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Simply isn't needed.

And this is not a guess on my part. A small town (pop 3000) not far from me installed WiMAX a year and a half ago. (Yes it was before the IEEE gave it's blessing to the standard.)

The system RIGHT NOW is reaching out well over 20 miles to rural locations (farms) as well as blanketing the entire town. The backhaul (internet connection) is via microwave so there literally is no "wire" involved at all. Not to feed it, not to distribute it to the end user.

Yes I am certain that at some point it ties into a fiber optic on the backbone but we are talking about a single connection serving several thousand customers. Now it doesn't require a math wiz to understand that going from thousands of connections to one connection is going to drastically cut income for the telco's involved.

To add to it they are rolling out VoIP (in partnership with someone) and 70% of those people that are on the system are signing up for it. The eventual goal being to completely remove the local telco from the mix.

What about cost you ask? Because the cost is so low for the infastructure private users are paying $19.95 a month and businesses $29.95 to $49.95 depending upon load (number of users in the building).

What about speed? DSL can't even compare. Most users are seeing around 3 meg download from the internet, however when accessing local systems (other clients on the system) the speeds are between 30 and 40 meg depending upon traffic. More than enough for video delivery and the fellow that owns the local DVD rental store is looking at delivering movies over the system. (Lots of legal issues to hammer out though.)

As I said, this is a real world installation that has a year and a half of success behind it, not one of the "someday it might happen" things. Yeah, the local telco is crapping in their pants. In fact they have filed a law suit against the city over the VoIP issue and are trying to stop it. That isn't being done because they see profits climbing...

Posted by: No_Ax_to_Grind   Posted on: 03/06/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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