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If you're looking for highspeed 2-way in Southern Ontario, look at WDSL

They cover Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, Mississauga, Stoney Creek, Grimsby, Beamsville, Carlisle & Waterdown.

3Mbit/s 2-way business access

cheers

As much as we would all love to have fibre installed to every house and business, at this current time it's just not economical, especially in smaller city centres. While there is fibre running through my area (just outside Hamilton, Ontario) the local loop cost is over $300/month excluding bandwidth (depends on ISP), and that's just for 1meg bandwidth.

With the telco's, it's over $1000/month just for local loop T1, and business ADSL is $500/month ... just not feasible for only bandwidth.

There's a provider around here rolling out wireless 2-3meg for well under that, and it includes professional web hosting, etc... They're called WDSL Inc.

One other thing to think about is DSSS vs FHSS - these are two variants of spread spectrum (direct sequence and frequency hopping) - cards can be 802.11 compatible and use either, but the two types cannot communicate... DSSS appears to be winning for 802.11 (2 Mbps version) but there's some questionmark over the allocation of spectrum for 802.11b DSSS (but I could have mis-remembered that last bit).

The problem with DSSS is that it uses 26 out of 78 available frequencies in the ISM band (un-regulated). Although some vendors are claiming that they can have 11 channels, what this means is the Starting frequency can be from frequency 1 to frequency 11. It also means that if you don't start on frequency *1* you are limited to only *2* channels in the entire spectrum. This covers ALL users of wireless in your physical area.

ISM Frequencies (2.4Ghz)
1-----------26------------52-----------78

3 channels
|-----------||------------||------------|
....wlan1........wlan2..........wlan3

2 channels
|-----------| |-----------|
......wlan1............wlan2

note that there is no room for a third channel in the bandwidth available.

This also means that if you have ANY external interference (microwave ovens, etc) in the path of connections, then your available bandwidth will be seriously restricted.



With FHSS, this is not nearly as much of an issue, since it jumps between all 78 frequencies, and if busy, just picks another. Theoretically the limit is 26 overlapping networks, but in reality this is probably limited to about 16 before units spend more time colliding (like ethernet) than transmitting.



Wireless internet access in southern ontario now! WDSL Inc.

1/2 mile ad-hoc link!

I needed to get a link up between our two buildings for about a month (waiting to move), bought an Access Point, Station Adapter and a PCMCIA card (for me!). Hung two low gain directional antennas out the window and away we went.

Full 2mbit connection with one antenna masking taped to a second floor window, across a mall (about 3 blocks) to the second antenna, screwed into a board hanging out of a third floor window over 1/2 mile away.

I did some load testing on it just to see what the throughput was using QCheck. 1.3 - 1.5 Mbit real-life transfer rates. According to the survey software, the QoS is barely "Low" because of the bad positioning of the antennas. (contractor should be showing up this week to put up proper masts).

This stuff is unbelieveable. I took my laptop across the street (about 800ft through 2 sets of double-paned glass) to Tim Hortons for coffee, and had 3Mbit connection to the LAN. It was just as fast as my wired connection (marginally busy 10Mbit ethernet).

One of our clients is starting to offer Wireless Internet Access in Southern Ontario ... check out WDSL Inc.

In at least 3 of these places, wireless networking is going to be used. Since we're in a mixed environment (Windows, Mac, Linux) we have no option but to use Lucent's cards. (do we?)

No ... Breezecom also has drivers for those O/S's (they even have ones for the HP Journada)

- have the ability to surf the net in each of those places.

Just hook up a Breezecom AP-10 to each LAN, set it to "roaming" mode and you're done.

- be able to "see" the pc's on the lans of the distributed locations, as though they were on thesame lan. (VPN)
- use crypto to secure the VPN.
- use a transparent proxy setup to mask the forced use of a proxy for webtraffic.


GateWeaver has a good VPN solution ... sets up connections with 1024bit RSA, then switches to 128bit BlowFish to run. Does cross-subnet browsing for WinBlows clients (SMB/NetBeui)

- have the ability to use the laptops in each of the locations transparently. (3 locations with wireless)
- i'm hesitating to use dhcp on the lan/vpn: to avoid being stranded if a node goes down, all the routers must deal out ip's to their own lans. They have to watch it not to step on each other's toes in the vpn though.

Best suggestion : set each internal LAN to use its own subnet (ie 10.0.1.0, 10.0.2.0, 10.0.3.0, etc), VPN them together and have DHCP assign IP addresses to the laptops (this way they get the right router gateway address ... you don't want to tunnel crypto to another site and then go open wire because the wrong gateway is set).

Your 486 boxes will probably not have the horse power for VPN crypto ... I've seen 128bit run nicely on a P-166, but nothing lower than that yet.


Wireless Internet in Southern Ontario available NOW! WDSL Inc.

802.11 doesn't specify FH (Frequency Hopping) or DS (Direct Sequencing). DS is what's taking over.

DS will not take over for the following reasons:

1. Although very fast, each DS cell uses a full 1/3 of the ISM bandwidth, and depending on interference this usually means a maximum of TWO co-located networks. While this may not mean much, right now, if you're in an office tower, and you have 2 neighbors running DS wireless lan's, you're out of luck. You need to be completely out of range to start a new cell (and not just the 11mb cell that everyone talks about, its only 150ft, i'm talking about the 1000-3000ft 1mb cell that is the faded signal propogation.

FH systems can have up to 26 co-located cells (or networks), although only about 10 is practical before speed drops off.

2. DS is very sensitive to interference. Fire up a DS wireless lan (lucent, wavelan, etc) and it'll work fine in a room. Now fire up a couple of FH lan devices, and you'll find that the DS link drops out pretty quick. (BTW - it's completely legal to do this, and there's nothing you can do if someone decides to jam your network).

3. DS doesn't do roaming very well. By this I mean inter-network, such as you would see with a wireless internet provider ... with FH, you can be doing 60mph in a car and keep your connection running 2mbit and depending on conditions/hardware 3mbit.

DS works really well in high-power situations like long distance links, but the power limitations of ISM severely restrict its useability. FH, although slightly slower can handle hundreds of users in the same area on multiple networks without choking.




Wireless internet in southern ontario available NOW! WDSL Inc.


DEFS: DS = Direct Sequence, FH = Frequency Hopping

Breezecom hardware is absolutely beautiful. I have a 1/2 mile link running 2mbps off of indoor antennas!
One's on the 2nd floor of our current building, stuck with masking tape to a window, and the others hanging on a board out of the 3rd floor window of our new building. There's a mall in between, and it works wonderfully!

(for anyone who doesn't know RF, this is just about the worst possible way to connect it, I should have climbed onto the roof, would have gotten much better signal but hey, it worked first time)

The side benefit of this is I can sit in Tim Hortons across the street, sit down to drink coffee and still be on the office LAN!

hoo-ah!

Wireless Internet in Southern Ontario available NOW. WDSL Inc.