Minnie Bannister wrote in message ...
The City of Grandhaven, MI has just set up WiFi for the whole area, and
Ottawa County is taking about doing the same for the whole county.

There ya go!

How could any local entity (govt. or otherwise) do this using satellite?
The cost of launching a satellite is too high. Aren't the existing
staellite Internet services (DirecWay -- is there any other?) slow and
expensive, and require a large outlay up front for equipment?

They can take any number of routes into existing satellite
capabilities which are both inaccessible and unaffordale out here at
the RRAP consumer level.

Very hypothetical example: Podunk Hollow County ND pays some first
tier commercial ISP which has a connection into the INTELSAT network
and pays them $10,000 a month for their connection. Could be AT&T,
Verizon, Comcast, etc.

Then Podunk Hollow County becomes a local non-profit ISP which puts up
a bunch of Wi-Fi nodes, signs up 2,000 of it's citizens as subscibers
to it's service and charges them ten bucks a month for the connection.
The $10,000 "profit" they appear to be getting in this scenario
actually goes into initial capital investment recovery, the sinking
fund and the system operating and maintenance expenses.

Alan NV8A

w3rv




On 08/14/04 05:47 am S. Hanrahan put fingers to keyboard and launched
the following message into cyberspace:

Wires for any type of communications purposes are already on their way
into history. BPL was stillborn from the gitgo.

The future is satellite. Wi-Fi will just be a fad like the laserdisc.