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It was actually Apple on the first version of the iPhone with the Cisco systems. However, it was when the device was actually connected to the network, not in broadcast mode to discover networks.

I forget it the root cause was later traced to Cisco or Apple.

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/3690981

Shortly after the release of Apple’s Wi-Fi-powered eye candy, the infamous iPhone, reports surfaced of disruptions on Duke University’s WLAN. After 10 days of industry speculation and furious troubleshooting, the culprit has now been fully identified.

According to Duke, “a Cisco-based network issue” caused “some minor and temporary disruptions in service.” Specifically, the way in which a tiny handful of iPhones interacted with Duke’s WLAN sparked a number of short but intense Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) storms. While each storm lasted just 10-15 minutes, they effectively prevented WLAN service delivery by over two dozen APs during each interval.

And this was pretty much the case for all other reports of Apple devices "flooding" a network.

Ahh, the two companies with the OS called [iI]OS. One sells overpriced hardware and buggy software with security problems and has users that are convinced it can't do wrong - the other is Apple.

Don't you have to crack the WPA2 before you can find one of the valid mac addresses?

Don't think so.

Stations brodcasts its mac address to the access point in clear text.
http://www.maxi-pedia.com/how+to+break+MAC+filtering

The stations may also send beacons, depending on how they are configured.
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1492071

I remember seeing a few companies that can pinpoint a wifi device without it being connected to an access point. Think reverse war driving...

Exactly.

  A radio NIC, for instance, will broadcast a probe request when using active scanning to determine which access points are within range for possible association. Some sniffing software (e.g., NetStumbler) tools send probe requests so that access points will respond with desired info.

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1492071

The think is, your phone is always running a scan, even when you have already associated with a router in the coffee shop, it will still scan occasionally to see other nearby stations. Even if your phone never associates to any of those other stations they can read the scan probe request.

I doubt the stores in your average mall can tell what isle you are in, that would require way higher density of access points than would be necessary to provide wifi service. This information is probably just not that valuable to them to build all that infrastructure. But monitoring on a department by department, floor by floor or store by store basis it might be doable.

Still it seems like collecting data for no obvious reason, just to know that some one came into the store who spent time in the Shoes department 6 weeks ago.

A restriction is only as binding as its enforcement mechanism. If the developers behind DOSBox aren't going to hold other developers accountable who are trading on their name, and nobody else is willing to take them to court over it (and obviously nobody will over $3.99), then the restrictions are meaningless.

Another incident which comes to mind is that of DD-WRT - there are several articles on this, but I'll just link to the first on Google's listings - where they derived their product from open source code (OpenWRT), then closed source key parts and refuse to release the code in workable form.

It seems to me that this is the fundamental problem with GPL, and some other, open source licenses; it all depends on the honor system. Sure, they are technically legally binding, but if nobody holds anybody's feet to the fire, that means nothing.

As it pertains to you if you really care that much about it, I suppose you have three choices: (1) Swallow it, and pay the price they are demanding; (2) Go without, and refuse to give developers like this your money; (3) Buy a license of the source code, and then release it publicly out of principle. Since this stemmed from wanting to play games from your childhood, the pragmatist in me says to choose option two and move on.

This is reminiscent of the original standards battle between AC vs DC distribution systems.. monolithic centralized infrastructure vs distributed regional systems. You remember the one where Edison electrocuted an elephant.

Anyways the pendulum goes back and forth on these things, and if period doubling is occurring that means that fine grained rapid deployment is required to keep pace with that. Won't be long before data centres are riding electric trains, semi-trucks (a la Walmart's warehouse on wheels model) or even public transit busses with high speed datalinks to physically shorten that last mile.

Why is Google so interested in autonomous vehicles anyways? Could it be something do with an inevitable trajectory towards automated containerized data centre deployment? After all, there is a similarity with a third world concept where poverty drives innovation. So really shouldn't the discussion be about graphing costs of data delivery vs cost of caching & updating?

