
Why Western Mass Doesn't Have the Internet - steven
https://backchannel.com/why-western-mass-doesn-t-have-the-internet-77922828048c#.blgqm57nc
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PaulHoule
Just a geography lesson for the California crowd.

In some places wireless is a real answer, but it goes nowhere in Western Mass
because of two reasons: (i) hills, and (ii) trees. The effect of the trees is
to make any towers 40 feet higher.

All of the time in the east we see proposals to build a fixed wireless system
and frequently these look attractive, at least in the short term, based on
back-of-the-envelope engineering.

Often when the radio engineering is done you find that you need two or three
times the number of nodes you did at first, you need to build miles of access
roads, and the towers need to be much taller and more expensive than you
planned. And then there still are people you can't serve.

We've had ten years of broken promises about fixed wireless, and the gist of
it is that: (a) wireless is expensive not cheap, (b) if incumbent carriers
can't provide a good 4G signal at your spot, neither can undercapitalized
local organizations, and (c) the problem is not that fiber is expensive, it is
that it is cheap. Fiber sells for $70 a month unlimited and some places, and
no way is Verizon going to stand for anything cheaper than the $10 a gigabyte
that they charge for wireless data.

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xbmcuser
I think Google loon could be the answer to some of these problems. Google
Fiber also announced something about bringing wireless 1gbit Internet. Despite
Google Fiber being a good business for Alphabet I think many of these thinga
Alphabet introduces are just a kick to monopolistic telcos to get with the
times.

~~~
PaulHoule
Loon, low-orbit satellites, and similar technology are like going from the
frying pan to the fire.

All technologies of this sort are challenged by extreme variations in demand
in different geospatial areas -- for instance you have to provide coverage for
uninhabited ocean areas, etc.

Inevitably around big cities you will find concentrations of people who want
to buy reliability/diversity at any cost, and if you don't keep these people
out, they will affect the system for 100s of miles around them.

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perimo
If you're wondering why, the one town that managed to get fiber installed
(Leverett) is relatively densely populated with UMass Amherst faculty.

