Introducing Starry (ex-Aereo)

starry.com

21 points·spmurrayzzz··5 comments

Does anybody have a decent understanding of why they would choose to build on top of 'millimeter wave' tech?

To a casual observer with a bit of amateur RF experience, 'millimeter wave' frequencies seem like a poor choice, as bands in the millimeter wave spectrum are going to suffer from lots of signal loss just due to attenuation from air, humidity, and rain. And these bands won't have particularly great range or penetration capabilities.

Ya I'd love to know the details of the implementation. Maybe it's just a solution to the last mile? Maybe it focuses a signal at the receiver?

Their marketing graphics on the website show that the carrier signal would be broadcast from a node on a building surrounded by subscriber nodes, with another carrier node a few blocks away.

So it definitely appears to be a 'last mile' type technology. Since everything (on the face of it, anyway) suggests that this is a poor fit for long-range implementations, I find it odd that their marketing materials imply that their tech will help bring broadband to the ~20% of the USA where broadband isn't available.

I'm super excited that their first city is Boston, we could really use some competition. I'll joyfully drop Comcast if their tech pans out. Maybe 10 years ago I was also excited about a company with a similar idea that launched here but failed for some reason. I wish Starry better luck.

Why not NetBlazr? They do residential wireless Internet in Boston.

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