Wireless Internet for All, Without the Towers
THESE still are early days for the Internet, globally speaking. One billion people online; five billion to go.
The next billion to be connected are living in homes that are physically close to an Internet gateway. They await a solution to the famous “last mile” problem: extending affordable broadband service to each person’s doorstep.
If you’re sitting with your laptop at an outside cafe, you’ll be happy with the service. But if you happen to be at home, you realize that service to the doorstep is not enough: you still need to buy equipment to bolster the signal and solve the “last mile plus 10 more yards” problem — that is, getting coverage indoors.
Wi-Fi signals do not bend, and you usually can’t get much of a useful bounce from them, either. Because Wi-Fi uses unlicensed bands of the radio spectrum, by law it must rely on low-power transmitters, which reduce its ability to penetrate walls. Travel-round-the-world shortwave, this ain’t.
Trying to cover a broad area with Wi-Fi radio transmitters set atop street lights brings to mind a fad of the 1880s: attempts to light an entire town with a handful of arc lights on high towers. But overeager city boosters around the country soon discovered that shadows obscured large portions of their cities, and the lighting was not as useful as had been expected. Municipal Wi-Fi on streetlamps, another experiment with top-down delivery, may run a similarly short-lived — and needlessly expensive — course.
The fact that 200 million Wi-Fi chips will be manufactured this year leads to economies of scale that will drive down the price of extremely intelligent network equipment. Meraki’s products are still being tested, but word-of-mouth has attracted 15,000 users in 25 countries.
MR. BISWAS says there are about 800 million personal computers in the world, but only 280 million are connected. The rest are “stuck in the 1980s” — close to being connected, but not quite.
THESE still are early days for the Internet, globally speaking. One billion people online; five billion to go.
The next billion to be connected are living in homes that are physically close to an Internet gateway. They await a solution to the famous “last mile” problem: extending affordable broadband service to each person’s doorstep.
If you’re sitting with your laptop at an outside cafe, you’ll be happy with the service. But if you happen to be at home, you realize that service to the doorstep is not enough: you still need to buy equipment to bolster the signal and solve the “last mile plus 10 more yards” problem — that is, getting coverage indoors.
Wi-Fi signals do not bend, and you usually can’t get much of a useful bounce from them, either. Because Wi-Fi uses unlicensed bands of the radio spectrum, by law it must rely on low-power transmitters, which reduce its ability to penetrate walls. Travel-round-the-world shortwave, this ain’t.
Trying to cover a broad area with Wi-Fi radio transmitters set atop street lights brings to mind a fad of the 1880s: attempts to light an entire town with a handful of arc lights on high towers. But overeager city boosters around the country soon discovered that shadows obscured large portions of their cities, and the lighting was not as useful as had been expected. Municipal Wi-Fi on streetlamps, another experiment with top-down delivery, may run a similarly short-lived — and needlessly expensive — course.
The fact that 200 million Wi-Fi chips will be manufactured this year leads to economies of scale that will drive down the price of extremely intelligent network equipment. Meraki’s products are still being tested, but word-of-mouth has attracted 15,000 users in 25 countries.
MR. BISWAS says there are about 800 million personal computers in the world, but only 280 million are connected. The rest are “stuck in the 1980s” — close to being connected, but not quite.
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