1.1 The Wireless Last Mile
In October 2002, at Owensboro, a small Kentucky city on the Ohio River, after a five-month pilot program, the local electricity and water provider, Owensboro Municipal Utilities (OMU), rolled out a high-speed broadband service to the city's 58 000 residents at US $25 a month, just $2 more than what many were paying for low-speed dial-up access. In a short six months since launching service, OMU Online has connected more than 700 customers with broadband access. Currently, it has a backlog of several hundred connections, and expects to have a total of 1,500 customers by the end of the year.
Two months earlier and 3000 km away, in Klamath Falls, Ore., a small start-up company, Always On Network Inc. (Chiloquin, Ore.), began serving up broadband to 30 test customers, converting them into paying customers a few months later.
What make these enterprises novel aren't the data rates, which aren't exceptional for broadband, at 250-1000 Kb/s. It's the way that the bits are delivered-wirelessly-at least for the critical last mile to the home.
In October 2002, at Owensboro, a small Kentucky city on the Ohio River, after a five-month pilot program, the local electricity and water provider, Owensboro Municipal Utilities (OMU), rolled out a high-speed broadband service to the city's 58 000 residents at US $25 a month, just $2 more than what many were paying for low-speed dial-up access. In a short six months since launching service, OMU Online has connected more than 700 customers with broadband access. Currently, it has a backlog of several hundred connections, and expects to have a total of 1,500 customers by the end of the year.
Two months earlier and 3000 km away, in Klamath Falls, Ore., a small start-up company, Always On Network Inc. (Chiloquin, Ore.), began serving up broadband to 30 test customers, converting them into paying customers a few months later.
What make these enterprises novel aren't the data rates, which aren't exceptional for broadband, at 250-1000 Kb/s. It's the way that the bits are delivered-wirelessly-at least for the critical last mile to the home.
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