No chance -- I think part of the thing for trademarks is you're supposed to protect them. Well look at this article from 2007:

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/3674591

Frank Hanzlik, the current managing director for the Wi-Fi Alliance, was not at the meetings where the Interbrand names were discussed, but he was a member of WECA and he is now entrusted with protecting and perpetuating the Wi-Fi brand. He confirms that "wireless fidelity" has no meaning, is not part of the trademark, and is not used or encouraged to be used by the Wi-Fi Alliance. However, he feels no need to aggressively correct those who use it, since what's most important to his organization is simply that "Wi-Fi" continues to be a household name.

"In the very early days of building the brand, there was a linkage to the hi-fi chronology," says Hanzlik. "It was successful in creating a positive connotation of what that could mean to a user. Over the last seven years, the term Wi-Fi has become quite ubiquitous in the developed part of the world. We just try to keep it simple and use only Wi-Fi."

"We declared victory when we made the Merriam-Webster dictionary," says Hanzlik. "Now we encourage everyone to use Wi-Fi versus 'wireless LAN,' because it resonates more with folks -- but we do enforce the Wi-Fi Certified and the Wi-Fi Alliance brands and logos."

So they had no problem with people using wi-fi incorrectly, assigning it an incorrect meaning, or any desire to prevent it from becoming a common word in the dictionary, or a household name (which I think is pretty close to saying generic). I mean he's even saying "just use wi-fi instead of wireless lan." Okay... that's like kleenex saying "Just say kleenex instead of tissue paper" and then getting mad when people use kleenex to refer to tissue paper. All they care about was "wi-fi certified" and "wi-fi alliance". Well, nobody called it super "wi-fi certified".

As for their victory in the dictionary:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wi-fi

Definition of WI-FI

—used to certify the interoperability of wireless computer networking devices

Doesn't even mention 802.11a/b/g/n.. just wireless. Based on that definition, any wireless networking standard can call itself wi-fi. That's just plain English at this point, and that was endorsed by the wifi alliance just a few years ago.

DD-WRT is STOLEN source.

Just fyi.

OpenWRT code wasn't stolen. If anything, Brainslayer (main dd-wrt dev) just doesn't respect the GPL fully (dd-wrt integrates proprietary binary-only drivers in a way that the GPL forbids).

That being said, even though I don't fully agree with how Brainslayer treats the GPL, I think it is fair to say that dd-wrt contributes in a positive manner to popularizing OpenWRT (Brainslayer and OpenWRT devs even seem to talk and share code and advices from what I read).

If you want to learn more, here's an article about it and if you really don't agree with how dd-wrt does things, use OpenWRT, Tomato, HyperWRT or whatever else. Personally, I use OpenWRT (you have to know your way around to use it), but for most people, OpenWRT is too complicated and dd-wrt is already less proprietary than default (and it gives more exposure to projects like OpenWRT).

Secure from brute force attacks != secure. Hello, exploits!

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/3784251/WPA-Vulnerability-Discovered.htm

DD-WRT isn't as open as it could be: http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/3816236 This is the reason that I'm currently running openwrt+gargoyle on my wrt54g. Gargoyle (the browser-based interface) actually isn't all that great -- very bare-bones.

My experience is that the real problem with consumer-grade routers has very little to do with the quality or openness of the software. The real problem I've always had with the damn things is that the hardware seems to be crap. I've been through three models, and it's always been the same story. Some people seem to have better luck with them, but mine lock up once or twice a week and need to be power-cycled. People told me to get one of the older wrt's, which had more memory, so I did. That's what I have now, and it's not really any better. I've run factory firmware, dd-wrt, and openwrt; none of them were measurably better or worse than the others. People told me that many routers were very sensitive to power glitches, and I should get an uninterruptible power supply. Did that, didn't help.

Users are responsible for their security. But as a provider, you may wish to do your best for them within your ability to provide a decent amount of privacy and security.

You can do that with wired ethernet. You can't with WiFi.

It is far easier to sniff someone else's WiFi traffic than it is to sniff someone else's traffic from an ethernet port.

AND it is still much easier to make it even harder for guest users to snoop on other wired ethernet connections with various switch vendors (e.g. cisco, huawei) port security features. The use of these features do not require the guests or users to do anything except just plug in as normal.

