Mark Addinall
Sure but you get a profesionaly installed 1 way link including hardware and dish for under $980 dollars. With subscritptions starting at $49-month for a 200Mb limit and $79-month for a reasonable 2 Gb link. I think that's pretty reasonable. It's not going to kill anyones budget. Prices go up about 50% with two way links but factor in that if you are in that remote a region you're also going to be able to get telophony and free VOiP over the same dish and its a pretty good deal.
Finaly people have got access through the CDMA1X network anywhere there is CDMA mobile phone coverage at rates comperable to the cheaper ADSL G.Lite plans.
CDMA1X averages 100kbits and often peaks at 144kbits.
A full sized cellphone tower with all land,parts, labour,environmental buttesments etc costs about $300,000. (Mini cells are much cheaper). Averaged over 1000 homes and 3 years the cost of putting up two towers (to get ovelapping coverage) works out at $200-year per home over three years. It's clear that there are ways of getting good country coverage if the local community and council work together as the costs are bearable.
The dialup account is included I'm certain.
Plus the cost of a land line.
The costs are substantially less unless you go for two way. Most people don't want or need 1.5Mbit speeds and 20Gb caps like you do. They aren't computer junkies. They want to browse, VOiP, chat, email and occaisionaly download a mp3 from the ninemsn site. 512kbits producese excellent browsing and most servers don't pump out the data any faster anyway.
This is the cost for one year including hardware and installation. Subsequent years will average out at around $100 or so per month. Lots of people pay that with bigpond anyway.
Its also the cost for two way which is needed when there is no phone network at all.
Scott Adams the fakeengineer. 3950Sounds like your son is getting incomplete career advice from someone, perhaps a high school guidance counselor. Also, was your son unaware of how a segment of society views lawyers...
$200 or so for the cellular-modem and $49-month for 1Gb-month. About the same as ADSL G.lite. His only disadvantge is that he can't drop to a lower grade plan with lower service as you can with ADSL plans.
There is no need to pull cables into the street and not even a need to put cables in between the towers. It looks like being cheaper than even 3GSM-W-CDMA and CDMA2000 data becuase of the very efficient modulation technology and very flexible synchronous time doman techniques. It is designed to be as reliable as PSTN and work non line of sight. It will provide broadband and telophony and we have seen a precursor of it int he form of unwired and the less compliant iburst.
unwired is available only in Sydney but it is my understanding that they will rollout WiMAX. Sydney is just an experiment to get the company going. They are waiting for WiMAX standards and technoloy to mature. In the meantime they get experience in Sydney. Unwired set out to target areas not covered by ADSL but found that they were getting about 175 penetration irrespective of whether ADSL was available.
Unwired will expand when WiMAX standards matures to offer better price performance.
You can drop to about $89-month for 12Gb at 512-128 or $65-month for 256-64. Speed not volume costs you.
Interestingly unwired offer a 64-32 plan for $15.95-month that competetes with dialup. Non of their simple plans have excess usuage charges: they just drop you back to dialup speeds till the next month.
I simply got unwired because it allows my wife to take it out with her laptop and you sort of impusle buy it and are setup in 1 minute instead of insalling those ghatly filters in the mess of extensions most peoples homes are now.
I thought it was IBM. No shame in being beaten by MS.
