Aereo Founder Is Back with New High-Speed Wireless Service
wsj.com
wsj.com
If this company is going for a tech solution, why not push for 5G which solves everything at once?
From the video, it appears that their goal is to have a few transmission towers in a region and then neighborhood or block-level repeaters that receive the signal and rebroadcast it.
So, fixed millimeter microwave wireless from the repeaters to the main gateway, but what will they use from the repeater to the customer?
Some WISP's are starting to roll out 4G hotspots over unlicensed frequencies. That would work in this situation and their experience with micro-antennas could let them cram several antennas into their router to connect to as many of the relays as possible to increase bandwidth and resilience.
Cell carriers generally solve this problem by paying building owners tens of thousands of dollars a year.
I thought the extent of their antenna technology was just a board with a bunch of token antenna element that gave the illusion that each subscriber was using a dedicated antenna.
It's not like it's crazy hard to make a small digital antenna, so I'm not sure why it would be in doubt that they did so.
Wireless ISPs have been tried for 15 years, but the only place they've been successful is where there is no real alternative. Weather, humidity, and trees make it extremely difficult to compete with the bandwidth and reliability of wired Internet.
Personally, I'm dubious that the Aereo antenna technologies apply to this new venture. The Aereo arrays tuned in relatively low-frequency signals from optimum locations. A wireless consumer ISP using unlicensed spectrum will be the opposite: listening for high frequencies in bad locations.
Deleted cookies and all that jazz, too...
Tons of copy cat stores without the paywall.
Ads are a security risk, obtrusive, annoying, data hog, etc, etc, etc... There is a reason more and more and MORE people are demanding ad blocking.
People have had online news without borders for too long for this garbage to work.
I so look forward to the day that I can tell comcast to F-off for good.
Comcast better get off there gravy train throne and stop pissing off their customers with there bandwidth rape you rates since they don't like the term data-cap.
Google Fiber , and wirelss tech as this company are coming for you.
On the other side Amazon prime and netflix are coming after your content provider business as they are creating there own.
1. Weather - The higher the frequency, the more things like rain/fog/sleet/snow start to affect you. For example, 24ghz in Florida is useless for more than about 1 mile, unless you're okay with it going out in the rain. In Arizona, it's great for up to 5 miles. 39ghz will be more limited than this.
2. Spectrum - The most efficient radios I know of achieve about 10bps/hz -- that means you need 100mhz of spectrum for 1gb/s. That's total speed, a 900x100 or a 500x500 connection. I don't know the details of what technology is being used or planned here but it's going to be at least half of that for a practical multi-point system, even worse since these will be user-installed where someone will settle on a weak signal that burns more spectrum for the same speed. My guess is around 2bps/hz, but I'll stick with 5 for now, giving the benefit of the doubt. Assuming the entire 39ghz(39000mhz to 39999mhz) band is available for use, at a likely best-case scenario of 5bps/hz that's about 5gb/s of traffic for any given signal area. If you're selling 1gb connections, even at a 50 to 1 oversubscription rate, that's only 250 connections. That will barely put a dent in an urban environment with 100,000+ people.
3. Spectrum re-use. Cell companies are able to re-use the spectrum they have because they can control with a good degree of accuracy where their signal goes. At 39ghz, this signal is going to reflect off anything and everything, making spectrum planning very difficult. You might need two access points on either side of a large building for coverage, but thanks to reflections, you won't be able to re-use any of that spectrum because the signal will be bouncing all over. You have very little control over where your signal goes in an urban environment. A truck driving down the road may send your signal 2 miles in the direction you don't want it to go.
4. Bandwidth -- How many rooftops have 10+gb/s of internet available? Probably not many unless you happen to get lucky and have a carrier hotel in the same place you need signal.
I'm a feet-on-the-ground(or sometimes tower) guy, so these are napkin numbers. I've seen a couple of real wireless engineers around here, maybe one of them can pitch in with some more concrete numbers.
