There is some nanoisation required for the CPE for Farmside to be conveniently portable onto cruise ships.
At present it's a dish about 0.8 metres across, with a cable to a box which is about 20cm wide, 30 cm tall and 8cm wide near enough from memory - with a photo here, scroll to the bottom:
farmside.co.nz Plug in a Zenbu router and hey presto, instant wifi.
One would look conspicuous installing that outside one's cabin on a cruise ship. A convenient little Globalstar device would be much better, with wifi integrated into one handy little package. Then one could go and sit by a pool and share the connection via wifi with anyone else sitting around using their wifi device.
Farmside isn't a competitor to Zenbu, it's a backhaul for Zenbu and a few Zenbu customers use that. Come to think of it, quite a few in the case of Cook Islands [perhaps not IPStar but whatever backhaul they have there].
Ideally, Globalstar would be built into little highly portable boxes with omnidirectional antennas with wifi links to Zenbu customers in the area. But $1 a megabyte is not quite aggressive enough. We will have to wait to see what Globalstar thinks "aggressive" means. My bet is that it is laughable. I wonder if they think SPOT pricing is "aggressive".
Whatever they think SPOT pricing is, they will probably think along the same lines for other things they do, so it'll be as exciting as an old people's home or government department.
The new constellation won't be like the launch of an iPhone or iPad for interest, yet it could be so much more. Imagine it, an actual global communications system for voice, skype, email and all that good cyberspace stuff.
Mqurice |
