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."

Giant Cell Phone Tower?

[bfizzle]

Does anyone know if any other communication devices are mounted on top the space needle?

It costs how much?

[raider_red]

In Seattle, there's probably enough coffee shops to blanket the entire city with wi-fi. Who do they think is actually going to pay those rates?

Re:It costs how much?

[zakezuke]

In Seattle, there's probably enough coffee shops to blanket the entire city with wi-fi. Who do they think is actually going to pay those rates?

Businesses in the industrial area that are in line of site of the space needle? Those towers on the Space Needle side of Capital Hill? Or how about those coffee shops that provide wifi access them selves.

1.5 Megabits for $500

[Sprotch]

Perhaps someone should tell them that a company called Free offers access up to 20 Megabits for 30/month in France.

Oh, and it comes with free local calls and ADSL "cable" television.

That's actually a consequence of the Europe induced forced deregulation of the telecom industry. Competition is good.

Re:It costs how much?

[Stealth Potato]

I live near Seattle, and whenever I'm there, I crack out the laptop with the WiFi card to do a little hunting for wide-open access points. There are so many of them it's not even funny - there's no need to pay for Internet service in Seattle; just mooch off of some unsuspec-- er, I mean, gracious bandwidth donor! ;-)

Once, I even managed to check my e-mail while moving south on I-5. (Traffic was really bad, and no, I wasn't at the wheel...)

Re:It costs how much?

[MrLizardo]

Maybe they think that the coffee shops trying to blanket the city in wifi will use this as a backbone to provide Internet access for their wifi hotspots. Less expensive and less of a hassle than getting a T1 line run. Also it has provisions for increasing bandwidth without needing to upgrade equipment.

Not Wi-Fi replacement not $500 per month

[eggboard]

A few errors in this item's text. First, it's not Wi-Fi replacement. This version of WiMax (technically pre-WiMax at the moment) is point-to-multipoint high-speed T-1-plus replacement.

It's $800 per month for 6 Mbps aggregate bandwidth in either 3 up/3 down, 4 up/2 down, or 2 up/4 down configurations. It's intended for businesses that need more than T1 (about $500 per month in Seattle) and don't want to simply double their costs and increase their complxity.

Re:Giant Antenna, NOT

[Analogy Man]

but it looks tall because zoning keeps high-rise buildings away from it....

and photographers have a secret spot on Queen Anne Hill that with the compressed perspective of the right lenses make the Space Needle look like it towers over the skyline.

Even worse

[Wesley Felter]

It's even worse than it appears: WiMax doesn't work in traffic. (Have you seen the size of the CPE?)

Re:HAHAHA

[Dopefish_1]

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.

I used to work at a small ISP where we pushed wireless access similar to this for business customers (but on a smaller scale than TFA is talking about). Basically, you put an antenna up on the customer's roof with line-of-sight to one of our POPs, toss in a router, then generally just run cat5 from the router to their internal PCs. IIRC you could get up to about 2Mb with our type of setup.

We preferred this to setting up a T1 because it was generally more reliable. Not that T1 service in our area was bad (it wasn't), but it's always a plus to not have to deal with the Telco. Pretty much the only points of failure were the routers at each end of the link and the antenna.

Now, whether this Space Needle implementation will take off, I don't know. But the concept of wireless as a T1 replacement is certainly sound.

Re:Giant Antenna, NOT

[seanadams.com]

the Space Needle is shorter than most of the downtown buildings, but it looks tall because zoning keeps high-rise buildings away from it.

Speculating: given the range and line-of-sightness of the signal, this may actually make the space needle a fine spot - being uncrowded and high enough, from there you can hit all the office buildings straight-on, instead of towering over them. Maybe from the top of the B of A building you could get better range out to the city limits, but not as good coverage to the target market.

Anyway it makes for a better story.

New uses for old architecture

[operagost]

Seattle, Washington has found a new use for their aging Space Needle.

I hope those enterprising individuals can also find uses for the aging Eiffel Tower and aging Washington Monument. Or the really, REALLY aged Great Pyramid.

Re:Fuck that.

[Ryosen]

Hmm...Comcast is $100/month for 6mb down and 768kbps up. Buy two, and you have 12mb down and 1.5 up. For $200. Or am I doing the math wrong?

This should not be interpreted as a single 12MB/1.5MB connection, but with a little load balancing and partitioning, this can work quite well.

We have Comcast here in a building that we own. I believe that the pipe in can accommodate 8 or 12 full connections. From a technical viewpoint, is there any reason why this could not work? For $500, you could end up with a lot of bandwidth.

"Push 'em together and make one big one", says I.