WiFi on the other hand is crap. It's either easy but unencrypted and completely insecure, or difficult for the users- they have to go get some credentials from the provider (cafe, conference organizer, hotel etc).

And if the credentials are a preshared key (WPA Personal or WPA2 Personal), it's not really secure against the other users. Because WPA2 Personal is broken in that if the PSK is known, you can decrypt other people's stuff as long as you can see the 4 way handshake, which is sniffable.

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3667586

So use WPA2 Enterprise? That involves users and passwords. How do you get those to the guest user's _machine_ (remember you can get it to the guest user, but they often fail at getting it to their machine ;) ).

Now if Microsoft, OSX, Desktop Linux, provide an easy option to use "anonymous:anonymous" in this scenario and somehow verify the base station's credentials, then things will be much better.

Lastly, regarding your suggestion "you should use end-to-end encryption". I have this to say: you should visit the real world more often and actually pay better attention. Only recently gmail started using encryption for everything. As for google searches, if I try https I get redirected to http.

You ever do google searches when connected on a WiFi connection? As I pointed out only the "user must jump through many hoops" wifi is secure, the best you get at most places is WPA2 Personal which is not secure against attackers, so they can _easily_ pwn you when you do a google search.

To pwn you when you're on a wired ethernet connection would involve them having to do more work - like social engineering, physically breaking stuff. They can't just sip a cafe latte nearby or even just plonk a "box" somewhere and walk away.

So after reading the article, I can't really agree on this. I have "lots of EE friends in high places" and they also disagree to a large extent.

Back in 03 when I was deploying my company's first wireless networks, this article explained a lot.

And further reading here...funny how this has already been covered this year.

And remember, the ISM band *was allocated because of microwave ovens* as in...it wouldnt be fair to license out this band because it is interference prone, so they made it a sort of free for all...if a baby monitor is interfering with your cordless phone or WiFi, that is probably the least of your problems!

In my experience, Tomato is a better router package, and isn't offered by a guy that likes to play fast and loose with the GPL and rebrand other peoples' work as his own.

I mean can you really force someone to not be able to just hid their SSID or mac filter or something?

Anyone can crack the 26-digit WEP key in minutes. From there, you can pick up SSIDs from association requests and snoop on the MAC that sends and receives each packet. Still, the use of WEP, hidden SSIDs, and MAC filtering keeps casual leeches out and establishes an attacker's intent to enter the network.

gah, I hit post too soon. Try this link http://products.wi-fiplanet.com/wifi/antenna/1066050927.html [wi-fiplanet.com]... there are others

Yes, Mobile WiMAX (802.16e) will have a very difficult time competing with 3G. LTE is being rolled out on upgrades of the existing GSM-WCDMA infrastructure. The momentum of LTE is unstoppable.

Now Fixed WiMAX (802.16d) is interesting. We're always complaining of the lack of competition at the last mile. Sure it's line of site but that only means a minimum of one tower in each 30 mile radius. The question is how many subscribers can each tower handle (sharing 75Mbps per channel). I know what you're thinking... one tower per subscriber sounds about right!

See also: The New Last Mile Broadband: WiMAX

Just use a half decent router (a hacked linksys would be nice, so you can play with the xmit power settings), two can-tennas (buy for 20 bucks or make them yourself, no great skills necessary) and line-of-sight (could put the antennas on the rooftop, or up on a mast)

Honestly, I was not even aware that there were still wifi coffee shops that you had to pay for internet access. Is that a Bay Area thing? In the Fort Collins CO area, most coffee shops I have been around have free wifi with no time limits.

Seriously.. small shops have been doing this for years. DSL is down in the $20/month range and a wireless router is cheap. I suspect that the administrative overhead of managing a system like this one for Starbucks is not really worth the effort. Starbucks may have made their money on the T-Mobile deal, but I doubt it. IIRC, it was a $500 mill contract. And, a quick websearch shows a series of price cuts.

