[TriLUG] High speed wireless service

[Magnus Hedemark]

On Thu, 25 Mar 2004, Steve Kuekes wrote:

> There was some discussion about a company that was providing high speed 
> broadband access over some kind of wireless for rural areas in NC.
> 
> I am working with the Boy Scouts and we are investigating getting 
> Internet service to their summer camps in Moore county.  The camps are 
> very rural so I think there is no cable and its probably too far for DSL 
> (although I haven't checked yet).  So I thought that this wireless stuff 
> might just be the ticket.

802.16 is being hailed as the holy grail for rural broadband.  It's a 
wireless solution with a much greater range than the 802.11 standards, and 
depending on which flavor of 802.16 you're talking about it can be pretty 
fast, too.

But it's also very new.  And last time I looked it was one of those "if 
you have to ask you can't afford it" kind of things to set up a rural 
Internet co-op.  But it's been about 6-9 months since I last looked, so 
maybe things have changed.

But wait a minute... should the boy scouts be outside canoing and fishing 
and making furniture with nothing but a swiss army knife and a pile of 
green saplings instead of playing around on the Internet all 
summer? ;-)