When Aereo first started, it was a sound idea with very little in the way on the technical side for implementation. As we know, Aereo's problems weren't technical. This project has many apparent technical issues, and probably some legal ones as well.
I don't want to unnecessarily poo-poo his project. If it works I will be glad -- it will be another tool I can use to do my job -- but it seems like he's promising rainbows and unicorns right now, like so many other investor-bait news articles I read.
Source: 20 years of experience working on/for/by/with many wireless internet providers and cell tower companies.
For weather, what if the base stations only need to work over some distance less than a mile?
For bandwidth, if you consider this to be essentially a last mile tech, and furthermore, if the base stations can mesh network to reach backbone, might that solve the issue?
Just some thoughts. I'm a total non expert.
A real engineer will be able to answer the signal processing question much better than I, but to my knowledge, multipath can only be effectively dealt with when all versions of the signal originated from the same device. When you have effectively a stray signal, it's difficult to tell even where the carrier is. There is some mitigation possible with timing of transmit/receive signals(usually with GPS), but this also requires some control over the propagation of the signal.
As far as weather, for most areas, 39ghz would probably be practical out to 2 miles, with some brief interruptions for very heavy rain. But with the bandwidth limitations, this isn't in line with the stated goal of gigabit level service to high-density urban environments.
This would certainly be a last-mile tech, but the described target is high-density urban areas, where population densities far exceed 1000/sq mile. I can't see this technology ever being able to function at gigabit speeds with those densities.
Mesh networking has it's own issues. If you're going to run it on the same frequency as your endpoints, then you are sharing spectrum with them and your overall bandwidth is significantly reduced. You can backhaul it on a different frequency, but now you have more equipment and expense, licensing, etc... I have to be careful saying it because I haven't kept up with the lastest in mesh developments, but over the last 10 years, I have never seen a mesh network system work reliably with any sort of appreciable speed. Most have failed miserably. The idea looks great on paper, but rarely works out in the real world.
There are tons of last-mile tech available that work very well. FSO(free space optics)[1] is one of them. It has nearly unlimited bandwidth. It's limitation is, it is, as the name implies, optical in nature, so line of sight is an absolute must. Currently available equipment is overpriced as well, but a newcomer could change that.
The FCC just opened up about 150mhz of spectrum in the 3.5ghz area also for last-mile delivery of wireless broadband - Citizens Broadband Radio Service[2] This band is aimed at rural deployments, and isn't concerned with pushing 1gb to everyone, but will go a long ways towards getting a lot of people on the internet at decent(20mb/s+) speeds.
The 5ghz unlicensed band is also very effective at distances under 2 miles, and can be pushed up to 100 miles in certain situations. There is about 600mhz of spectrum available here, some of it ideal for urban situations as it shares frequencies with weather radar and is under strict power restrictions that make it difficult to use for longer and rural connections.
On a tangent, I deal with people nearly every day that can't even get 3mb/s DSL service. The only high-speed that's available to them is satellite, with data caps and horrendous latency, or 3g/4g with spotty speeds and availability, data caps, and impractical per GB billing. When they are able to get even 10mb/s of real internet, they are happier than a 5 year old on Christmas morning. It's by far the most rewarding thing I get to do. It would be nice to see more money flowing towards things like this. But not like FRBA [3] -- Essentially $24 million wasted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_optical_communicati...
[2] https://www.fcc.gov/rulemaking/12-354
[3] http://blog.tmcnet.com/on-rads-radar/2013/04/florida-broadba...
edit: fix footnotes
However this has the founder of Aereo pushing it who made a pretty successful implementation using that technology which had to overcome some of the same issues: Access, visibility, and interference.
Also comcast with other ISP-Content providers also helped in shutting down his company, so he might have some bridges to burn to bring ISP down.
If they had focused on broadband to the home instead they may have had a different fate. This also sounds much, much faster.
I was a user for about two years and, personally, the bandwidth just wasn't enough.