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...it provides heaps of motivation for
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Wireless Networks. And the government finds it pretty difficult to argue against them.

...it provides heaps of motivation for
C
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M
M
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T
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Wireless Networks. And the government finds it pretty difficult to argue against them.

San fransisco, Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Adelaide, Sydney, London, Rotterdam, And more

A few of my friends in Tasmania are working on this sort of thing. It's meant to be a public access wireless network that allows users to be on the same network as everyone (theoretically) else in Tasmania. It doesn't have an internet access point, yet, and from what I've heard, when an internet gateway is established, at some point in the future, there will be a small fee for access. The URL is as follows.

http://www.tas.air.net.au/

It will be interesting whether community networks such as Sydney Wireless and air.net.au will prevail over this company. One oft-neglected point in favour of local networks is that all of the traffic stays in the geographic region. Most of Australia's horrific net access costs are due to the fact that most data accessed by Australians is served from the US backbone, which costs money (there are no reciprocal bandwidth agreements with the US providers). With very limited access to the greater Internet, a local wireless network will still be able to host local sites, allow P2P and allow many local game servers with no per-MB costs.

That's a very attractive option in a country where broadband is download-capped.

We should blanket the country with 802.11b

In Tasmania, a few friends of mine have begun this same sort of thing. The idea is to cover Tasmania with a public access wireless network. More information can be gleaned from their web site, here.

Australian Air

Air network
Australian Air network links

Step 1 to Free World: Get off ass and build a neighbourhood air network. Wireless? Bwhahahahahahaha! Go air!

Air network
Australian Air network links

Step 1 to Free World: Get off ass and build a neighbourhood air network. Wireless? Bwhahahahahahaha! Go air!

Non-exhaustive list:

Adelaide

Brisbane

Gold Coast

Melbourne

Mudgee

Perth

Sydney

Western Sydney

Non-exhaustive list:

Adelaide

Brisbane

Gold Coast

Melbourne

Mudgee

Perth

Sydney

Western Sydney

Non-exhaustive list:

Adelaide

Brisbane

Gold Coast

Melbourne

Mudgee

Perth

Sydney

Western Sydney

Yes, there if a wireless network is not set up correctly, there is obviously going to be security issues. This is true with any networking medium, be it wired or wireless. It all comes down to how you set up your network obviously.

SWAG - Sydney Wireless Access Group

Help the free public wireless networks: Perth, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide,Sydney, Gold Coast (QLD), Tasmania, etc.

Help the free public wireless networks: Perth, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide,Sydney, Gold Coast (QLD), Tasmania, etc.

Help the free public wireless networks: Perth, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide,Sydney, Gold Coast (QLD), Tasmania, etc.

Help the free public wireless networks: Perth, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide,Sydney, Gold Coast (QLD), Tasmania, etc.

this is a commercial venture. There are community based wireless LANs such as Airnet and Melbourne Wireless

Put together a few clever CGI's, maybe an IRCd and you could have yourself a nice little wireless network of people, independent of the Internet. People would download interesting things from their own Internet connection, and make them available to the neighbourhood at no cost. A mini-napster if you will.

Like others, I miss the community aspect of the big, bad Internet and I think it could be rekindled somewhat with projects like this. Also, here in Australia it isn't feasible to share a broadband connection with other people, the AUP and bandwidth charges make it illegal or too expensive. Not too mention the carrier laws coming into play, there are many issues to resolve when you move Internet traffic over the air.

There are some groups here in Australia attempting things like this, see http://www.air.net.au.

It works beautifully, with far better stability than my old ISDN 128K connection, with a few caveats:

1. Total install cost was about Australian $6000 (US$3000). This included two dishes, two wireless LAN cards, cabling and professional installation in both locations and a Cabletron wireless gateway in my house. You could get away with cheaper equipment, but I chose this setup because it was tried and tested by my ISP already.
2. There is a significant loss of bandwidth due to reflections from the water (I tend to get about 5MBit out of a theoretical 11MBit connection. But, hey, I'm not complaining.)

* For those Aussies on fixed-price cable or ADSL contracts, those on per-meg contracts are subsidising you. Apparently these costs should be coming down significantly in the near future.

In Canberra, people are using the old Galaxy pay TV aerials, with minor modifications, to create a wireless CAN.

The term "IP Sharing" in this article is known as NAT or IP Masquerading to the rest of the world. There are a number of companies selling "IP Sharing" boxes that just do NAT.

It sounds like users in Korea are wiring entire blocks of flats for network access, sharing the cost of a single ADSL connection. That wouldn't be so bad, but then they put a web server on their connection criticising their operator for banning the practice in the ToS. Big mistake, there are tons of other places to put up your web site, like geocities. If you are going to bash a telecom, do it from another part of the internet, not on the wires they control.

This is just another battle between one business who supplies a scarce service to consumers, and other businesses who supply boxes to relieve the scarcity.

