Aereo Founder’s New Startup Wants to Bring You Wi-Fi–And Cut Out the Providers | Hacker News Reader

Aereo Founder’s New Startup Wants to Bring You Wi-Fi–And Cut Out the Providers

wired.com

47 pointspdq28 comments

Quoting from a slightly older Fierce Wireless article that delves into some of the details of Starry's fixed wireless millimeter spectrum play as outlined by CEO Chet Kanojia:

"[Cellular carriers] have more money than God, so I'm not sure that's a good area for us anyways." Then you start looking at spectrum at 24 GHz and above, and there are plenty of challenges, but the 37 GHz range might be the sweet spot for Starry.

To be clear, "we're really smart people, but we're not that good," he said. "We took a tremendous short cut, which we think is the right strategic short cut." The company didn't develop its own radios; it's using 802.11ac MIMO radios off the shelf, having figured out a way to convert them to a higher frequency band without causing distortion, he said.

[1] http://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/story/att-verizon-other-c...

Is sounds like they are developing along the similar lines I have.

My first product was free television (Free.Tv) and I recently open sourced my patent on free wireless at http://Free-Fi.org

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984755

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10981220

tl;dr: consensus is, barring some wild, unknown innovation, the technology claimed does not seem to be a good fit with the mission stated.

my option: investor bait

"The Starry Station is a sleekly designed device with a touchscreen interface that allows people to track the devices on their network and the overall health of their network on a daily basis, and lets them install things like parental controls and, possibly, even ad-blocking technology at the network level."

Sounds like it (lack of focus, i.e. just meant to attract money).

Curious, given the mission stated, what sort of technology would be your first go-to solution?

Free space optics would be my technology of choice for short distance, high bandwidth, high density connections.

Nearly unlimited spectrum. The 'tower' side could be essentially a 'floodlight'. And you don't even have to tassle with the FCC AFAIK.

It has the distance and weather issue as millimeter wave tech, but it doesn't have the bandwidth constraints.

Outside of that, there is not a viable technology I'm aware of that can do wireless data distribution in a high density, multi-gigabit environment. There is simply not enough available RF spectrum in the bands that can tolerate weather and atmospheric conditions over distances that would be relevant here.

I haven't seen anyone create hardware for free-space optics that supports bandwidth above 100Mbps. So, technically the medium of transport has nearly unlimited bandwidth, but it seems like a moot argument as long as no manufacturers are doing anything about it. If I'm wrong in this assertion I'd love to know. I have a project that could benefit from such technology, if you can spare a few minutes I'd love an e-mail chat (see profile).

There are many companies providing high bandwidth optical links. One is just about to go under, they were charging $50,000+ per link. [1][2] Most are prohibitively expensive -- the field is ripe for someone like Ubiquiti to come in with some 'disruptive' pricing.

[1] http://www.aoptix.com/

[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/08/anova_takes_slice_of...

Yet, Google has announced they're playing with millimeter-wave networking from aerial drones and that was much better received for some reason....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009109

As did Facebook.

Google is not promising gigabit speeds that will displace landline providers, and the article linked acknowledges the challenges with the technology that are yet to be overcome.

It doesn't blow sunshine in my face and tell me everything is golden.

I like the way this guy thinks. Takes on the fat cats who are abusing their unfairly advantaged business positions to squeeze more money than they deserve out of us.

If he keeps doing this and getting squashed, it could lead to a successful career in politics :)

It's deeply ironic to paint Aereo as taking on those with "unfairly advantaged business positions." Aereo's whole business model was getting other peoples' content for free because of a loophole in the broadcasting laws. It's great to build a business delivering content other people create that you don't have to pay for, but that's the definition of "unfairly advantaged business position."

But, but ... aren't all startups told to look for that "unfair competitive advantage" :)

I never felt that situation was clearly resolved in my mind. The essentially ran a subscription dvr service. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around how it's illegal for a business to do that, but just fine for me to do it myself.

I'm not talking about the law so much as the moralizing. Aereo was a middle-man. The only reason anyone ever paid them money was to get access to content that Aereo didn't create or even pay for. When that content became unavailable, Aereo collapsed because the entire value of their service was derived from other peoples' content.

Whether or not their "subscription DVR service" fit within the legal loophole they were trying to take advantage of doesn't change the fact that it's pretty rich to build a service like that and then go around saying that the people whose content you're distributing -- the people who create the content that is the sole basis for the existence of your business -- are "fat cats" with "unfairly advantaged business positions."

Nah. They were providing "dvr as a service" at a reasonable price. The "fat cats" are the cable monopolies that lobby to protect their unfair positions while drastically overcharging and providing poor customer value.

Aereo made it easy to take advantage of something that is already free (and free by law). That was going to cut into the fat cats margins, so the fat cats got them shut down.

To be clear - would you also be morally opposed to renting physical TV antennas? Assume that the only thing they are useful for is receiving broadcast television, they can't be repurposed for electronics hacking, hanging clothes, etc.

I'm not morally opposed to the service--I'm opposed to moralizing the issue and pretending that you're fighting "fat cats" even as you create a service that exists solely to sell their content to other people.

But that content is already being freely distributed over the airwaves. They just provided another means of accessing it. The only reason the broadcasters opposed Aereo is that they were afraid people might cut the cable. The current system is a bizarre pyramid of misincentives. I really believe the decision against Aereo came down to fear of what would happen if that pyramid needed to be fundamentally rethought, as it will eventually definitely need to be. It was basically a gift to the established players to hopefully give them another couple decent years before they actually have to innovate. It's rather telling that they could pretty trivially live stream their over-the-air content, obviating the purpose of an Aereo, but they simply choose not to.

The content is free because it is distributed over the public airwaves. If you distribute it in a way that does not use the public airwaves, the basis for making it free to the public disappears. Also, broadcasters couldn't care less if people cut the cable. They only reason they cared about Aereo is because they're in a bitter war with the cable companies over retransmission fees, and if Aereo can stream broadcast content for free, that could undermine broadcasters' leverage over cable companies.

The system definitely needs to be rethought. The sensible thing to do would be to simply get rid of free public broadcasting and the associated copyright exceptions. Free up the airwaves, and let broadcasters sell content directly to cable and internet companies. But as Netflix is finding out, content is king. There is little room for simple middle-men like Aereo to make money when they can't get content for free.

In other words, he was operating exactly how the cable companies did when they first started. And the west-coast movie companies. And American book publishers in the 1700s. And Irish book publishers before that.

Remembering the heated discussion in my neighborhood about installing some extra mobile towers, I can already see the protests when they hear "high-frequency millimeter waves","Starry Beams".

How is another provider "cutting out the providers"?

I think that the value is "adding another provider" to the market, where in many places there is only one or two choices for internet, from entrenched providers with low levels of service.

> Aereo, now Chet Kanojia is taking on the country’s biggest Internet providers with a new start-up called Starry.

Excuse me while I piss myself laughing at the thought that the major ISPs would be worried about a wireless broadband startup. I tried Clearwire for six months. Even when it works well, wireless is no substitute for even copper wire, much less fiber. Bandwidth is lower, they have to throttle because of it. The physics just doesn't work to give anywhere close to the same experience as copper without doing something drastic like mesh, and that's got its own problems.

Is there a fundamental problem with mesh? Why couldn't that work in combination with something like maidsafe?

Just thinking out loud here.

The main issue with mesh is the property rights. It's too much of a headache to put mesh devices everywhere. So your market is going to be extremely limited.

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