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Wireless Networking Businesses The Internet Hardware

McCaw's Wireless ISP Begins Trial Run This Summer 112

Posted by timothy from the more-wireless-always-good dept.
prostoalex writes "Wireless legend and billionaire Craig McCaw is moving into broadband wireless business with his new company. ClearWire will launch the service this summer in Jacksonville, FL and St Cloud, MN. The offerings will include 512 kbps, 786 kbps and 1.5 Mbps plans. Pricing is not revealed yet, but Business Week cites industry insiders claiming it's going to be in $40-50 range. ClearWire will rely on WiMAX (802.16) technology."
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McCaw's Wireless ISP Begins Trial Run This Summer More

McCaw's Wireless ISP Begins Trial Run This Summer

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  • Lag (Score:4, Funny)

    by The Slashdotted ( 665535 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:26PM (#9347385)
    For services like Vonage, thy name is lag.
    • Dslreports.com has gotten some pretty ill responses for this ISP. Major problems seem to be very low speeds and very high latency when you're more than about a mile from their comm tower.

      Here's the comments from the story they ran just a few days ago on clearwire.

      http://www.dslreports.com/forum/news,45033~mode= fu ll

      I keep hearing wifi is the savior for small communities, but it seems that it's as bad as dsl when it comes to distance from the "co". =(

  • Great way to meet wireless peers? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by number ( 309649 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:27PM (#9347390)
    I guess I'm missing a problem here, but for every transmitter this guy has there will be (hopefully) more than one person that will be subscribed to it.

    If more than one person can access the transmitter, then those multiple clients could just as easily talk to each other, should they take the time to work out a private wireless network for everyone to work on.

    If the company had a forum where users could post their area codes, it would be a great way to meet and then privately organise a self-contained network.

    • Re:Great way to meet wireless peers? (Score:4, Informative)

      by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) * on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:50PM (#9347514) Homepage Journal
      802.16 is a highly asymmetric protocol. To SSs (SS = Subcriber Station) cannot talk together directly. They communicate with a BS (Base Station).

      There is a mesh version in the standard, but it is incomplete and insecure.

    • Sounds like a great way to cut out the middle-man. Why would the middle-man support that?

      I think his prices are awfully high for wireless. Sure he has the bandwidth, but his costs are too close to cable's cost for me.
    • That makes no sense. The tower you communicate with in WiMAX has a large pipe to get the multiple data streams between the internet and the WiMAX subscribers. A grass roots network using this technology would violate FCC regulations since the broadcast range is on the order of a kilometer. There would be too much interference between networks without a entral tower to control things.
    • "If more than one person can access the transmitter, then those multiple clients could just as easily talk to each other, should they take the time to work out a private wireless network for everyone to work on."

      Sssh...

      Let the big business setup wireless ISPs and encourage everyone to buy wireless network cards. When their business eventually folds, there will be a huge population of wireless-enabled computers, maybe even enough to bootstrap a mesh network...

  • Think, people :) (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:30PM (#9347405)
    There is a huge, and I mean HUGE, demand (as of yet, vastly unrealized) for wireless broadband anywhere you walk, at a reasonable price. I work for a realty MLS, and there are a good number of listing agents (500+ at this MLS, I would say, out of 17,000ish total) that use their PDA's to access the listing database online via wireless at places like Starbucks & Barnes & Noble, because it saves a ton of driving time. This is but one example....personally, I'd love to go to the beach and play online games with a great view in front of me :)

  • McCaw reads Cringely? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FirstTimeCaller ( 521493 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:41PM (#9347461)

    Well if I didn't know better, I'd think that Mr. McCaw got his idea from a Robert X. Cringely [slashdot.org] column. Or maybe it's just Business Week's choice of calling it a disruptive technology.

    Too bad he didn't get all the details right. As far as I can tell, it certainly would be disruptive to my wallet. At 40-50 dollars/month this is obviously not aimed at your average consumer. I do a lot of commuting by ferry and would love to be able to spend some of that time online, but I'm not about to double my monthly ISP expenses to do so.

    So this appears to be aimed primarily at business users... but that makes me wonder why the choice of Jacksonville and St Cloud as test cities? Is there some high-tech corridors in these cities that I don't know about?

    I'd love wireless access everywhere, but it seems like Cringely has the more feasible solution.

    • Re:McCaw reads Cringely? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rebelcool ( 247749 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:46PM (#9347491)
      cable broadband these days costs about $44.95 (in austin, for the full 3 mbps service)... so $40-50 is a really good price for a brand new service.
      • Yep, 60 bucks. We really need more competition. DSL is in the 40-50 range, but that requires a landline. Something I dont need as I'm paying for a cell phone.

