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Facebook reveals 'SuperCell' tower to increase connectivity in rural areas
- 1f60c 6y agoHow did this get past Legal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercell_(video_game_company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercell_(video_game_company)
- asciident 6y agoWhat's the issue? If you're implying there is a trademark problem, it's not clear. Products/companies can use the same name.
- Triv888 6y agoexact same name? I thought you could use a similar name if you were not in the same market but I didn't know that you could use the exact same name... I guess Facebook has a bigger legal budget.
- Retric 6y agoYou can use the same name as long as it’s in clearly different markets. However, plenty of issues can crop up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
- vmception 6y agoYou can use the exact same name and filing a trademark actually is more useful to help existing trademark holders delineate and remove ambiguity. It at least removes their claim as they obsessively try to defend how they understand the world. Trademark filings let you mention that areas of trade and commerce you want the trademark for.
- mc32 6y agoSee Lexis-Nexus vs Toyota Lexus.
- meragrin_ 6y agoDo you mean LexisNexis?
- rayuela 6y agoGotta make sure rural folks have their Facebook news!
- grishka 6y ago*ads. Totally love it when advertising companies pretend that they're making the world better by trying to be ISPs where people don't have good networks. Google did it too iirc.
- forgot_old_user 6y agowin win situation? With net neutrality, that is.
- dcolkitt 6y ago"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest" -Adam Smith
- KingMachiavelli 6y agoThe issue comes starts we start regulating and trusting baker's like brewers and butcher's like doctors. If I am in the market for beer then the brewer is fine but if I'm in the market for bread I sure hope it has not fermented. Similarly, if I am in need of ad subsidized internet then fine but I would not want additional public funding or regulatory capture to assist Facebook.
- tristanb 6y agoTLDR: Made a bigger tower, it worked better.
- lucb1e 6y agoWhile serving more ads! I remember reading in Ready Player One about IOI controlling most people's internet connections and mentally drawing a parallel to Google at the time, thinking that would be a huge monopoly if Google not only served the online services, the laptop hardware, the laptop software, and now also the uplink itself. And indeed, a few months after I read the book, they announced the fiber project. Then Google and Facebook were going to give people in Africa internet with balloons and stuff. Now we can add this initiative. It's really getting there: ISPs are shifting from a specialized business (they may do TV, web hosting, etc. as well, but it's always related services together) to something that comes bundled with your favorite ad service. They have the money to outcompete any existing ISP they like, so long as they somehow manage to dodge anti-anticompetition laws they can really give the non-ad-supported services a tough time. Ads is were we're headed, it would seem.
- beamatronic 6y agoWhatever happened to the Cantenna concept? https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out-of-a-pringles-can-nb/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out...
- wmf 6y agoCantennas were always inferior to real yagi or dish antennas which are now <$100.
- Johnythree 6y agoCantennas were always a cheap and nasty kludge. Their performance is poor compared with yagi's, dishes, etc. Plus the name is doubly ironic. To an RF person, a Cantenna is a homemade dummy load which is specifically intended to not radiate.
- microtherion 6y agoThe Eye of Zuckerberg?
- hedora 6y agoThis doesn’t compare to the most common approach to long haul wireless in rural areas. There are many competitors that use an omnidirectional tower and directional antennas at customer sites. A recent competitor in this space regularly achieves 6 miles at >100Mbps (~16mbps uplink): https://www.telecompetitor.com/wisps-get-cbrs-range-as-great-as-six-miles-at-100-mbps-speeds/ https://www.telecompetitor.com/wisps-get-cbrs-range-as-great... FB is claiming 6Mbps down (1.2 up) at 12 miles for their approach, which doesn’t seem to rely on fixed location customer antennas.
- joe_the_user 6y agoThe antenna FB is describing provides cellphone coverage. Wireless providers just provide Internet/network capacity (since they rely on a customer's fixed antenna). Both those things are needed in rural areas. Both these solutions require that you be in line-of-sight to the tower. You are more likely to be in line-of-sight to 250 meter tower. So, you're right, not comparable but still.
- Ecstatify 6y agoI think people are beginning to see through these advertising companies. If it’s too good to be true it probably is...
- woeirua 6y agoI guess if you're a terrestial teleco you have to do something to compete with Starlink, but I'm not sure I'd make the investment in these in rural areas if SpaceX can really make Starlink economical. But that's a big IF right now.