Here's one from 2003:

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/1855971

"In the original story regarding the price drop, Starbucks New Ventures Director Lovina McMurchy is quoted as saying that even the busiest Starbucks shops get about 20 Wi-Fi devices on the network per day. While T-Mobile doesn't release cost information for providing the hotspot, the revenue generated from so few customers is probably not enough to cover costs of a high speed line -- the T-Mobile Hotspots are served by costly T1 lines -- and the revenue sharing between T-Mobile, Starbucks, and HP, which provides some software for the services."

http://www.lockergnome.com/mobile/2006/03/09/t-mobile-answers-the-cries-of-starbucks-owners/

"All the mom-and-pop coffee shops offer free Wi-Fi. In fact, most everyone does except Starbucks. The Seattle-based coffee house gets its hotspot piped in by T-Mobile. It's been reported for years that store managers at Starbucks has been complaining to upper management for a while about losing business because customers don't want to pay for their Internet after forking out $4 on a foo-foo drink."

Here's my favorite:

http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/23/fonbucks-wifi-starbucks-ent_cx_mc_0226fonbucks.html

"FON, a community WiFi provider headquartered in Madrid, Spain, is offering wireless Internet access to Starbucks' latte-sipping surfers for just $2 a day--versus the $10 users pay to sign onto the 5,100 T-Mobile hotspots at U.S. Starbucks (nasdaq: SBUX - news - people ).

Just how does FON plan to steal away Starbucks Internet users? By offering FON wireless routers, also known as "La Foneras," free to anyone who lives above or next to a Starbucks. The routers, which usually cost $40, split an Internet broadband connection into two wireless signals--one for personal Internet use and the second for public use, which can be accessed by anyone within range for $2 per day. The routers' owners get to pocket half of the sign-on fee, and FON takes home the rest."

My WAP is invisible from downstairs.

Um... get a WiFi Repeater?

My access point is in an upstairs bedrom. If I want direct line of sight from my shed, no signal, an old brick washhouse is in the way. So I got a thirty-quid repeater (actually just a regular access point switched into "repeater" mode) and installed that on the corner of the washhouse (in view of both the bedroom AND the shed). Now 100% signal in the shed.

There really isn't any magic to installing a WiFi repeater. Plug in to your PC, configure over a web browser with the SSID and encryption key, disconnect from your PC, plonk it somewhere where it can see both you and an original access point. Job done.

If I can figure this out in my 100-year-old farmworkers' cottage in rural England, I'm sure as hell you can figure it out in a modern US city gated community. It really, really isn't hard.

Here's a link for an historical perspective.

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/144812 1

Note 2002, FIVE years ago.

Five years ago, you were right. Not anymore.

SiGe is killing GaAs.

Many of the devices communicating in the higher frequences of the microwave range are based on Silicon Germanium. This includes cell phones.

Almost ALL WiFi radios are SiGe [PDF warning]. Some have even moved to RFCMOS.

Most GPS devices are SiGe.

Oh, and TV Tuners, too.

Gallium Arsenide *is* exotic, because it has to be done in specialized fabs, not those that run silicon wafers. That significantly drives up the cost vs. SiGe and RFCMOS.

This article is pretty lacking on facts. It's called 802.22, or WRAN (Wireless Regional Area Network). The AP's use GPS linked to an FCC database to determine which frequencies (between 54 and 862 MHz) are available. It sounds pretty promising, supposedly 25,000 simultaneous users over a 10 mile radius at 1.55 Mb. (another link)

Give me one example of a company being forced to release previously proprietary software under the GNU GPL. One.

Do a Google search will ya?

How about Cisco for example, uhm? Or Linksys:

In June 2003 some folks on the Linux Kernel Mailing List sniffed around the WRT54G and found that its firmware was based on Linux components. Because Linux is released under the GNU General Public License, or GPL, the terms of the license obliged Linksys to make available the source code to the WRT54G firmware. As most router firmware is proprietary code, vendors have no such obligation. It remains unclear whether Linksys was aware of the WRT54G's Linux lineage, and its associated source requirements, at the time they released the router. But ultimately, under outside pressure to deliver on their legal obligation under the GPL, Linksys open sourced the WRT54G firmware in July 2003.

Now, you could say, the open-sourced firmware was never proprietary to begin with somehow, but that's just semantics — clearly, Linksys thought of it as proprietary and weren't planning to release the sources until the outside pressure made them do it. I'm not aware of anybody benefiting from this open-sourcing, however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point.

