MRN

How it works

We have an bulk Internet connection through Michigan Online Group, in Owosso. Currently our connection is via DSL at the base of the Corunna water tower. We have a high speed (10Mbps) wireless radio on the top of the water tower, that communicates with a farm silo on Brewer Road. That silo has another set of radios that broadcast a signal within a few miles. Your house with broadband would have another radio that communicates to the silo.

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We use these high structures for wireless so that we can have "line of sight". The radio signal we use is very low power and doesn't travel through tree foliage very well. The popular WiFi signal (2.4GHz) can be blocked by a single large tree. We are using radios at 900MHz frequency that aren't blocked as easily by trees, but are slightly slower than WiFi connections. We are also evaluating radios at 5.8GHz that are very high speed (perhaps 30Mbps), but only work line of sight.

An example would be your laptop communicates to a WiFi access point at your house. That access point is connected by ethernet cable to the wireless radio mounted outside your house. The signal is sent from your wireless radio to the silo, and then retransmitted to the water tower. The signal then passes over the DSL/phone cable to fiber optic cable heading toward Flint and Southfield where the traffic enters the Internet "cloud". This sounds slow and convoluted, but a packet can be sent to Chicago and a reply received in less than 25 milliseconds.

The radios we use are an unlicensed type, regulated by the FCC for a few frequencies and low power. Licensed spectrum might be better, but the licenses are very expensive (a million dollars or more).