Space Needle To Become WiMax Antenna

Technofusion writes "Seattle, Washington has found a new use for their aging Space Needle. Three companies have teamed up to turn the Space Needle into a giant WiMAX antenna. Bruce Chatterley, CEO of Speakeasy, announced it will be the biggest deployment of it's kind in North America with six towers, one placed on the Space Needle and five others around the city , beaming a signal over a 5 square mile area. Don't put away those 802.11b/g cards just yet, as WiMAX is projected to cost $500 a month for 1.5Mb service."

Radiation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't all this radiation going to cause disease?

HAHAHA

[MindStalker]

Its actually 6Mb.
They are trying to sell this as a replacement for buisness T1 thats why the prices are so high. Though I seriously doupt they can provide the reliability and the uplink speeds of a T1. Not to mention the fact that a 6Mb T1 really doesn't cost 6 grand anymore like they are trying to imply. Maybe it does in Seattle? Now if they can provide all my workers access to the internet (obivously their bandwidth would be set to max out as an aggregate to the 6Mb between all connections) from whereever they are in the city, $500 is a steal. Otherwise, no thanks.

Re:Doesn't *anyone* RTFM anymore?

[Binestar]

I know that editors can't be bothered to check the accuracy of stories, but you think that at least the submitters would RTFM...

Actually, it seems the submitter did "read the fine material", but didn't "understand the fine material". It's a reading comprehension issue that we need to resolve with this submitter.

Re:$500 for 1.5Mbit?

[DJCacophony]

T1 isn't DSL or Cable. It's fiber. That means higher costs for laying the groundwork and higher costs for the fiber itself, which the ISP passes onto the consumer (usually a business). What you're mostly paying for, however, is a guaranteed 1.5mbps line, not one that fluctuates wildly like DSL or Cable. T1 is much better suited for business because it almost never has any downtime (which of course is greatly valued by businesses, since time = money).

Re:1.5 Megabits for $500

[dick johnson]

You're comparing apples and oranges.

WiMax potentially would give anyone with access to it the ability to surf the web wirelessly within a 30 mile range of the antenna.

WiMax will be WiFi on steroids. Plus it allows you to surf while traveling at relatively high speeds. Your kids could be surfing the web in the backseat of your car as you travel down the highway.

Comparing it to ADSL or any other wired broadband internet service misses the point of the technology.

Re:Awesome

[bananahead]

You will be lookung forward to it for a very long time. WiMax to the home is just not going to happen. The 802.16 standard is TDMA-based, which means every connection takes a time-slice. This design does not scale to the home. The decision-point is coverage vs. density. A WiMax tower can cover a HUGE area, given that the density of actual users does not exceed ther time-slice availability. To cover a high-density area, like neighborhoods, you have to add more 'hot-spots', which drives the cost to the providor WAY up.

Stick with DSL and MIMO, you are better off.