I dare you.

Now that I've successfully responded to your dare, what will you do? If you are a female, you can scratch my back for 5 minutes. If you are a male, you can take out my garbage — once, this Monday. Make your pick.

We're talking wifi, not wires.

Dvorak was. I don't think you can disassociate municipal WiFi from the broader municipal broadband issue.

There's no possibility of a natural monopoly on wifi.

Sure there is. It's called "interference". IIRC from the last WiFi config I did, you have a choice of a whopping three channels: 1,6,11 (in the US). Just type "wifi interference" into a Google search box and you find many articles discussing the issue. At best you could have two muni-wide WiFi installations, using two channels and leaving the third for citizens to use for their own home networks if they're not using the muni WiFi service.

And, with respect to your "moral responsibility" phrase, municipalities have no "moral responsibility" to provide electricity, telephone, television, water, sewer, garbage/recycling, snow removal, park maintenance, etc. to its citizens either, and one could debate whether the phrase "moral responsibility" would cover such things as police, ambulance, or fire services. In these cases, many municipalities offer some of these services (or centralized rights-of-way for services, such as with telephone and television franchises) due to natural monopolies.

They're called wireless bridges, and there are plenty on the market, no need to email random people looking for one unless you want that one specifically . http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1 563991

Incidentally, Fry's near me has a Netgear display showing off their "zoned" multi-antenna gear, didn't look at the gear itself, just gawked at das blinkenlights on the display.

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3 484186
http://www.sans.org/rr/whitepapers/vpns/1459.php

couple of interesting references for setting up vpn access to your network

I wouldn't be so sure about that, considering somebody's managed to make a wifi micro-sd card: http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/363895 6

I'm not sure if this applies, but is there a way to change to Point Coordination Functionality (PCF) instead of Distributes Coordination Functionality (DCF)? PCF means the AP will "ask" each connected system if they have something to transmit. They don't just send it out and hope there aren't any collisions like in DCF. If it was set up in a round-robin style, you would get your x% of the bandwidth - as long as you had something to send.

Don't know what settings would have to be changed on the AP or client system. (Or if they even have that built into their management console.)

MAC Modes.

Hmmm...that's a good idea. Lets take this to a legal computer network. I want to connect with my neighbors. They're only a few hundred feet away. Should be easy right? Let's see...I could run cables between our houses...no, would be impractical--expensive and what about across the street? How about WiFi? OH YEAH! THE FCC ONLY ALLOWS A TINY BAND AT LOW POWERS WHICH IS SHARED WITH MICROWAVE OVENS . Not only will it not travel far enough to reach even my next door neighbor, if anyone wants to cook a burrito, the connection dies.

The airwaves are a community resource.

No they're not. They were, until the FCC auctioned off almost all the airwaves. Now like the Native Americans, the public is only allowed in areas the rich people don't want.

Just because you hadn't heard about it, or aren't forward thinking enough to do a search, doesn't mean it's not in the USA. Just because the article said "world's first" didn't make it so.

Business Week:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug 2006/tc20060814_285305.htm

Wi-Fi Planet
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/362874 6

Daily Wireless:
http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=News &file=article&sid=5708

From the Daily Wireless page:
"Indeed, T-Mobile is not the only telco pushing into at-home wireless services. Already, AT&T (T) expects to introduce two new at-home offerings in the coming months."

This page:
http://www.blackberrytoday.com/articles/2006/7/200 6-7-28-Nokia-Takes-Dual.html
Says there's reportadly 20 UMA trials going on right now.

Netstumbler will do most of what you need done and it's free. Here's a link to a tutorial.
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3 589131

Incorrect about Japan. Japan only permits operation on channel 14:

A quick Google search says:
The 802.11b standard defines a total of 14 frequency channels. The FCC allows channels 1 through 11 within the U.S.; whereas, most of Europe can use channels 1 through 13. In Japan, you have only one choice: channel 14.

"Who wants to invest money in developing a product, only to have the open source community go after you? And you get bashed for trying to earn a living."