- jariel 6y agoParadoxically, 'Starlink' may have more measurable economic value for unintended customers rather than 'rural folks' etc.. For example, urban homes and companies may want to chose them for any number of reasons and if they do, their willingness to pay may be higher than for rural folks and definitely higher than rural folks in Africa. There probably is no market-based way to to do such a thing if there are global bidders for a resource unless there's some kind of non-market intervention such as Starlink setting aside a certain bandwidth per nation, or per economic tranche etc. Novel solutions to the rural/distance problem are welcome. Even it's just literally 'a higher tower' as long as it works and is sustainable/cheap.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoStarLink is taking FCC rural bandwidth funds, so there is a geographic tranche they’re prioritizing/reserving capacity for.
- est31 6y agoStarlink won't be able to provide service to all urban customers at the same scale as landline ISPs can. Here and there there they can take a customer but there wont be enough spectrum to serve everyone. Also if you have to put up a pizza sized box outside your home, your landlord might complain. Even if you are the owner, building codes may prevent you.
- wmf 6y agoBecause traffic will downlink traffic locally (for multiple reasons) there should be virtually no interference between countries.
- woeirua 6y agoI’m ready to jump off of Comcast as soon as possible, but Starlink may not be the best option there. Now if I was working from an RV all the time it would make tons of sense.
- jariel 6y agoCan anyone comment on if there's anything novel here other than the config i.e. tower height + sectors?
- labster 6y agoFirst they say 5G isn’t dangerous, and now they say a 5G supercell is going to precipitate in our neighborhoods.
- dboreham 6y agoLike rain or like snow?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- joecool1029 6y agoLost interest when I read: >The test location had a rocky desert topology with minimal foliage, and tests were conducted using LTE Band 41 (2,500 MHz). T-Mobile/Sprint use this band. I have a lot of experience with it because I am located in a semi-rural and hilly area and I use LTE exclusively for internet access. For B41, I have one tower that's approx 2 miles away and 600ft or so down from me in a valley, close to line-of-sight. This signal is only usable if I install an antenna outdoors or use next to a window facing the tower. My real-world speedtests are around 75mbit down, and 2mbit up on a good day. Indoors not in front of a window I cannot force any of the devices I own to connect to this band. I'm also going to mention: Uplink/transmit power on most cellular devices is limited to 200mW (class 1) unless you use a device that supports Sprint's Class 2 High Performance User Equipment (HPUE) at 400mW or you have a router/device that does class 3 High Power User Equipment (also HPUE) at 1.25W. Only class 3 devices have a shot in hell at communicating back to this tower if there's even a small number of trees or a single wall between you and it. Finally, this B41 TD-LTE tends to work worse the further you get outside the cell, since it relies on precise timing of all equipment inside it. Installing cell relay equipment works poorly outside of a mile or so of the transmitting antenna, again due to precise timing issues. (personal experience with a Sprint Magic Box). Ignoring all the other social/anticompetitive issues there is with Facebook proposing this, it stinks like a scam to get a tax writeoff or jump onto the same sort of FCC rural internet grant money Starlink is bilking taxpayers out of. You can't scale a midband macro like this even using a dumb amount of spectrum. Oh totally forgot, there's an 'educational' use case for use of BRS (2500mhz) spectrum that I'll bet Facebook will also try to get their hands on. EDIT: Note on power class, you have certify through the FCC initially to use higher classes, can't just enable it later on without recertification. Also, higher transmit power = less battery life. This is why in urban areas it usually makes more sense to use cell network to save battery (better scheduling/sleep modes, low transmit power) than it does in rural areas where the cell radio is cranked up to its limits and it makes more sense to use a low power radio like wifi broadcasting all the time.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoAre you excited for Starlink, or will line of sight be a problem for that?
- torgian 6y agoNow with the added bonus of taking your personal data, location, etc, because it's in your contract.
- ashtonkem 6y agoI remain baffled how many people I know who run ad blockers cheerfully bought Google routers. And FB is arguably worse than Google here; I can’t imagine willfully handing FB all my network traffic.
- ultrarunner 6y agoI've mentioned this on HN before, but I find condemnation of the NSA situation followed by calls for municipal broadband similarly baffling.
- dboreham 6y agoNo municipality has the competence to tap your connection.
- mindslight 6y agoI'd be more pragmatically worried about XfiniWarner than a municipal broadband provider. The former operates at scale and can escape accountability by fallaciously invoking private property, whereas the latter has at least some democratic oversight at the town level. Although really all communications companies are effectively organs of the state, regardless of their governing charter.
- lmm 6y agoMunicipal agencies are subject to a lot of safeguards e.g. FOIA that private companies are not - market competition is supposed to hold them accountable instead, but for natural monopolies like internet service the competition doesn't actually exist.
