Regards, Ivan
There is a huge Naval Air Station in Jax, King's Bay is a Trident base, and Savannah has Hunter, a rather large Air Force base. In addition, Fort Stewart and Warner Robbins AFB are fairly close to all this activity... leading me to think something military is up.
I pinged .45MAN because when he & his charming spouse visited me a couple of months ago, he had seem some other things along the drive down I-16 and I-95 that were noteworthy.
Wireless is wonderful for a lot of applications, like large retail concerns, warehousing, homes, and smaller offices where modern wiring is not practical. Cisco is even pushing it for college campuses and it looks like a really good use there. But for the large backbone corridors between cities and across country, fiber is right now the best and only way. Those dark fibers will be lit up some day. Let's just hope that people don't get stupid and rip them up.
The problem is that people forgot what FO is good for.
It's ideal for backbone connections between major nodes. 2 or 3 FO connections between Eugene and Portland could carry all the voice and data traffic you could throw at it for the next couple of decades.
The problem is that there aren't just two or three FO pipes in the ground. There are dozens of them. The situation is analogous to having 6 different water companies all laying pipe to serve the same market. There simply isn't enough demand.
What FO sucks at is individual connections for home and business. For that purpose, twisted pair copper is going to be the way to go for the forseeable future. Wireless is alright for certain applications, but it has major problems. Security and range are just a couple of them.
802.11b (and a) can't serve anything more than a couple of square miles at best and that's under ideal circumstances. Radio is radio my friend, and that limits a provider to line of sight. That severely limits an ISPs options in mountanous states like Oregon, Washington and California.
If someone had a few million dollars just laying around doing nothing, I would recommend buying up a very small portion of the FO cables between major nodes and then putting some additional money into the necessary repeaters.
One could buy the already buried FO at fire sale prices and then use the incumbent ILECs and CLECs to complete the networks by bringing bandwidth to consumers over already proven 2 pair and 4 pair copper technologies,(IE SDLS, ADSL, and integrated T1) at bargain prices.
The TELCOM Act of 96 pretty much was a death blow to the Bell monopolies when one considers in detail what they are required to do. Hell, SBC is required by law to lease T1 circuits to CLEC's at something less than 75 bucks a month in most US markets.
Sorry for the 'inside baseball' response, but the plethora of FO is going to be a Godsend to someone who realizes what's already buried in the ground and the capital to buy it up in the proper markets.
Hope all is well across the pond.
Regards,
L