And Alive
An 802.11 ISP on Maine's Rocky Coast
by Glenn Fleishman
10/12/2001
In the late 1700s, optical telegraphs were all the rage. In France, Britain, and other western European countries, a series of line-of-sight towers using a common semaphore language could relay a message across hundreds of miles in a few minutes.
Today, the coast of Maine is experiencing a bandwidth rebirth through the use of the modern equivalent of these early information beacons.
An Internet service provider on the state's rocky coast offers topographically enabled customers up to 3 megabits per second through point-to-point wireless IEEE 802.11 networking using a series of bridged line-of-sight transmitters. (Lose your "b" prejudice, as "802.11" is no typo.)
Maine's midcoast region stretches 100 or so miles from Belfast in the north down to Rockland and the peninsulas in the south. There are plenty of towns and villages with a few hundred to several thousand people, but the large population centers like Portland, Augusta, and Bangor are an hour or two away.
Midcoast isn't on the way to anywhere, unless you're vacationing. Thousands of strands of fiber don't criss-cross it, as the Midwestern states are checkerboarded, and a weak analog cell signal is about the best you'll get after you surmount any of the modest coastal hills and hit the shore. Those of us used to digital service are surprised to see our dual- or tri-mode phones "pass out" with dead batteries after just a few hours.
When I lived in Camden, the jewel of the Midcoast for tourists and a nice town year-round, I was lucky to exceed 14.4 Kbps through a dial-up connection (to AppleLink, of all things, one of AOL's side operations). That was in 1993, but eight years later, many residents of that area can still only connect at two to three times that speed.
It's not impossible to buy bandwidth up there. If you happen to have loose change in the neighborhood of several hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month, you can get long-haul T1 -- as a big bundle of wires -- or ISDN. But DSL is not widely available and cable modem service is, by all reports, erratic.
An ISP discovers the ether
Enter into this void an enterprising college student named Jason Philbrook, who started Midcoast Internet Solutions (MIS) in 1995 in a basement in Owl's Head.
MIS has grown steadily, but the costs of moving data around even short distances on the coast are substantial. Owl's Head is small even by Midcoast standards, and in 1997 the company wanted to locate offices in nearby Rockland. The rub? Its T1s and other lines all terminated in Owl's Head, and the cost of running another T1 to its new Rockland location could cost $1,000 to $1,500 a month.
Midcoast Internet Service's customer base is scattered around the coastal inlets and islands of Maine's rocky midcoast region.
MIS had heard about using 802.11 point-to-point unlicensed wireless, and in 1997 began testing equipment from Breezecom. Breezecom, which has since merged with another firm to become Alvarion, specializes in ISP and enterprise-style equipment that would allow no-fuss, (almost) zero-administration, high-speed links.
The 802.11 standard predates 802.11b, and uses frequency hopping (FH) to offer about 3 Mbps (or 1.9 Mbps of throughput) in Breezecom's implementation. Because of the lower data rate and the method by which frequency hopping distributes signals across the 2.4-GHz band, you can locate many overlapping access points in the same directional space, and deploy them at a distance over 30 miles. (For more details on spread spectrum technologies, including frequency hopping, see Jim Geier's white paper, Spread Spectrum: Frequency Hopping vs. Direct Sequence.)
One of MIS's earliest (and continuing) customers is Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, who has featured MIS in several of his "From the Ether" columns in InfoWorld.
Charles Jones, MIS's wireless Internet manager, says of its initial link, "It worked perfectly" -- a phrase we don't often hear in the technology world. Jones says the company started thinking right away "how easy it would be to offer access to customers who needed high-speed access." It would also bypass local wiring limitations and costs, and reduce their reliance on their local carrier, Verizon, which they have to wait on to provide more circuits.
MIS put BreezeNET devices on a tower at a high point near Owl's Head, and its new business began. MIS uses a variety of BreezeNET devices:
· client devices called Station Adapters (SA) that plug into Ethernet LANs,
· more or less standard access points (AP), and
· wireless bridges (WB), which connect repeater stations with MIS's Internet feed.
In a typical end-user installation, MIS brings out a station adapter and an antenna and performs all the wiring necessary to bring an Ethernet connection to the right drop spot. The company sites new locations with either a view to an access point on one of its towers or mountain sites, or pointing at businesses that host repeating stations.
