On the idea of locally owned/municipal WISPs:
There are many around the country seeing various types of success. The local wimax guy is caught in red tape hell because our township can’t figure out how to zone a tower for commercial use rather than personal. And there’s another nasty flynin the ointment. It works like this:
1) Town X has around 2000 people. The council, mayor, etc. have heard from their citizens they want broadband access at home, schools, local businesses and so on.
2) Town X’s officials contact major ISP’s like Cox, Comcast, Verizon and so on but they’re given the same answer by all: it would cost too much money to deploy for such a small population. Town X appeals again but gets nowhere.
3) the Citizens then decide to create their own network using local dollars. They have the plans drawn up, contracts are negotiated, costs are determined and the residents are thrilled...and it all comes to a screeching halt.
4) One of the big ISP’s files a lawsuit, alleging that a governmental entity is acting in place of an existing corporation and using tax dollars to fund it. That they weren’t interested before doesn’t matter — they can afford the lawyers to keep deployment tied up for years.
It’s a mess that shouldn’t exist, but there it is.
Thanks much for explaining the hassles and barriers you have seen to establishing WISPs. I was thinking of a WiMax tower to serve 100 rural families. Has to be cheaper, faster than Hughes dish internet??? Could it come in a $50/month per dwelling, per family? I think it could if the Federales or the state of Idaho (for example) guarantee construction loans and make minor grants
By Tim Conneally | Published April 27, 2009, 3:38 PM
Soon, funds from the 7.2 billion dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be available, with $2.5 billion going to fund rural broadband projects through the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS). This funding is intended to be used in the construction, improvement, or acquisition of facilities to provide broadband to unserved and underserved locations in the US.
The 2008 Farm Bill (1.5 MB PDF available here) defines eligible rural communities as any area other than a city, town, or unincorporated area with a population greater than 20,000 inhabitants, or a city, town or unincorporated area with fewer than 50,000.
For those of us living in areas served by fiber-to-the-home and 3G wireless, any venture outside of our coverage blanket feels like a journey into the past. But in truth, if you cover your eyes and point to a United States map, the odds are in favor of your finger hitting an underserved rural area where the adoption of new technology is hampered by its lagging infrastructure.
The FCC categorizes the possible rural broadband options -- and certainly those in the whole of the US -- as: DSL, cable, satellite, fiberoptic, BPL (Broadband over Power Line) and wireless. A crucial debate thus far has been over which method of connection is the most advantageous, but wireless has been getting strong support in recent months.
Thanks to test deployments of WiMAX in extreme locations like the remote Ta Van village in northern Vietnam, and in under-connected African countries like Benin and Cameroon, deployments can begin quickly, cheaply, and in spite of harsh conditions. Unlike fiber and copper, no digging is required in a WiMAX network. Base stations can be set up, moved, or upgraded with relative ease.
Because the guidelines for receiving stimulus grants are still very unclear, and Congress has stressed that it wants practical solutions as quickly as possible, WiMAX is in a unique position. American WiMAX supporters like Airspan Networks are eager to show that it is "ready to roll" with both back-end and CPE hardware available, economically viable, flexible, and able to support the capacity and speed minimums that will be laid down by the government in the upcoming grant programs.
Even though early supporters of the wireless standard such as Nokia have grown skeptical of its potential as LTE has gained major support in the mobile sector, WiMAX still has much to offer and could experience a big boom as early as next month.