Broadband Internet access, often shortened to just “broadband”, is a high data rate connection to the Internet— typically contrasted with dial-up access with a modem. There are several broadband service providers in the US such as AT&T, Verizon, Cox, and Time Warner.
Broadband service is available in all major US cities, but there are still millions of people in rural areas that do not have high speed internet.
There are massive areas in the US without coverage – called “dead zones”, “coverage holes” or “no-service areas”. Most wireless service providers work continually to improve and upgrade their networks in order to minimize their dead zones.
Anyone with a cell phone, computer or a tablet, should be paying attention, because LightSquared is proposing to build something that currently does not exist: a high-speed wireless system that reaches almost every corner of America, including underserved rural areas and over-capacity urban areas. LightSquared, a company trying to break new ground in the telecom industry as a national wireless broadband provider, has invested billions of dollars to develop America’s first ever broadband system that utilizes a combination of satellite and cell tower technology.
Because satellite signals are ubiquitous, using them as a back up to cell service would eliminate the dead zones that still exist all over America, bringing high-speed internet for the first time to vast parts of the country that have never had it.
This new network could bring wireless broadband to 260 million Americans by 2015, and create 15,000 jobs a year over the five-year build out of the network.