http://www.isp-planet.com/cplanet/tech/2006/prime_letter_060522.html
I do have some hesitation about this, seeing as I help run a small town wisp. However, they would be in another spectrum, and possibly even help lower costs more.
There is always a problem with free service, and it’s something I see when you have said free service.
Consumers have a funny mindset when it comes to something that’s free, and isn’t even supported with ads. They think free means full support, and you’ll take care of any problem they have, at your cost for free service.
Case in point, we had a client who piggybacked off my 900mhz gear that was repeated using 2.4ghz equipment. Things were mostly fine, signal quality was in 70% and very little drops, but the 2.4 ghz was slightly blocked by some trees.
Being a 2 mile link back to them, it would sometimes have a dropout or two, possibly slow down.
It’s important to mention that the client had service with the same wisp that I did business with, 4-6 months earlier. A local computer store, like ours decided to lie, cheat, and take a tower the wisp we had and turn it into his own.
None of us would go to that company for internet, they had done something really, really dirty. They also expected to use their own gear, so it’s another $250 investment. These guys claimed the gear was different, but it was the -same- wireless card inside the CPE.
So we shot a 900mhz signal through the top of a big, big hill and 1 mile of foliage to get it to this remote location from our computer store.
We hooked up the other clients too at a cost of almost a grand in antenna, tripod, access point and labor to do so.
They never paid one dime, nothing. So after 4 months of free internet, my boss cut them off. I told them they needed to come down and pay, but they never did. We also, to be fair didn’t send them a bill, they were told to just come down and pay a measly $20 a month.
You should have heard the phone conversation, it was nasty, she/he was -pissed-, pissed that it was cut off. They didn’t even have a clue that if they would have not given attitude about it being cut off, they could have just paid at that point.
Nope, in the end they paid $250 to hookup to the other wisp, who by the way… is inches from bankruptcy.
But, with 2.4ghz some links are just not possible. Even when they are, you have to take into account how the rest of your network is gonna react to all that retransmission of a dirty link.
I can’t imagine that these guys are gonna cover 95% of the US, with 2.1ghz. It’s gonna be 30 radios per square mile in almost everywhere they are, if it’s a big city. Rural areas are screwed, unless you use 30 radios. Then the biggest problems are getting tower space to get it to those places.
Billions, if not hundreds of billions. It’ll never hit here in WV, ever. Not gonna happen, but it may lower the cost of existing 2.4ghz equipment depending on whom they use.
I doubt they’ll do that though, it’d create more competition.