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Thanks to wireless hotspots set up by networking activists in Portland, Ore, people are able to surf the Internet from their laptops wherever they happen to be -- at home, a coffee shop or a neighborhood park. So when Portland announced it would try to blanket the entire city with similar Wi-Fi technology, many people got excited -- until they tried using it.
According to an online report in the Caspar Star-Tribune, the Wi-Fi net leaves something to be desired.
Programmer Adam DuVander was quoted as saying in the report, “For me ubiquitous access means I don't have to base my life around wherever my office is. I tried it out as soon as I could and found that it wasn't for me. The quality of the connection is not up to my standards."
The report noted that the Wi-Fi signals don't travel far or penetrate building walls well. The existing access points serve a coffee shop well, or a park where enough users are concentrated to justify installing a lot of wireless antennas.
Logan Kleier, the city's manager for the Unwired Portland project was quoted as saying their contractor, MetroFi Inc., is putting roughly 25 access points per square mile, so that users would generally be no farther than 500 feet from the nearest one. Cutting that distance in half would require about four times as many access points, because they need to be installed in all four directions.
"The network cost gets completely out of whack," he said. "The business model breaks in its entirety."
For $150, signal boosters are being offered by network operators. However, many Portland residents are sticking with their existing DSL or cable provider instead.
Sprint (News - Alert) Nextel Corp. is reportedly planning to phase in WiMax, an emerging technology promising much longer ranges, in several cities starting with Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.
Dave Burstein, editor of the industry newsletter DSL Prime, was quoted as saying that while wireless networks are good as backups during emergencies and away from home, "it's very hard to have a wireless network compete as a primary connection. Where you have a choice, DSL or cable compared to wireless, you are going to go for DSL or cable unless it's ridiculously overpriced," he said.
Calvin Azuri is a contributing writer for TMCnet
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Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) | X | | Frequency Division Multiplexing is used in wireline systems such as CATV-Community Antenna TeleVision and DSL-Digital Subscriber Line systems. This form of FDM is also called Broadband Multiplexing o...more |
802.11 (Wi-Fi) | X | | The IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard is usually referred to as Wi-Fi-Wireless Fidelity or WLAN Wireless Local Area Network. The 802.11 standard has evolved into a number of sub-standards 802.11a/b/g...more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X | | IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
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