One of the repeaters is located on Ragged Mountain at the Camden Snow Bowl, where other broadcasters have located towers because the site is already wired: They need electricity for the ski lifts.
Installation isn't cheap
The cost is still a sticking point for some users. Jones says, "That's the hardest part about wireless -- the client end. The price we get up front is steep." The company charges about $800 for a standard installation and client equipment, but it can go up from there if inside wiring or complicated outside antenna siting is required. Jones says that they're currently offering a $300 rebate for a 12-month contract to bring in more users.
After installation, it runs $50 per month for one machine, plus $8 per additional computer on the same network. Jones says the pricing competes with the cost of a second wired phone line and Internet account, and that it's worked for both customers and their bottom line. (If this seems expensive to those of you who, like me, are reading this from an urban area with competing DSL, cable, and satellite options, consider the cost of the only real competitor on Maine's Midcoast, ISDN from Verizon. With modem and installation, it costs about $350 to get into, plus $59 per month for the service and $30 per month for an ISP account with them. And that only buys you 128 Kbps, compared to throughput up to 1.9 Mbps over wireless.)
MIS's access points are typically connected to a wireless bridge over a local Ethernet network. Breezecom's wireless bridges offer a nice feature: They can connect with Breezecom access points as a client, meaning you don't need a bridge on each side of a span. This allows MIS to deploy a hub-and-spoke approach, in which Internet traffic is relayed via access point to bridge to access point to end user with only losses in latency, while retaining most of the bandwidth potential.
Jones says that MIS hasn't limited itself to offering this simple arrangement, however. For instance, in nearby Damariscotta, further west toward Portland, they offer DSL in conjunction with a local independent phone company with bandwidth brought in wirelessly from their head office to the local telco's switch.
Out to the islands
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More intriguingly, MIS has brought local, no-toll Internet access to the island of Matinicus, about 20 miles from its tower at Owl's Head. Telephone calls off-island from Matinicus cost several cents a minute, so MIS brought an access point to the island that local customers can use directly.
But they also connected this access point to the island's phone exchange. Residents can make local calls to the modems at MIS's facilities on the island. These modems are in turn networked via a terminal server to MIS's wireless connection, avoiding any toll costs or metering for the locals.
Jones says the company has installed some similar operations inland, as well, installing a tower in the town of Union to bring dial-up into the local exchange and wireless access to line-of-sight residents. Union has 55 dial-up customers now and about five wireless users.
MIS has also used solar and battery power at some locations to avoid bringing electricity to more remote locations. The Breezecom devices use about 2 amps each, and a complete installation is well under 10 amps.
Security and scaling
The Breezecom devices use a combination of closed-network IDs and back-end RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) authentication, to avoid snooping and access hijacking. Jones explained that Breezecom's frequency-hopping equipment first requires authentication of the network ID (the ESSID used to uniquely name a network) before it reveals the hopping pattern; then, with the client hopping along with the access point, RADIUS authentication logs the user into the network.
Frequency hopping offers additional advantages, Jones says, in having many, mostly non-interfering hopping patterns, which allow MIS to install lots of overlapping service without signal degradation. This limits the company to the raw 3 Mbps maximum of 802.11, but Jones feels the tradeoff for security, configuration, and cost is worthwhile. MIS has no current plans to add 802.11b service.
Jones notes that they can easily handle more users in most locations by adding sectorized, higher-gain antennas that handle just a certain degree of arc directionally.
The limits to the speed and availability of the service don't seem to be a problem for the users that Jones interacts with regularly. "People want speed, not bandwidth," he says. "The average user isn't going to be downloading a bunch of files or CDs or images day in, day out. They just want to be able to go to a Web site and have it be fast."
Distance hasn't proved a problem. Jones says the company thinks nothing of a 15- or 20-mile link, and that longer connections have worked with some tweaking. From Westport to Rockland, for instance, MIS runs a 40-mile point-to-point connection with a 300-foot tower on one end and a 100-foot tower on a 450-foot hill on the other.
Jones says that MIS hopes to push further inland using wireless as their toehold. He admitted to a certain obsession with siting. "When I travel around, one of the first things I'm looking at it now is, 'I wonder if this would be a good place for access.'"
Glenn Fleishman is a freelance reporter who writes for the New York Times, Fortune, the Seattle Times, and other publications. He has a daily weblog at glennf.com.
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