I know that Tivo and Cisco (Linksys) hate the GPL. I mean, if you look here http://www.tivo.com/linux/linux.asp you can see that Tivo thinks the way to stay in business is to hold the source code close. And of course, using open source, GPL'd software is a way to drive Linksys out of business http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3 562391

If your business model depends on closed source, then you are increasingly a dinosaur. It's like the employee who thinks he has job security by keeping what he does a "secret" from his boss. It only works for a little while.

This could be a hit, if the costs keep down, for the small-medium business and home broadband markets. But I have trouble seeing how this will take significant market share in the Enterprise except for perhaps edge or LAN devices. For one thing, you pay Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, whomever for wire-speed implementations (among other issues) that rely largely on the ASICs and the overarching hardware architecture, beyond just the OS.

For the home market, there are already open-source software solutions such as for the Linksys WRT54-series wireless router, which is itself based on the GPL. See http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/print.php/356 2391 for more info.

Until someone funds an open-source chip foundry, these won't replace the core.

But one can achieve toll-quality audio across a low-bandwidth line. Which means it could also be done across a wireless connection.

Within the next ten years, as long range wireless systems like WiMax come into play, the inability for a provider to serve a customer without building a physical network will disappear--all you'll have to do is build a phone that connects directly into a WiMax-type network a peripheral. Build one really well designed WiMax call center capable of servicing millions of low bandwidth connections, put it in the right place in a major city, and voila--everyone in the metropolitan area of that city could switch over to your network tomorrow.

I agree that it's preposterous to say that the phone companies didn't have a monopoly on the phone service they provided, and that monopoly also seriously depressed any competition from providing a compelling alternative. But I don't think that limitation is going to stay with us for much longer. It's already fading out as major cities implement their own Wifi hotspots.

• The Wikipedia entry
  
• WiMAX Forum
  
• Wi-Fi Planet
  

Pulver Innovations had a WiSIP phone that would connect over your LAN to act as a standard SIP phone, which you could use, for example, with Free World Dialup or asterisk@home. Unfortunately, as one article points out, most WiFi hot spots don't co-operate and the the phone connect, so it has some major limitations. Even Pulver doesn't push it anymore... I had a tough time finding a link to it on any of their sites.

They also had a gadget that you could plug a cell phone into that would allow you to preferentially use the cell phone's free minutes for long distance calls from your VOIP system. Since most cell phones come with a huge number of free long distance minutes, it might be worth the lower quality to some, but I can't even find a link to it any more :(

The tablet PC shows some promise, but

Yes it does, but I think it's really hobbled by legacy applications. Because individual application authors do too much custom GUI code deeply entwined in each program, there's no way to get apps suited for the new GUI capabilities without costly and slow individual rewrites.

it is strange that the tablet part isn't offered as a peripheral to an honest computer.

It is available. See the Viewsonic "Wireless monitor". However, there are numerous crippling drawbacks, starting with the $800 pricetag.

It'd be a lot easier to get a variety of providers that just benefitted from this ruling to build these back doors. "We gave you one, now you give us one."

Wrapped in the flag, it's a pretty present for the patriotic consumer. "Verizon is doing its part to protect America from terrorism. By installing a back door for feds..."

Also, in the last few years, the gov'ment has been reformulating statistics (un-employment, etc) invariably using some figure that was unavailable in previous calculations making comparisons difficult. This logic could, conceivebly, be applied to the definition of "information carrying mediums"--or any other communication the FCC may wish to regulate.

Say, Voip, for instance. Is it data, and can be blocked by telco networks, or is it "telecomunications?"

Perhaps this quote from Wi-Fi planet may shed some light to what's really going on: "I look forward to creating clear rules for all IP-enabled services." --Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Energy and commerce Committee.

