Where is the outrage over this? It's amazing, Clinton gets a blow job from an intern and he gets impeached by the House! But yet this happens and... nothing. Oh, sure, the media is -talking- about it, people are -talking- about it, but where are the protests? Where is the action? Revolutions have been fought over less than this!
Clinton was impeached because he lied under oath. The blowjob was not the reason.
Study history before spouting off.
The problem that was already addressed is the curving of earth, because it can be overcome with height. Let's sustain that increasing the altitude of your dishes will allow greater distance without the sphere's shape interfering, you still have all of the factors associated with those heights: weather, cost of getting there, service, general maintenance.
Maintenance: How easy is it to remove ice? Snow? What about the cost of maintaining the tower?
Service: What do you do when you can't communicate with the unit, and you've ruled out everything except the cable between the unit and it's nearest point of contact?
Cost: This is a broader issue than maintenance, because it allows for not owning the tower/building. Tower space is premium, building roof-tops are premium, labor to install, service, or repair is EXTRA premium. Not only do you need guys willing to climb 200+ feet, but they need to be technically capable. http://www.midweststeeplejacks.com/ charges no less than $250/hr.
Weather: Why don't you see point-to-point connections on towers that are 200ft up on towers? Because the bandwidth requires very high frequencies, and those frequencies are very susceptible to any movement caused by wind. I've seen a gentle breeze (on the ground) turn a wireless link from -45 dbi to -60. Let's not forget rain and snow.
The only good ways to mount an antenna or dish at a height, and ensure reliability, are with a very large antenna (think something with 3 or 4 legs and covering at least 400 feet^2), or a building.
You sound like someone who has never looked at a communication tower, much less installed and used equipment on one.
I run a WISP and have equipment dangling hundreds of feet in the air. With proper planning, amazing results can be achieved. Weather is a factor over 6Ghz but, once again, this is not a problem with proper planning.
Less than 3Mbps might as well be dialup.
You can't really stream much video over it, video conferencing is probably right out and I doubt that slow a link is very reliable. They had to put a limit on it, or people would assume like you that even ISDN should be considered broadband.
Mind you much of what you are considering broadband is actually baseband. So they might as well keep redefining broadband over and over since they already destroyed the term.
A stable 1Mbit connection is plenty fast to stream from any provider.
The problem is that ISP's oversubscribe so your 3Mbit connection is really like 512kbps.
Source: I own a small ISP.
Quantum Mechanics is God's version of "Trust me."
