Sci-Fi author Rudy Rucker's son's one of the folks behind the cleverest wireless ISP serving San Francisco. He and his team have set up a system to provide customers with reliable 10-30Mbps download speeds for a mere $40 per month.
Sure, you could get theoretical speeds of about "20 Mbps down and 4 Mbps up from Comcast for $55 per month," but the service provided by Rucker's company, MonkeyBrains, is providing reliable and consistent speeds:
MonkeyBrains guarantees at least 10 Mbps symmetrical and most customers see 15-20 Mbps. Some customers see 25-30 Mbps with a good connection. According to [a company employee], this depends on the company's backhaul connection, which is in the process of being upgraded. Once that happens, he expects 30 Mbps+ connections will be common.There are initial startup costs associated with the service—it costs about $250 to install the required antenna—but MonkeyBrains appears to be offering customers several free months of service to compensate for that cost.
The company is still small: It has "about 100 antennas, each of which may serve one or many customers—an average of 5-10 per antenna"—but it certainly appears to be off to a good start. Of course, the downside of a company like MonkeyBrains is that it provides such great—and cheap—service because it's sticking to a small area and focusing on those customers. This means that those of us who live outside of San Francisco are left hoping that someone will think to run a small WISP with a silly name in our areas too. [Information Week]
Image by Chistoprudov Dmitriy Gennadievich/ShutterStock
Update: Originally this post named sci-fi writer Rudy Rucker Sr as one of the folks behind MonkeyBrains, but it is actually his son, Rudy Rucker Jr, who is involved in this project.
Send an email to Rosa Golijan, the author of this post, at rgolijan@gizmodo.com.
Source: www.gizmodo.com
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