In some places wireless is a real answer, but it goes nowhere in Western Mass because of two reasons: (i) hills, and (ii) trees. The effect of the trees is to make any towers 40 feet higher.
All of the time in the east we see proposals to build a fixed wireless system and frequently these look attractive, at least in the short term, based on back-of-the-envelope engineering.
Often when the radio engineering is done you find that you need two or three times the number of nodes you did at first, you need to build miles of access roads, and the towers need to be much taller and more expensive than you planned. And then there still are people you can't serve.
We've had ten years of broken promises about fixed wireless, and the gist of it is that: (a) wireless is expensive not cheap, (b) if incumbent carriers can't provide a good 4G signal at your spot, neither can undercapitalized local organizations, and (c) the problem is not that fiber is expensive, it is that it is cheap. Fiber sells for $70 a month unlimited and some places, and no way is Verizon going to stand for anything cheaper than the $10 a gigabyte that they charge for wireless data.
I think Google loon could be the answer to some of these problems. Google Fiber also announced something about bringing wireless 1gbit Internet. Despite Google Fiber being a good business for Alphabet I think many of these thinga Alphabet introduces are just a kick to monopolistic telcos to get with the times.
Loon, low-orbit satellites, and similar technology are like going from the frying pan to the fire.
All technologies of this sort are challenged by extreme variations in demand in different geospatial areas -- for instance you have to provide coverage for uninhabited ocean areas, etc.
Inevitably around big cities you will find concentrations of people who want to buy reliability/diversity at any cost, and if you don't keep these people out, they will affect the system for 100s of miles around them.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 18.2 ms ] threadIn some places wireless is a real answer, but it goes nowhere in Western Mass because of two reasons: (i) hills, and (ii) trees. The effect of the trees is to make any towers 40 feet higher.
All of the time in the east we see proposals to build a fixed wireless system and frequently these look attractive, at least in the short term, based on back-of-the-envelope engineering.
Often when the radio engineering is done you find that you need two or three times the number of nodes you did at first, you need to build miles of access roads, and the towers need to be much taller and more expensive than you planned. And then there still are people you can't serve.
We've had ten years of broken promises about fixed wireless, and the gist of it is that: (a) wireless is expensive not cheap, (b) if incumbent carriers can't provide a good 4G signal at your spot, neither can undercapitalized local organizations, and (c) the problem is not that fiber is expensive, it is that it is cheap. Fiber sells for $70 a month unlimited and some places, and no way is Verizon going to stand for anything cheaper than the $10 a gigabyte that they charge for wireless data.
All technologies of this sort are challenged by extreme variations in demand in different geospatial areas -- for instance you have to provide coverage for uninhabited ocean areas, etc.
Inevitably around big cities you will find concentrations of people who want to buy reliability/diversity at any cost, and if you don't keep these people out, they will affect the system for 100s of miles around them.