Mesh Networks Bring Broadband to Rural Areas

In late August I moved to a country house looking over 23 mile long Rice Lake, 10 km North of Cobourg, Ontario, Canada. The only problem was the fact that the area did not have high-speed internet, a must for someone working from home doing research.

 Consequently, I had to suffer through 6 weeks of a “dialup” internet connection, and had to go to town just to be able to download large files. What a pain!

We tend to forget that millions of people still get their internet through less than adequate pipes, at a time when the sizes of files that people want to see and download continue to go up. For me, using dialup was equivalent to regressing back about 10 years, in terms of speed of access to what has become an essential service.

 I investigated using a satellite hook-up, but, while faster than dialup, it has delays as your antenna communicates with the satellite. And, it is only relatively fast in downloading, remaining painfully slow for uploading files.

Help came in the form of a new point-to-point wireless “mesh network” that uses radio-based repeater stations with a line of site range of about 15 miles. The particular technology used in my village is from Tranzeo, and my provider is Airnet, which bounces a digital signal in from Cobourg to a group of towers and rooftops along the lake and other rural areas of Northumberland County. For those who are more technically minded, Tranzeo has a white paper that illustrates the network setup with lots of diagrams and tables.

Here is a photo of the radio/antenna that is just outside my office window. My experience of the service is that this is the fastest internet connection that I have used to date. While the weather can cause problems, in general it is a great technology that brings high speed internet to areas that the big providers won’t touch.

For me, it brings me back up to speed…