Aereo Founder Is Back with New High-Speed Wireless Service
I see some major issues here.<p>1. Weather - The higher the frequency, the more things like rain&#x2F;fog&#x2F;sleet&#x2F;snow start to affect you. For example, 24ghz in Florida is useless for more than about 1 mile, unless you&#x27;re okay with it going out in the rain. In Arizona, it&#x27;s great for up to 5 miles. 39ghz will be more limited than this.<p>2. Spectrum - The most efficient radios I know of achieve about 10bps&#x2F;hz -- that means you need 100mhz of spectrum for 1gb&#x2F;s. That&#x27;s total speed, a 900x100 or a 500x500 connection. I don&#x27;t know the details of what technology is being used or planned here but it&#x27;s going to be at least half of that for a practical multi-point system, even worse since these will be user-installed where someone will settle on a weak signal that burns more spectrum for the same speed. My guess is around 2bps&#x2F;hz, but I&#x27;ll stick with 5 for now, giving the benefit of the doubt. Assuming the entire 39ghz(39000mhz to 39999mhz) band is available for use, at a likely best-case scenario of 5bps&#x2F;hz that&#x27;s about 5gb&#x2F;s of traffic for any given signal area. If you&#x27;re selling 1gb connections, even at a 50 to 1 oversubscription rate, that&#x27;s only 250 connections. That will barely put a dent in an urban environment with 100,000+ people.<p>3. Spectrum re-use. Cell companies are able to re-use the spectrum they have because they can control with a good degree of accuracy where their signal goes. At 39ghz, this signal is going to reflect off anything and everything, making spectrum planning very difficult. You might need two access points on either side of a large building for coverage, but thanks to reflections, you won&#x27;t be able to re-use any of that spectrum because the signal will be bouncing all over. You have very little control over where your signal goes in an urban environment. A truck driving down the road may send your signal 2 miles in the direction you don&#x27;t want it to go.<p>4. Bandwidth -- How many rooftops have 10+gb&#x2F;s of internet available? Probably not many unless you happen to get lucky and have a carrier hotel in the same place you need signal.<p>I&#x27;m a feet-on-the-ground(or sometimes tower) guy, so these are napkin numbers. I&#x27;ve seen a couple of real wireless engineers around here, maybe one of them can pitch in with some more concrete numbers.<p>When Aereo first started, it was a sound idea with very little in the way on the technical side for implementation. As we know, Aereo&#x27;s problems weren&#x27;t technical. This project has many apparent technical issues, and probably some legal ones as well.<p>I don&#x27;t want to unnecessarily poo-poo his project. If it works I will be glad -- it will be another tool I can use to do my job -- but it seems like he&#x27;s promising rainbows and unicorns right now, like so many other investor-bait news articles I read.<p>Source: 20 years of experience working on&#x2F;for&#x2F;by&#x2F;with many wireless internet providers and cell tower companies.