- smolder 6y agoIf we were talking about some federal, nationalized internet infrastructure, I'd agree. Municipal broadband isn't that. The NSA operates at a much different scale than a municipal broadband provider, which is small and basically transparent. Local broadband providers have no capability to undermine cryptographic standards, use libraries of 0days to take over your PC, or anything like that. NSA et al aren't going to grant them that capability either. I'd at least like the option of an ISP that is under indirect voter control, to complement the usual 900lb gorillas that line their pockets at everyone's expense and are basically unaccountable.
- Animats 6y agoIt's just a tall tower with more antennas. Those aren't rare. American Tower's tallest tower, in New York State, is 358m. There's no problem doing this. The question is whether to build fewer large towers or more smaller ones, which is an economic tradeoff.
- joecool1029 6y agoUpvoted because you aren't exactly wrong. femto's comment explains the logic, they combined a bunch of splits in one antenna unit so they can direct spots. Femto also explains why there's a large disadvantage to doing this in the real world where things like towns/villages exist instead of perfectly spread out groups of people.
- orthecreedence 6y agoPeak capitalism: when ad companies own your communications infrastructure.
- aaron695 6y agoThis is the sort of thing that moves the world forward, but Facebook don't seem to have built a tower to test this. They seem to have used pre-existing towers and modelling. Telcos would have known this works but haven't done it because of why? Regulations on high towers? They don't want to be stuck managing these unique things? What's the catch. The solution is probably not technology but some sort of process issue that you need to actually get dirty to find out about and fix. Facebook needs to invest in building towers. Go do it in Africa. If it's profitable they wont lose money and if not they've tried something great.
- Ekaros 6y agoThe ISPs and network manufacturers know all of this stuff. They likely already have superior modelling ready. It is just not profitable. The towers cost money, the equipment inside those towers cost money, the power to towers cost money, if not using radio-links the network to towers cost money, the core network in these rural areas cost money... And really you can get only so much money out from single tower. Considering how plan prices are fixed for cell services it could be that even over decades of time such installation won't pay itself back. If the service providers thought they could make money by offering service to area they would be doing it.
- femto 6y agoCSIRO's Ngara aims to solve the same problem of rural access [1]. It was designed about 10 years ago, with a view to being the rural segment of Australia's National Broadband Network, but the NBN passed on the technology. Ngara was designed to work in the vacated VHF/UHF TV bands (but will work in other bands). It uses MIMO with a large number (~32) of antennas to do spatial multiplexing rather than FB's "brute force" sectoring. Sectoring is a disadvantage of FB's method, as the sectoring will limit the multipath and the ability to do spatial multiplexing via MIMO. With sectoring you will only get full capacity if your terminals are evenly distributed in azimuth. With MIMO you can get full capacity as long as the antenna has a big enough aperture to resolve each user, which will work better if you happen to have a small settlement in the cell. MIMO can also trade spatial multiplexing for diversity, which will allow longer range if there are fewer users. FB could do a lot worse than just buying Ngara. [1] https://research.csiro.au/wireless/888-2/ https://research.csiro.au/wireless/888-2/
- WeekSpeller 6y agoThey tried similar thing in India and it was shutdown because it violated net neutrality laws.
- zkms 6y agoFor the Luneburg lens antennas, are they using MatSing (https://matsing.com/ https://matsing.com/) balls? They look a lot like them, especially the rear part where the RF cables terminate....
- spacemanmatt 6y agoI read this as a tacit endorsement of socialized network infrastructure.
- TruthHurts44 6y agoThe last thing the r*rals needs is more internet.
- tigerBL00D 6y agoI can't help thinking that reliance on a smaller number of these SuperCell towers will make the network less distributed and therefore more vulnerable. For example, attacking a smaller cell may not be worth the effort for a malicious actor because impact of outage is very limited. It sounds like with SuperCell you can take down one tower and the impact is similar to taking down hundreds of sites. My intuition may be wrong here as I'm not an expert in cell networks, but the tradeoff seems quite analogous to ones faced in distributed computing, storage and other systems. I'm curious to see some more authoritative opinions on this.
- INTPenis 6y agoI've seen a number of these types of projects crop up in the northern Swedish forrests during the 2000s. Every single one that I heard of petered out or was revealed to be a straight up scam. Like trying to sell wifi to rural homes in the woods.
- throwawaymanbot 6y agoThis is insane.. they have zero respect for users as it is on their app/website... what liberties would they take with an entire network???