IMPORTANT NOTICE about High Speed
I work fulltime on the Internet. In fact, I own and run a webhosting company out of Panama where we have 6 fibre optic networks coming into our data center. Where I live however, I can only get a very second rate satellite service. I have to drive 15 miles to get what I need for high speed when I need it.... VERY frustrating.
Now... VERY, VERY IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR YOU ALL. I see everyone is talking about access to high speed broadband... BUT ...I cannot find any mention of what that speed should be and it very definitely SHOULD BE A SURVEY QUESTION. I am in Nova Scotia, Canada and here they are trying to put up 6 wireless towers in our area to give us ONLY about 1 Mps supposedly "high speed". This is better than dialup but still VERY inadequate. The minimum should be at least 54 Mbps.
If this issue is not covered, then you will see a lot of the rural areas in the USA very STUCK for a long time with only 1-2 Mbps. PLUS... the wireless towers are very bad for the health of those within 3 Kms of the tower. They are now tearing these down in Europe because of the great rise in Cancer and other diseases found in those people near those towers.
Yours truly,
James
Comments
We don't need to settle for less than ONE GIGABIT PER SECOND -- the telecom industry wants to sell "wireless" but wireless is the weak second cousin to FIBER.
EVERYONE should IGNORE OFFERS OF WIRELESS-ANYTHING until we have FIBER TO OUR HOUSES AND OFFICES. And then the supposed "need" for wireless will be shown the same toy it is today.
When Fiber is deployed, its starting speed can be as high as the adapters are cheap. One Gigabit per second is COMMONPLACE, so fiber networks commenced today can run at 1 gbps. However, TEN GIGABIT is being worked on for commercial use and it might be available in a few years; and so when your FIBER NETWORK STARTS UP in 2012, you might even get 10 gbps!
Wireless will NEVER COMPETE WITH THESE SPEEDS. Nor, for that matter, will the telcos/cablecos. If we want those speeds, WE CAN BUILD OUR OWN NETWORK TO DELIVER IT, see http://communityfiber.org.
+1 to this. Any broadband initiative should be through running cables, not wireless towers. Broadband used to mean 1 - 2Mb, but we all know that CATV infrastructure already in place can run at many times this. Anywhere that electrical and telephone poles run now could have a simple coax cable with amplifiers to take a broadband signal anywhere. Better yet, fiber optics.
Better still would be to run fiber underground. Much of this infrastructure has already been built.
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