What happens if you add 3 billion new people (in a very short time) to the internet, and increase the bandwidth available to everyone by a factor of 20 today with a potential for a factor of 100 in the near future? Let’s look at the implications of a new technology that holds the promise of inexpensive broadband coming not only to your backyard, but to the backyards of an entire world. This is the beginning of a revolution that will sweep throughout the world faster than the adoption of any previous technology. (…)

Much of the problem is the same one faced by Samuel Morse when deploying the telegraph: telegraph poles don’t “scale.” They don’t get significantly cheaper the more you make them. It takes a certain amount of labor to install a telegraph pole. No matter how much you improve the technology of telegraphy, you still have to get someone to put up a pole.

The same for telephones and for cable or fiber optics. Someone has to dig a trench or string a wire. While the cost of computers and routers and switches keep dropping as their performance improves, the cost of the last mile does not. Backhoes don’t scale. The cost of everything else associated with telecommunications keeps dropping, but the cost of connecting that last mile is essentially the same as it was 15 years ago.

There is wireless, of course, based on cellular technology, but it is expensive and still relatively slow, with speeds in the real world rarely over 400 to 500Kbps, and most often much slower. You are not going to be doing a lot of web searching on your computer, V/IP (Voice over Internet Phone) calling let alone streaming video over a cellular connection (…) While Cellular technology is interesting and possibly useful in certain applications such as very rural areas it is limited by the laws of physics when compared with the efficiency and costs of a competing standard called “mesh technology.” Mesh has lower cost of deployment and higher potential speed per dollar invested, as well as an absolute speed advantage.

Cellular technology systems are based on the single cell tower system. Mesh uses small radios or access points which are much cheaper to deploy and which connect to each other with many possible routes, passing information up and down the system. (…)

So, what is MeshLinx [the company] going to do in Richardson? (A little background. Richardson is a city of 100,000 people covering 27 square miles, with a mix of high rise offices and commercial businesses as well as homes and apartments. It was recently named as the third most technologically advanced city of its size in the US. The University of Texas at Dallas is in the city, where one of the most important nanotechnology research centers in the country resides. It is home to some of the country’s leading technology firms. It is known for its “telecom corridor” because many of the manufacturers of telecommunications equipment have their US headquarters in Richardson. In short, this is a forward looking city with a number of engineers and tech savvy people on its city council, and a mayor who “gets it.”)

Within 10 months, Richardson will have the most advanced wireless broadband system in the world, what we think of as a third generation mesh system. Over this time, the company will be installing approximately 700 basketball-sized access points throughout the city on light poles, buildings and other infrastructure. This will lay a very dense high speed wireless broadband blanket over the entire city. Each access point has six radios in it. For the technically minded, this is a single silicon tunable chip, radio mesh network digitally interfacing with every network layer and able to automatically adjust in real time.

This is the first of its kind in the world. It delivers bandwidth on the public wi-fi spectrum to the end user, the so-called last mile, at a speed unrivalled by its wire bound brethren. And at the end of the day, that is what consumers really want: high speed bandwidth. They really are agnostic as to how they get it. Just serve it up, as fast as you can and easy to use. Oh, and can you please make it cheap?

Every citizen in the City of Richardson will be able to access 756 Kbps of internet connectivity for free, from anywhere in the city. They will be able to access the internet from their homes, schools, restaurants and parks using standard wi-fi connections which are now installed on almost every notebook computer. That is almost as fast as many so-called high speed broadband connections that one pays dearly for today, and several times faster than the various hotspots at your local coffee shops. For those who want higher speeds, they will be able to buy up to 20 megabits of bandwidth (upload and download). { John Mauldin’s Weekly Newsletter, May 11, 2007 | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Link Parabole, 1985 }

READ MORE >> technology, future | May 13th, 2007