You obviously have not built antennas for HF then where it's EXTREMELY easy to built a antenna that causes losses.
Like I said, only if you're incompetent

Fixed point to point (unlicensed) is restricted to 4 watts EIRP(unless things have changed since 2002 when this http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1 144391 was wrote.
That's not even what the article says, learn to read. It very specifically says, "For antennas with gain greater than 6 dBi, the FCC requires you to reduce the transmitter output power if the transmitter is already at the maximum of 1 watt. The reduction, however, is only 1 dB for every 3 dB of additional antenna gain beyond the 6 dBi mentioned above. This means that as antenna gain goes up, you decrease the transmitter power by less. Thus, the FCC allows EIRP greater than 4 watts for antennas having gains higher than 6 dBi. Of course these higher gain antennas would mostly apply to point-to-point solutions having longer-range requirements, which is not common for most indoor applications," (emphasis mine); actually, this portion of the rule applies to fixed, point-to-point systems only. Non-point-to-point systems are limited to 36 dBm. The article is in keeping with my post above, which was derived from the applicable Part 15 rules directly.

You obviously have not built antennas for HF then where it's EXTREMELY easy to built a antenna that causes losses. It's not really that hard to do it on 2.4 GHz either.

ERP is used for Repeaters. I also would not be a bit surprised to see the FCC swich to ERP for all parts mostly because of invalid environmental concerns (OH my you might get brain cancer and such......NOT).

Fixed point to point (unlicensed) is restricted to 4 watts EIRP(unless things have changed since 2002 when this http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1 144391 was wrote. ). That would be 1 watt plus 6 dBi gain. That's is relaxed compared to Omni Directional rules. In any case, if you homebrew and antenna, you better hope whoever designed it thought about all of those things when designed. According to the same article, the maximum gain you'd likely be allowed from your antenna is about 8-9 dBi for a omni-directional. At least according to that article I linked to.

Depends, the limit for mobile operation is 1 watt EIRP... that's after antenna gain.

Fixed station operation has much looser limits. 4 watts EIRP or higher (the formula is kinda complex, just read this URL).

Microsofts Xbox has had wireless networking for a while now.
It should be expected of Nintendo and sony to match what Microsofts pervious console, anything less just means they are falling behind.

"The Chevy Blazer was still there, the man furtively hunched over his computer." Well lets give this guy the stupid award for getting caught. Seems he wasn't so furtive after all? -----
Since this is a duplicate article, I will just post a link on how to secure your wifi on the road.... http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3 106011

Ever transfer files from one computer to another with a crossover cable? It's really nice to do it wirelessly- hence ad hoc mode.

For the layman's overview of ad hoc mode check out this overview if you want the nitty gritty read the standard itself

It is a real mode. And would be quite usefull if chipset manufacturers bothered to implement it correctly and test interoperability.

While wireless isn't new, the idea of it being absolutely ubiquitous on campus is fantastic. How frustrating is it in the real world to have to find an AP? Even within places like airports, coverage is spotty at best and you can't really roam easily. The ability to do everything (Internet, Phone, and TV) on your laptop is great. It also saves money for the College as well. More details can be found here http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/349 9271

IEEE 802.22 sounds like a much better alternative because it uses UHF frequencies and because I'm biased against intel.http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.p hp/3483426/

to tell the truth, 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11c, 802.11d, ... exists, but some are less used (and known) than others.

More info (with explanations) here

What do the letters mean?

"Task groups within the 802.11 WG enhance portions of the 802.11 standard. A particular letter corresponding to each standard/revision, such as 802.11a, 802.11b, and so on, represents the different task groups. For example, Task Group B (i.e., 802.11b) was responsible for upgrading the initial 802.11 standard to include higher data rate operation using DSSS in the 2.4GHz band."

From 802.11 Alphabet Soup.

..an awful lot of cities have already been doing it for a long time.

Including my town, which has had free WiFi covering a large portion of the city for over a year. I and I know for a fact that we aren't the only city doing this, plenty of others in the US already have simmilar setups.

If your home WAP had been using the same channel as the city, tough cookes. Change your channel. Is it really that freaking difficult? Took me less than 30 seconds on my linksys.

You'll be waiting even longer if you want to use WiMax for a connection in a moving car. The WiMax (802.16) standard is for portable broaband access, connections that you can take with you but don't work so well while moving (ref).

802.16e is looking at adding mobility to WiMax but what you'll really need for access while mobile is 802.20 - (MBWA) - Mobile Broadband Wireless Access. This standard is specifically for broadband access while moving.