High-Speed Wireless LANs Move Forward

GrokSoup writes: "Neat article from the WSJ (free site) about European hackers using 802.11 technology to create limited-range, high-speed outdoor networks. As you might expect, people are messing with directed antennas to send signals up to a kilometer. While I've tried this to get from the house to the pool, the idea of banding together in open-source fashion had never really occurred to me. Nifty!" We've mentioned consume.net before, but this piece mentions some interesting possibilities, like how the same idea may result in an approved-by-the-Man wireless network in Sweden, and the golden hope that multiple connection methods will let us switch handily among several wireless protocols as the occasion merits.

Comments

Finland has wavelan ISP's

[nchip]

Here at Finland, radionet and Saunalahti are busy building wavelan network. While the idea is great, at the moment they have many techincal problems.

In practice you need a line of sight and radio frequency is used by many other devices. A common joke is to call it instead of a "wireless Network" a "connectionless network". Still those few who have managed to get a subscription seem to be more than happy.