        WISPs or broadband over powerline at a key price could really shake up the industry.
      • Yes, cable broadband here costs $57 for 4 mbps, though it isn't a guaranteed speed on a dedicated line (like a T1). I wonder if the wireless guarantees bandwidth availability?
    • There probably arn't many people there that both want and can afford the product. I suspect that there are also some advantages there when installing the infrastructure - physical access to buildings for sites, data pipes to the sites, street layout friendly to signal propagation, city council friendly to McCaw, etc.

      You do not do a test where you'll be swamped by users in a hostile environment. 300/75bps speeds and dead spots like freckles on a read-head are not going to help.
      • (hmm, caplock key just came in handy).. I say MILLIONS of people in rural america who would love broadband, and so far, wireless seems the only way we are gonna get it. And at 50$ for his service would it be available in my area, I would be *SAVING* 20$ a month to replace my dialup, as I could ditch the landline phone that I only use for inet connection. Seems like a good deal to me!

        Yes, maybe inside broadband-rich urban mega cities it might not be cost competetive (if you refuse to factor in convenience
        • I don't really see this working for a rural population - the population density is too low to make it feasable. For broadband data rates, distance is limited, and so the subscriber-per-basestation is not economic unless everyone is a subscriber and has very small farms. An advantage is, of course, that farmland is radio-friendly.

          Cities have the opposite problem, in that the individual bandwidth on a shared carrier is horrible, and the environment is radio-hostile.

          A semi-rural(hobby/weekend farm, dairy, et
    • Couldn't people ditch their cable/dsl broadband service and just use this? I admit to not RTFA, but for laptop users, being able to go online at home and on the road on the same bill might be worth it for a drop in speed.

    • Re:McCaw reads Cringely? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Here in Jacksonville, FL, broadband is typically 45/mo, more if your not already a customer to the local comcast. On top of all that, this city has a very large landmass for its population, making things like cable and DSL available only to the areas with highest demand.

      If I had to guess, i would say nearly 40% of the city is still without broadband of some kind. Not from lack of desire for it, but simply not available in your zip code. Nobody in Jacksonville will be doubling their ISP bills by paying $50/
    • St. Cloud is a university town..there's some manufacturing stuff around there, too, but I don't remember hearing much about a 'tech corridor' up there. I thought that was kind of an odd choice, myself. I can't speak to Jacksonville, FL, though, because, quite frankly, I avoid FL like the plague.

    • I don't care where Mr. McCaw got his idea. With a mug like this [achievement.org] I'd let this pimp skillet disrupt whatever the hell he wants.

    • I'm not sure what your fees are, but some of them are hidden. For DSL, you generally have to pay for a land line for it to work. Of course, you get basic phone service, but that cost must be considered. It only looks like $25 or so if you already happen to have a land line in use. People seem to find out the hard way if they only had a cell phone or get a cell phone and try to cancel the land line.

      I really don't think $50 is all that bad, cable internet near my area is $60, although that does include b

    • My guess is that Jacksonville makes a good test site becase the city is so large (in terms of land area - population, not so much). So, it's an ideal test site for WiFi coverage. If I remember correctly, Sprint also used Jacksonville as a test site for their own long-range WiFi service not too long ago.

      I live in Jacksonville. If any of you techies are willing to relocate to Florida, some of the biggest names in business have large campuses here - Merrill Lynch, Blue Cross, CSX, Bank of America, etc. Come o

    • If you RTFM, you'll find this service is being offered as an alternative to DSL/cable for those areas that still don't have it available... not as a broadband mobile solution. Since the way it's described you need a book-sized antenna to access the Internet, it doesn't seem viable as a mobile option. If it is a viable mobile option, however, you could always just have it replace your existing DSL/cable service, and kill two birds with one stone, making it an outstanding value.

      I access the Internet using

  • Hmmm, Nice Article. (Score:3, Funny)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) * on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:47PM (#9347497) Homepage Journal
    Hey! I like that Wimax article thats linked to. It's kind of familiar. Oh, that's it. I wrote it. Duh.

  • considering that the price for buying 3G bandwidth financially crippled [infosyncworld.com] many Telco's, wifi with VOIP [fcc.gov]could be a good way to deliver on the promise of high bandwidth phone technologies.

