Midcoast Maine is a beautiful stretch dotted with picturesque villages and towns - and suffering from a severe lack of bandwidth. Users today can expect no better than mid-range modem speeds up to ISDN unless they're willing to spend a small fortue that's beyond the abilities of even a moderately sized business.

Enter 802.11 - plain old 802.11, not 802.11b: a wireless networking protocol that can stretch 30 miles or more point-to-point, and which Midcoast Internet Solutions (MIS) has been using for years to pump up the broadband. One installation links an island miles off the coast with the mainland without any fuss.

Read more about the details and the technology in my article today for O'Reilly Networks Wireless DevCenter. (And read the discussion on Slashdot about this article.)

MobileStar Round-Up

New York Times weighs in on MobileStar's closing: more detail emerges. The company hired a turnaround firm to sell itself. Starbucks hopes for continued uninterrupted operation. The Times doesn't mention which deal fell through, but it was with Nextel, according to several sources. Nextel was to provide a significant sum in exchange for huge dilution of the existing shareholders' stakes.

Local coverage from the Dallas Morning News about MobileStar: a nice level of detail in this piece. MobileStar is located in the Dallas/Ft. Worth megalopolis.

The San Jose Mercury News offers more local insight into MobileStar's woes: I'd disagree with the writer's characterization that MobileStar was one of two companies racing to install service nationwide. Wayport has been taking a slower approach, largely through partnerships with hotels and individual agreements with airport authorities.

Puget Sound Business Journal emphasizes Starbucks's side of deal: This article clarifies some of the issues about Starbucks and MobileStar's ownership and costs.

MobileStar's deal with Starbucks required it to install, own, and operate a nationwide T1 network on behalf of Starbucks, coupled with the installation of wireless access points. Starbucks's end of the deal was to get, gratis, a national network for its coffee shops to allow them training, real-time store data exchange, stored-value card systems, and other perqs. The company currently relies on dial-up service for the majority of its data interaction, including inventory and sales retrieval (polled nightly) and credit-card verification.