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Broadband Access
Rural Telco Enjoying a Ruckus
Wireless Eases Burden for Delivering Content to Multiple TVs
by Jim Barthold
John Dillard, general manager-president of Rural LEC Monroe
Telephone in Monroe, Ore., has figured a way to avoid a dirty
job and still keep his customers happy.
“I crawled under a fair number of houses in my work life and I
prefer not to do it again,” said Dillard, pointing out that it’s
often necessary to go underground to wire multiple devices
within a premises. Besides the creepy crawlies living there,
Dillard has another problem with the job. “There are some
houses that are now a challenge for me to crawl under. I
imagine three or four days after I’d get stuck, I’d slim down
enough to get through.”
The thing is, Monroe delivers digital TV to its 950 customers
using a combination of fiber and ADSL2+ copper and if
subscribers have more than one television set, somebody has
to get under the house and snake those wires. That, said
Dillard, is why Monroe is using Ruckus Wireless’ Wi-Fi gear to
build home networks that deliver TV to three “clients” in the
home for $6 a month with each additional device costing $3.
“We can go in with this and 30 minutes later we’re out of
there,” he said. “We’ve saved a whole bunch of time and
money.”
And a trip under the house.
Dillard estimates that 10 to 15 percent of his TV customers
will use the wireless option, which he has already tested
himself using a house he owns next door to his own.
“I was using Ruckus from my front room back to my back
bedroom and I was recognizing the signal over at the other
place on my laptop,” he recalled. “I grabbed the unit out of
my bedroom and brought it over to my office and I had a
good signal there. I now serve my back bedroom from my
other house.”
To get there, the signal travels 150 feet through two glass
walls and two regular walls, which, it might seem, would be an
opportunity for a thief to step in an help himself to free
television. It won’t happen, Dillard said.
“They would have to be allowed to get on by the access
platform, which means they would have to mate with it,
actually have to come in with a computer, be able to identify
everything and then hack it,” he said.
Ruckus uses what it calls “smart Wi-Fi” technology to
integrate with standard 802.11 Wi-Fi to move digital content
around the house and better distribute a triple pay of voice,
video and data services. Dillard is only using it for standard
video but is confident there’s enough bandwidth available to
transport high definition content.
Wireless, he emphasized, makes a lot of sense for rural
providers delivering video, although said he would keep an
eye on advancing wireline technologies as well.
“We understand there are some that work inside the house
over the electrical system and we’ll probably try some of
those,” he said. “We’ll take a look around and see if there’s
something a customer can use that will work and we’ll do it.”
As long as it doesn’t mean crawling under the house.
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