[joelhaus]

Does anyone feel that the new white space standard (up to 22Mbps over 12,000 sq mi; 802.22) could be a game changer?

Original article was posted here yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2814917

Cross-posting my question from this thread:

Is this spectrum encumbered by any regulations that would prevent an enterprising individual from leasing some land near a backbone connection and setting up a startup ISP?

Would LOVE to see the regional cable monopolies face real competition. 22Mbps is about 30% more downstream and 4000% more upstream speed than I get from Time Warner Cable in NYC.

[wmf]

22 Mbps shared by hundreds or thousands of customers is much worse than cable or DSL. You can already do ~100 Mbps at decent range in 2.4 GHz using Ubiquiti or similar equipment; there are dozens of WISPs doing this and if they're lucky they barely break even.

[joelhaus]

Thanks Wes - If I understand correctly, it's the density of end-points within range that would determine whether the economics are favorable.

Wondering then, what is the use case for this new standard? Only very rural areas?

[Nrsolis]

No. You're missing the point ENTIRELY.

As average bandwidth consumption PER ENDPOINT increases and moves from very bursty to somewhat constant bit rate, the effects up the cost chain start to chip away at the design parameters that went into building the infrastructure we're going to live with for some time. Replacing that infrastructure is costly so pricing pressure is used to delay that replacement event. It's all about ECONOMICS.

This is the case whether we're talking about urban or rural areas. It's definitely more acute when we're in a rural area, but the first-mile is only part of the cost of delivering b/w. The rest of that cost is driven by indirect factors.

Case in point: a very recent government regulation resulted in a network upgrade that cost $71 million in new hardware ALONE. Add in the labor costs associated with testing and installing all of that hardware and you're somewhere north of $100 million. That "upgrade" added not a single bit of capacity to the network.