had this quote which I found interesting: Dr Borg said, any possible license conflicts - with digital radio advocates, and with the remaining users of the appropriate spectrum - would have to be resolved..

    I wonder if the resolution will sound like this? All your VHF Bandwidth are belong to US! Resistance is futile. We will use your bandwith for irrelevant Christmas Music Remixes [pquinn.com].

    Ding Fries are Done! Merry Christmas!

  • only 250kbps! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bruha (412869) on Monday December 08 2003, @11:19PM (#7665798) Journal
    Look in 1xRTT ie the current 3g offerings by Verizon Wireless and Sprint we use 1.25Mhz of bandwidth and we can push 155kbps.. I even think our EVDO pushes that envelope further.. so I'd think you could do more on 7Mhz of frequency

  • Maybe Austrailia, but not here... (Score:4, Informative)

    by turtlexit (720052) on Monday December 08 2003, @11:47PM (#7665922)
    This might fly in Australia, but probably not in the US or other large nations. The radio spectrum is a limited resource and as such, a highly competitive one. Amateur radio operators (myself included) are constantly trying to defend our allocated bands here in the US against commercial entities who would like to have it for their own usage. I don't see a system that uses this much bandwidth being practical for US usage.
  • 17W of power to get 40km?

    I use/test/setup equipment that goes 50km at 0.5W of power. OK, they're using a non-optimal antenna, but the antennas really aren't that expensive. 17W would kill a bettery quick. No surfing for pron at night anymore.

    200kbps is interesting, and as Bruce Perens mentions, they should have been able to get a lot more bandwidth out of the spectrum they are using. None-the-less, they could be making a robustness/raw data rate tradeoff in the modulation scheme. I am probably just blind

  • Spectrum, data rates, propagation (Score:5, Informative)

    by dogsend (568967) on Tuesday December 09 2003, @01:00AM (#7666209)
    Just to clarify some of the issues raised already...

    Analogue television channels in Australia are 7MHz wide. The channels of interest are between 45 and 75MHz. BushLAN is not necessarily tied to using a particular block of spectrum, or an entire television channel. BushLAN subdivides available spectrum into 300kHz channels. As always, there is a tradeoff between transmitter power, communications range, and the data rate.

    Using two 300kHz channels [for a symmetric full-duplex connection] low power, relatively short range links with a raw data rate of 115.2kbps have already been created.

    As to propagation. VHF achieves beyond line of sight range whereas microwave links are limited to LOS. Long distance propagation is largely due to diffraction over hill tops. Atmospheric attenuation is much smaller at VHF (wavelength is roughly 6 metres) than it is at microwave frequencies (wavelength: ~10cm). This allows greater reliability during adverse weather conditions.

    • Re:Won't Work (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As a transmission engineer, you should already know that, in the US, that part of the spectrum (45MHz +/- 3.5MHz) is already allocated and HEAVILY used by all kinds of two-way land mobile radio systems. In fact, the band is sliced up so that even various Federal agencies (including the military) are using it. TV starts at 54MHz, and those frequencies (TV channels 2-59) will be used for HDTV.

      Go read 47CFR Part 2...
    • Yes they do. I am a licensed amateur radio operator (with moorse code, a nifty skill to have, though now kinda useless lol). It is called packet radio. I myself haven't gotten into it, but it is a different protocol which you can tunnel others through (tcp/ip). Some are internet repeaters, basically hooking up their cable modem to their ham radio. Problem is, that only one person can transmit at a time, collisions aren't too common though.
      • Great. So first I'm +1 Funny, then -1 Troll, and then -1 Overrated. If I'm a 0 Troll, how can I be Overrated? Sometimes moderators don't make a whole lot of sense.

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