I've been trying to find a supplier of consumer grade internet access (DSL, cable or even dial) who will allow "group" access for small wireless installations. These would be similar to groups in major cities all over the world who want to create an alternative wireless internet, with a number of gateways to the wired internet. This has been difficult for consumer level access, but is possible with high cost professional style leased lines and individual ports on router.

The economics of consumer grade connections means that a restricted (in ToS) connection to a single computer can barely use more than .05% to 1% of the available bandwidth during any 24 hour period, and their profit calculations count on this. When approached by a non-mainstream use, they don't really understand how it might impact their severely under-engineered systems, so they get very obnoxious and end the discussion. However, if you are willing to spend the money, you can get a professional grade connection with very liberal ToS, but only over leased lines.

the AC

http://www.air.net.au
No sign of any network in Melbourne as yet, but ask around, and you might get lucky.

Shamelessly lifted from BAWUG 's links page, where there is lots of information about wireless hardware and software:

• Greater San Francisco Bay Area
  • BAWUG (Bay Area Wireless User Group)
  • SFLan (S.F. Presidio)
  • SBay.ORG (South Bay Wireless)
  • Mycal.NET (Petaluma)
• Burning Man (Black Rock City, NV)
  • PlayaNET
  • Internet BM
• United States
  • Colorado Wireless Exchange Cooperative
  • Xlan.ORG
• Outside the U.S.
  • Canberra Wireless Network (Australia)
  • Elektrosmog (Sweden)

Also if you bothered to go to the home page of the project you would have seen that it is an effort by a bunch of Linux enthusiasts to build a high-speed wireless network in some parts of Canberra.

So the mention of Linux down the bottom of the post is actually quite subttle. The article could have been titled Linux Enthusiasts Put Old Pay-TV Dishes To Use -- As A LAN as that's what it is really about.

Next to reply to Now if you're going to put up a tutorial on writing a driver for this dinky little device, or one of the "making-of" type pages; if you actually go to the link you'll see on the page the section:

Antenna designs

Jason Hecker has an excellent document on his helical antenna design.

Tony Langdon has design details for a high gain 2.4 GHz omnidirectional antenna. Look for the links that refer to a 2.4 GHz antenna.

Finnally if I look at the Frontpage of /. at the time of posting, there are only 3 out of 23 stories that are directly Linux related and 2 others that are indirectly related. This is not quite the enviroment for rampant Oooh ooh they mentioned Linux, they must be l4m3rz!!!!!! Kill the pengiun!!!! rants

But isn't this kind of thing what gave Fidonet such growing pains? The original Fidonet address spec was two 16 bit integers, but then they had to add zones in front, and they wanted non-dialable client nodes, so points were tacked to the end. Some software never properly supported zones, much less points. (And some TCP/IP software still doesn't support variable length bit masks either.) At least with a full class C per site, they don't have to worry about the "point problem".

Yer I saw that. The article is infact on Air.net.au. It has some excellent info on it. Im interested in trying something like this, however I am unsure about the FFC rules and regulations for 2.4GHz operation. Isn't that "free" man's territory?

I don't know about Australia, but here in the US there are strict limits on what you can do with te 2.4GHz band, including rather low caps on the total transmitting power which limits the range of any sort of home network.
Does anyone with experiance in the aussie equivelent of the FCC have any insight into this?
Oh, and the link in the article should point to www.air.net.au.

Adelaide Wireless Network

Canberra Wireless Network

Although there isn't anything extremely new in this current story, it's important that the internet is becoming more and more available to EVERYONE. That's what makes the internet so exciting. A hick in the sticks can have just as much power as a corporation by learning a little html. Well that may be pushing it. But the divide is theortectically shrinking, and that is a good thing (TM).

Adelaide Wireless Network

Canberra Wireless Network

Although there isn't anything extremely new in this current story, it's important that the internet is becoming more and more available to EVERYONE. That's what makes the internet so exciting. A hick in the sticks can have just as much power as a corporation by learning a little html. Well that may be pushing it. But the divide is theortectically shrinking, and that is a good thing (TM).

However I don't see this as the biggest gain from this announcement as all users of the Telstra Cable Modem service will agree the pricing structure that Telstra will likely employ as a monopoly will be so high as to be restrictive. Remember the Charging fiasco of recent times. The real gain for the Australian net community is the access to the local loop for Telstra's competition.

Historically in the Australian Teleco industry it is almost impossible for ANYONE to compete with Telstra on a country wide scale. This being directly related to the fact that Australia is a BIG place. Sydney to Perth is what 4,000 km(?) and there is not all that much in that space. The major competitor to Telstra Cable & Wireless Optus is still suffering from massive costs incurred in both building a fiber network that covers lots of the country as well as covering the cost of buying out the other half of a joint venture that went bankrupt trying to install an HFC network only in Aus larger cities Optus Vision. Yes I hear all you Australian's saying there the same company . . . well they are NOW after CWO payed $400 million to buy out it's other parteners to stop liquidation.

The way I see it is that Australians need need to have more of the community efforts like those that are going on in Canberra and I see now other centres in Aus like this one where communities get together to set up wireless or other types of networks.