On July 19th, telecom giant Sprint-Nextel and wireless web innovator Clearwire signed a letter of intent to join forces and blanket a substantial percentage of the U.S. with a high-speed wireless broadband network.
These tech giants intend to bring most of America’s major metro and suburban areas high-speed web access before the end of this year reaching full capacity by New Year’s Eve 2008… whole cities including parks, stadiums, bars and waterfronts will now be covered by fast, powerful wireless, microwave Internet access.
Imagine living anywhere in the mountains or back woods of the great American interior back in the early-1800′s, before the railroad. Horses would have been the only means of transportation. Now, imagine the day when the first locomotive arrives at your town’s new train station.
Within days, hundreds of people and tons of goods and supplies funnel into the countryside. Regular mail becomes a reality. Settlers, teachers, doctors and professionals of every type pour into town with knowledge and skills from all over the country.
Almost overnight the small town becomes a large and economically thriving place and all because the “iron horse” bridged that “last mile” between this rural, isolated town and the rest of the country.
This is the same kind of advancement that high-speed, broadband Internet access offers 80 million rural Americans over their slow, marginally capable and expensive dial-up service. But these companies could not previously tap into this massive market because of a technological quandary known as the “Last Mile.”
What this means is that bringing hard-wired broadband Internet service (ie; DSL/cable,) that “last mile” into homes that are far back from main roads or outside of existing cable TV networks is too expensive.
The length of the wire and the labor to run it simply costs too much to justify bringing service to the end user… and until now existing wireless transmission options for bridging this “last mile” gap have fallen short of meeting this challenge… until now.
Enter IEEE 802.16 “WiMAX,” a new, exponentially more powerful and wide-ranging standard in wireless transmission of the Internet.
WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. It was designated as Standard 802.16 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Instead of the roughly 100-foot radius that current wireless solutions can cover with a Broadband signal, a single WiMAX base station can blanket a radius of up to 30 miles with high-speed microwave-based Web access for hundreds of users… no cables to install, no wires, no labor costs.
Which means… The “Last Mile” problem is solved. No doubt the effects of this new technology will be dramatic for the telecommunications and broadband service providers adding 80 million new subscribers to their customer base.
Our amazing technological advances leads me to think we may eventually invent our way out of the seemingly insurmountable problems that our nation (the politicians) has created for ourselves. Decaying infrastructure (water pipes and drainage systems, bridges, roads), which were constructed following World War II, devastating droughts, costly, unsustainable foreign wars (Iraq is running at $10 Billion a month) and a host of unfunded social “entitlement” programs threatens to bring our way of life crashing down around us.
The brainless politicians and the American public at large continues to bury their heads in the dirt praying to the “fast buck” gods of Hip Hop and Reality TV instead of on the decline of a worthless, flat currency that will force our future generations to pay dearly for our excesses. All the while the Fed Chairman can’t take his greasy little fingers of the printing press (he ran off another $41 Billion just last week… what in the world could he be thinking).
History has already been written. The fall of the Roman Empire (one of the greatest civilizations in all of antiquity) mirrors the excesses in our own society that will certainly signal the demise of our own Great Society.
Here’s hoping the don’t fry us all with the microwaves.
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