  • Why work so hard at layer 2? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jonbrewer ( 11894 ) * on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:56PM (#9347564) Homepage
    I still haven't figured out why people think L2 switching for wireless is so sexy, especially for fixed wireless installs such as this new McCaw deal.

    kid in 32 Oak Road and kid in 35 Oak Road are going to tie up a lot more network resources sharing DivX movies than they would with a mesh-routed layer 3 network, 'cause in WiMax the IP stuff isn't getting routed until it hits the backhaul point.

    WiMax

    subscriber 1 --(802.16)--> cell site --(802.16)--> cell site --(DMR)--> POP (now do the routing) --(DMR)--> cell site --(802.16)--> cell site --(802.16)--> subscriber 2

    WiFi Mesh

    subscriber 1 --(802.11)--> subscriber 2

    Granted this is the case on WiMax gear I've researched. I wish it'd die a quick, painless death, but I'm afraid it's going to be more like ATM - a great idea, but not worth the costs.

  • This is NOT WiMax (Score:5, Informative)

    by sargon ( 14799 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @09:07PM (#9347628)
    Once again the media get it wrong. ClearWire is NOT using WiMax. There is no WiMax gear available which uses the U.S. spectrum, and there won't be such gear for another (probably) another 18 months.

    What McCaw is doing is using the equipment from NexNet (which he also purchased) to make everything work. NexNet builds MMDS (Multichannel Multipoint Distribution System) equipment. Transitioning that equipment to WiMax may not be too difficult, but, again, there is no WiMax equipment currently on the market in the U.S.
    • What about the Redline Communications AN-100?
      • I have yet to see the equipment on the market. Yes, it is listed, but, like all the other competitor' products, you can't buy it (not as I have been able to purchase them).
    • Oops. Typo. Should be

      NextNet

    • My local Telco, which is owned by the Power Co-Op in town, is setting up a complete WiMax VoIP setup in our small town (less than 1000) to test scalability and reliability, then expand to the surrounding bigger cities. I have briefly talked with their CEO a few times, and they seem to be on schedule to be fully implemented by the end of July. And btw, there are no WiMax products on the CONSUMER market, but many OEMs are pumping them out this year, for situations just like this.
  • This seems to be one of those pilot ideas that won't exactly pan out. While the WiMax Point to Multipoint (P2MP) system is conceptually interesting, the question that remains is whether or not it can be successful on a large scale. It is my personal opinion that this first venture will likely not be successful, but only because it is so new and innovative. Look for more of these large-scale wifi networks to spring up all over the place in the near future.
  • http://www.nextelbroadband.com/ [nextelbroadband.com] is using Mobile-Fi (IEEE 802.20). This technology is superior to WiMax in many ways. First of all, Mobile-Fi actually provides mobility today, while 802.16e will probably never provide realisitic mobility. And Mobile-Fi is very low-latency when compared to WiMax, WiFi, and 3G/3.5G/4G networks.

    The primary benefit of WiMax is in the architecture. It lends itself to be very flexible. The person who mentioned it as a replacement for LMDS/MMDS and other wireless technologie

    • The INTERNET was created by the government and hated by the PHONE companies that are now trying to be the saviors of broadband networking.

      A public government funded WiFi network is better for the longterm. I compare it to highways. What if private enterprise built the highways ? We would getting billed ever month for 50 bucks with hidden charges and endless tollbooths.

      We need more proactive presidents and congressman in these regards.

      Kerry has said that it's governments responsibility to bring fiber to t
      • In Canada, while our government does not build networks, they certainly subsidize them especially in rural areas. My town (20 minutes from Winnipeg, MB) has a population of ~500 and we have broadband wireless internet.

        Of course we also have way higher tax rates than the US, but if you want the government to subsidize everything, they need to get the money from somewhere.
      • Information and communication are shared between people, not processes or computers.
    • The IEEE hasn't even started writing the 802.20 spec [ieee.org], so Nextel can't be using 802.20.

  • In New Zealand.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Segway Ninja ( 777415 )
    Wireless internet plans such as this are already in place. I'm not sure what technology they use, but they do have most of Auckland covered (entire CBD, most residential).

    It is in the $40-$50 USD range (About $70 NZ, $120 for 2mbit - Pretty good when you consider 256kbit ADSL costs you about $70 per month)

  • McCaw's WIreless ISP Begins Trial Run This Summer
    Wireless Networking | Posted by timothy on Saturday June 05, @08:23PM

    Ask Slashdot: Is Caps Lock Dead?
    Hardware | Posted by timothy on Saturday June 05, @07:21PM

    Caps lock is dead...no- wait, someone accidently left it stuck on when writing their headline! No, that was just the shift key, damn...

