Apparently the leaves are getting in the way of the wireless network in Minneapolis. Darn trees! According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, it isn’t a big problem it only affects 163 antennas out of 3,000 in the city.
The problem is that much of the network was installed in the winter – when foliage isn’t an issue. They are fixing the problem by adjusting the antennas to either transmit above or below the leaves and they are installing more antennas.
I just thought this info might be useful to other communities that are thinking about installing wireless.
3G is designed to provide voice and high-speed mobile data using the cellular approach already proven to work in mobile phone networks. The biggest obstacle to implementing high speed wireless networks is the lack of bandwidth, or range of usable frequencies. Just as only so many radio stations can be squeezed onto the FM dial, only so much data can be transmitted across the available bandwidth. EVDO is an advanced CDMA technology developed by Qualcomm to deal with this limitation.