Can 802.11 Become A Viable Last-Mile Alternative?

NikiScevak writes "As telco's around the world move from government hands to private investors the incentive for them to create compeition at the wholesale DSL level drops dramatically. The CSIRO in Australia are investigating the use of Wireless LAN technology 802.11b as a means through which to provide alternative broadband access, achieving range of up to 7km with standard components."

Last Mile?

[brooks_talley]

Surely you mean "Last 200 feet." At least, that's what it's like in any remotely urban area.

-b

Re:Bad if you do this on a large Scale?

[markov_chain]

Directional antennas would help with all of these problems. Crossed beams don't interfere, and can't be sniffed from the wrong place.

Already Doing It in India

[Anonymous Coward]

There are atleast 3 ISP's doing this in India.. ut not using standard equptment, they have specially modified high-power directional antenna.

Besides the favored method is to do Wireless to a roof-mounted antenna at a commercial (or apartment) complex and then do a 10baseT ethernet switched network inside the complex.

So the last 0.99 mile is wireless but the last 0.01 is yet copper ;)

$200 per 1 mile does not add up.

[t0qer]

I think i'm close to the average price of a 802.11 tranciever. Back to my point, I can buy 1000 feet of cat5 for $50 dollars a box. Maybe 2.5 boxes per last mile? In quantity it would be cheaper of course.

So i'm lookin at $125 dollars per mile VS $200 dollars per mile and i'm asking myself, ARE THEY COMPLETELY OUT OF THEIR MINDS? How hard is it to run a cat5 cable over someone's fence? Hell I share my DSL with my neighbor that way (Pesky teenager d/l on kazza screwin with my CS games)

So point is, this is what I would classify as an overengineered idea. Too expensive, too much stuff can go wrong, no no no no. Look at what happened to metricom a.k.a. Ricochet. Same plan basically and it died because they needed something like 300,000 subscribers just to cover their equipment costs.

At least the cable can be recycled for scrap metal. Not sure what you can do with a 802.11 basestation.

--My Sig is a warning that it's 1:30am and I can't be held responsible for this ramble because i'm pretty flipped out.

It's a viable alternative....

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of wireless to solve the "last mile" problem has been growing at a steady pace since around 1997. At least in the mid-south. A small company called www.airosurf.com started using the equipment to provide broadband access to small rural towns in the south. A close friend of mine recently took advantage of the unique characteristics of grain elevators to provide Broadband access to practically anywhere. It is/has/will be an excellent alternative to an otherwise poor communication infrastructure that rural areas have now.

SSH

[The Real Chrisjc]

I've yet to see a hardware AP that does SSH tunneling between nodes. I've yet to see any implimentation of any other encryption over a link. With the recent insecurity of the encrytion in 802.11b wouldn't it be a good idea for manufacturers to use alternate encryption in their products and still support the old encryption?

Re:Read the article (and a few books on Security)

[thogard]

802.11 in the 2.4 Ghz range can carry about 415mb max. Thats based on no interference. The problem with 2.4 GHz is that it tends to bounce around things and get phase shifted so the recivers have to do lots of tricks to pull the proper bitstream out. If you have two systems that get 10% of the bits shared, you will find that your performance drops quickly. Parabolic dishes will help but the frequncy is so overused in places, you end up with slow unstable links over large distances. As you up the frequency you find that you need more directional antennas to get thigns to work but interference gets much worse. This is why 3.5Ghz wasn't used to it could be sold off to the suckers tring to do large last mile solutions. The 5Ghz is even worse but that may make it very good for wireless lans inside buildings. The 28 to 40 Ghz stuff only goes about the same distance as optical stuff and since point to multipoint optical and optical mesh systems can now be bought that do better, I don't see that as being a long term solution to the problem.

Re:Why not:

[adolf]

At my previous residence, which was situated in the middle of an Ohio corn field, there was no cable TV. The telco CO was 20 miles away. 802.11b provided an excellent last-mile solution.

Standard equipment all 'round, on my end. Cisco Aironet 350 in the garage, a white plastic Pringles can-looking antenna on the garage, and Cat5 running to the FreeBSD box inside the house.

Real-live, actual, sustained file transfers of 300 kilobytes per second were pretty common between myself and anyone else in the world with good connectivity to att.net. VCDs flowed forth from the ether with astounding ease, while mp3 downloads became nauseating, as one begins realizing that they're downloading hundreds of times more music than they'll ever have time to sort, let alone seriously listen to.

Hard drives, even those of several hundred gigabytes, start feeling pretty small with that sort of bandwidth.

There was no rain fade to speak of. Storms which completely disabled a well-tuned directv system had no effect on the net connection. Having the antenna turn 90 degrees in an intense wind storm did not phase it.

Of course, the antenna arrays on the ISP end were several hundred feet in the air, and I had a clear view of the entire tower (and the small buildings at its base), which was just over 2 miles away.

I'm sure that there are others who were less fortunate. This ISP (comwavz) claims to be able to cover entire counties with a single tower, which (around here) means a radius of perhaps 15 or 20 miles.

Even with the ruler-flat landscape here in the upper-left corner of Ohio, it is difficult to imagine that a wireless link of 15 miles would work very well, with only a quarter-Watt of output power with which to play. OTOH, it's also a little past last mile territory, either, so this last conjecture might be beginning to stray off-topic.

Thus, I'll conclude: The last -2- miles work fine with 802.11. So fine, in fact, that I was happier with it than any other consumer broadband choice I've ever had the pleasure of abusing, from dual-channel ISDN to 1.5Mbps SDSL, and the spattering of ADSL and cable and satellite that rests in between, irrespective of cost.