    (If this makes no sense at all the editors have probably fixed the extra capital letter there)

    (If this makes sense but I should have RFTA because it's actually call
  • Here's an article stating Intel had planned to intruduce WiMAX 802.16d chips right around this time:
    http://news.com.com/2100-7351-5144887.html ? tag=nl

    I really don't think people understand the as yet unknown implications of a MAN wireless network you can connect to ANYTIME, ANYWHERE (in a given area). In addition to the technolgies P2P capabilties, I think we really have no idea how this technology will change things 10 years down the road. It's just like cellular phones, once the technolgy matures and is
  • Rioplex wireless broadband [rioplexwireless.com] (which I'm assuming is basically the same thing) is already available where I live. They also claim to have the largest coverage in the US. I know people who have it, because it would cost them thousands of dollars to get a cable line to their house, even if they live 100 yards from a cable connection. Yeah, it might be more expensive than cable, but with this type of thing, you can get a PCMCIA card with the modem, and use it everywhere there's coverage. I think it's a step i

  • Not really wireless (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:47AM (#9349083)
    Customer premise equipment consists of a book-sized indoor transceiver unit that consumers merely plug into power outlets and the Ethernet jacks of their LANs or PCs.

    So basically the receiver is stationary and tied to at least one wire - the power line. If you already have cable at home, there is little point to this service. If you don't, then of course it's cool. But it should be still called "reduced wiring" rather than wireless.

    Now, give me a notebook card that can connect to this service anywhere in a metropolitan area, and we are talking about something really useful.
  • I think people are missing the relative importance of WiMax. Using their private spectrum and numerous tower locations the cell companies will cut the cord with the landline circuits. This will end one of the biggest problematic causes of dropped calls and poor voice quality in the industry. Also the cell networks will become super redundant as they will be configured as one mesh network. And with the advent of phones such as one in development by Motorola that uses WiFi to expand it's range in areas of
  • We're a small town of 68,000. We already have one wireless ISP, 2 cable companys, 2 phone companys offering dsl, and a university which gives free internet to students. Compitition is great! I currently pay about $40 a month for 1.5 mbps cable. With a second WISP in town I'll be in Heavn. w00t
  • If we really want to roll out universal broadband coverage, we need it to be sub-15$/month. Think about it: 40$/month is almost 500$/year. Is your standard low income family even going to consider it when they can get dial-up for maybe 10$/month?

    Oh well, I'm sure someone will figure out how to provide really cheap broadband/wireless service sooner or later. Taking the monopolistic local copper providers out of the loop will certainly improve things. I'm guessing we will see "economy/low margin" wireless br
  • JSV/Comesurfthe.net has been doing this (802.x wireless internet delivery to comm and resi customers) for years. What's news about it?
  • This dude showed up one day here in St. Cloud (as i live here, and happen to work for radio stations with towers) asking me how tall my towers were, how much per ft, etc. This dude wanted the top of my 1000' tower in the middle of nowhere so he could hop from a water tower in blaine minnesota, to avon where the tower lives, then hop to my other 500ft tower in st cloud.... Well, do the math and a simple topo map will tell you this dude has NO clue. hopping 5.8Ghz over 90 miles is just... well dumb, and won't
  • I worked for XO Communications (Nextlink), another Craig McCaw company, during the LMDS push. That is the push that broke the company. They tried to implement LMDS before the equipment was ready and without a complete understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the technology.

    I don't think WiMAX will be much different. Much like BPL it is touted as the solution to providing wireless in rural areas. In each case the infrastructure required to implement a Base/Subscriber architecture using fixed inf

  • Way Ahead of Him.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dethb0y ( 774761 )

    These Guys [epiinternet.com] in East Palestine, Ohio (of all places) are way ahead of him. thier using Motorola Canopy gear as i recollect.

    Since i'm in thier coverage area (as is my mother) i had them come and check us out. the results were pretty interesting. They installed something that looked like the reciever part of a Dish Network dish (that rounded-square thing on the front), which they then pointed line-of-sight at the tower.

    This wasn't flawless as stuff in the way can easily block it; i imagine a house would t

  • Verilan [verilan.com] is offering 802.11b and 802.16, side by side, in Portland for wireless connectivity to those without DSL or cable modems. Price is still a little spendy, but give them volume and they can drop to match McCaw's prices, I'll bet.
  • http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1607131,00.as p

    "Service is to be offered at 512K bps, 786K bps or 1.5M bps, and will bundle local and long-distance VOIP service alongside broadband Internet data access."

    $40/mo for VOIP plus broadband?

    Sell your ILEC stock today!

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