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To: Elmer who wrote (166322)	6/14/2002 1:38:47 PM
From: tcmay	Respond to of 186894

"Tim, in Santa Cruz anyone with line of sight access to Loma Prieta can get highspeed wireless internet access at a reasonable cost. How many people there are taking advantage of it? Here in Phoenix Sprint offered a similar service but I don't know it's status. I tried to get it but there was a tree in the way." I don't know. At my house, Loma Prieta is blocked by nearby hills. But this raises the point again about alternatives to fiber. (Not that I'm knocking fiber...I'd love it if PacBell actually does deploy fiber in my area.) There are many viable alternatives, especially for the 95% of users who are not office buildings or corporations: 1. Line of sight, last mile, wireless broadband or laser. Power-limited broadband RF avoids the congestion problem in the obvius way: cells are small enough that number of users in a cell is small. Laser avoids the congestion problem by directionality. (Lest anyone be fretting about blinding occurring, or birds being cooked, the laser power can be limited to a few milliwatts, and can be done in the IR. Microwave lasers, aka masers, are also possible.) (Intel buildings were communicating with rooftop lasers as early as the early 80s.) 2. Satellites. Typically these are multi gigabits per second on the downlink side, albeit with less "choice," and a few hundred kilobits per second on the uplink side. Not so great if Junior wants to send his bootlegged copy of "Spiderman" to his friends, but perfectly fine if HBO or Showtime plans to broadcast "Spiderman" to a few hundred million potential viewers. (And there is enough bandwidth for even the hundreds of PPV channels I never choose to use.) My contention, epitomized by my earlier point that a 48K dial up line has served me JUST FINE, is that it is very difficult to create content needing a wideband line, but very easy to _request_ content created by others which needs this bandwidth. In fact, about the only I can generate this kind of content is with my digital video camera and then try to dump it out over a line. For anything else, lower bandwidth works. (For sending digital photos, my 48K line is a major pain. Cablemodem or ADSL would do the trick. And, again, I don't generate digital images very often, nor does the average person, so the bandwidth issues are about waiting a minute to upload an image or waiting a second.) 3. More mobile devices. Namely, advanced PDA, advanced slates, advanced cellphones. Or, obviously, all three combined into one. (I personally am expecting slates to take off, someday. A topic for other articles.) These mobile devices will benefit from an infrastructure rich in ultrawideband wireless, along the lines of cell-based UWB. Which of these will dominate? I don't know. But it's why, I believe, we should not rush into doing an "Apollo Moonshot to Put Fiber into Every Home!!" A mix of approaches, an anarchy, beats a stalinist, centrally-planned approach. --Tim May