Fixed Wireless Business

1.5 Mbps is "Dialup 2.0"

Customers would love more bandwidth, business need it, and websites demand it, says a wireless broadband booster.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 22, 2006]

"If you had a 1 megapixel camera a few years ago, you have an 8 megapixel camera now," says Ken DiPietro, broadband businessman and NextGen Communications blogger. But broadband technology remains the same, at 1.5 Mbps.

What's a broadband family to do? On any evening, DiPietro will be on VoIP, his wife Dawn might be on Second Life (when she's not on our ISP-Wireless list), and their son's streaming YouTube. If the router is left to decide who gets the bandwidth, everybody loses.

DiPietro wants 100 Mbps, and says that wireless broadband can provide it.

He says that faster speeds would help business and government too. "If you're a paramedic in an ambulance, and you have a 5 Mbps connection to the hospital, you can talk to the doctor and send the doctor all the data including images. The doctor can start work on the patient while the patient's still in the ambulance."

There are plenty of ways to use bandwidth, once it's available. "I have a page and a half of applications that should be running on every network."

Web designers are building an internet designed for broadband users, ignoring dialup users, DiPietro says.

The technology is ready
Wireless technology provides a solution that offers exactly what the blog's slogan says, "solutions, not concessions."

It's true that wires can also deliver 100 Mbps or more, but he doubts U.S. customers will see those speeds, even though they're being deployed elsewhere in the world.

That's because regulators don't care about broadband. We've noted before that the FCC uses an out of date definition of the word. The U.S. communications regulator continues to define "high speed internet" as 200 Kbps in one direction.

"Why aren't we on par with Tokyo and Amsterdam," DiPietro asks. "Because the FCC relies on the ILECs. But on the ground, we're going backwards, not forwards. The ILECs want to maintain artificial bandwidth scarcity so that they can raise prices."

Politicians contribute to the problem. "We need more net savvy politicians," DiPietro says.

Wired networks aren't designed for today's streaming world. "The amount of oversubscription you can get away with on a network is dropping," says DiPietro. He says it's dropping because voice, video, and software (games at home, databases and collaboration at work) demand a constant stream of data. In the dialup days, several users could use the same line because a user would download e-mail or a web page, read it, and then download some more. Usage was periodic, not constant. Today, everything from YouTube to a conference with a shared document to an online game gunfight is streamed in real time, changing before the user's eyes.

The technology is wireless
So people want bandwidth, but wired networks won't deliver. DiPietro believes that better radios can beat wired networks and deliver real bandwidth to customers.

He envisions a mesh network, and says the technology is improving. Initially, mesh network equipment makers designed everything to run on one radio. Today, equipment makers use separate radios for the last mile and the backhaul. In addition, DiPietro says, mesh network radios operate on full duplex. "In the past, latency was caused by switching from transmission to reception and back," he says.

An ideal mesh network would have so many adjacent nodes that no routing would be necessary. At that point, latency drops from milliseconds per hop to microseconds, so you only notice the network if you have to go, say, a few hundred hops to get to backhaul.

DiPietro says that current mesh equipment has improved (initially, some vendors required a backhaul connection for every other AP), but many cannot go beyond nine hops (which is, nevertheless, better than two).

He says that in cities, every building will be connected, and mesh architectures can take advantage of the ubiquitous nodes to avoid routing overhead.

The ILECs are building a slightly faster network for affluent suburban neighborhoods, but there's no solution for urban and rural areas, DiPietro says.

So he's identified a need and a market. Later this year, he says, he will have a product to offer as well.

—End