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Is A Public Wireless Internet Possible?
edmz asks: "As of this day anyone with resources can deploy their Web site and be accessible worldwide. Thanks to telcos wanting to charge for use of their infrastructure this might change soon, who knows. But the point is that its possible in this very moment. Now, let's be imaginative and think that in 10 years we will be able to have a truly wireless Internet. What things are being done now as to guarantee that we will have a public and big enough part of the spectrum so that we can broadcast, share and communicate as we do with the net now? Will all of the spectrum be private, and thus, possibly pay per use?" A wireless Internet, when created, will be one of the first major advances of the 21st century. How long will it take before it becomes a reality?
All those unused television UHF channels have great bandwidth possibilities...
I'd like to see a grass roots effort in which a bunch of people just buy Apple Airports and the like, turn on DHCP and NAT, and hand out connections to everyone in range of their station. That way, anyone with an 802.11 equipped laptop, PDA, or even desktop could hook up wirelessly while in that area. I don't think it'd supplant the existing network, as I wouldn't give up my cable modem and "real" IP address for a NAT from a neighbor, but it'd be great for traveling.
It'd be really cool when the 802.11 Springboard module comes out for my Handspring Visor, imagine walking around the city, and being connected in various places.
I'm thinking of buying an Apple Airport for home, maybe I'll set mine up to let anyone with 802.11 use it. Anyone in and around my apartment building will have access...
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
You absolutely can not prohibit someone with a scanner from eavsedropping on wireless communications.
One word. Three syllables. Rhymes with "depiction".
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Is what any study has shown on the effects of RF on the body. WHile I too am an EE, and yes I am not to keen on 2.4Gig Hz waves going through the air, the use of a cell phone has shown no correlation to brain cancer / tumors.
HOWEVER: They have done studies that show that the cell phones DO heat the brain, but only to levels that are considered NORMAL. Of cource this is NORMAL for someone doing heavy thinking, like working a crossword, or similar though intensive stuff.
Personally I think it will be at least 10 years before we know the effects of these waves on our bodies. Look at how long it has taken them to show a relation between smoking and enphazema(sp). People thought (in the 1920's) that smoking was 'good' for you. Now we know that it is not healthy for you. It has taken us many many years. Maybe in 10 years we will know enough about bio chemistry and bio electricity that we will be able to make any determinations about that.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
I would _hate_ having to use the net on a current PalmOS machine. Horrible little things - and yes, I had a Palm III for 6 months or so.
That screen is tiny - far too small to use for the web and really too small for e-mail as you can't fit 72 characters per line onto it.
Graffiti is really, really inaccurate and slow IMO - after all that time I still found I was only getting 80ish% accuracy. If it can't get into the high 90s it really isn't good enough. Maybe I just wasn't any good with it but seriously, this is with practice and real attempts to get better. I just found their topology seriously suspect - e's and s's got interchanges with alarming regularity. I actually spent a while experimenting with the training tool (so it'd render the character onto the screen) and was horrified to see what results it was coming up with. Also, that silkscreen design is just cheap 'n' nasty I'm afraid. Even if the screen area was permanently dedicated to input, making it rendered rather than fixed would help as you could use the keyboard without penalty, or get on-screen feedback as to your attempts. Seriously, having the system draw your characters under the pen helps. Try a WinCE machine to see what I mean.
I've currently got a Psion 5, which I love. A screen big enough to work on (640*240) and a keyboard I can use at nearly the same speed as a normal desktop. Yes, it's larger, heavier and more expensive. But it still fits in my jacket pocket (always felt a little silly with a Palm in a shirt pocket), doesn't noticeably weigh me down and, in all honesty, was worth the extra money. It's a better machine which allows me to do far more. For example, I've regularly taken live meeting notes on this. I tried on the Palm - just wasn't possible. With the Psion, works beautifully. I've written fairly long documents on it before then printed them off via the host PC and the sync cable - no conversion needed.
I'd have to say my honest opinion is that Palm succeded mostly by being just good enough and still relatively cheap. Good enough to make people at least try one without rejecting it from the spec sheet, cheap enough for people not to have to consider the purchase too hard and just buy the things. It's really not up to it, though, and I honestly can't see myself ever going back to a PalmOS box now I've had a play with a Psion. Got colleagues thinking about making the switch, too...
Try a Psion, then see if you can go back to the Visor.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I know that a certain "well known" telecommunications carrier looked into the feasability of creating nationwide Internet access in England. The problem was just what you expect.
The cost to deploy such a network, even over an area as limited as England, was extremely costly. The revenue opportunity looked poor. A flat rate model or a usage based system wouldn't bring in the dollars to make it profitable.
Then, you add in the factor of competition, and there's a great deal of risk. And there's the known risk of the technology they used becoming outdated.
Its just not something big business will go after anytime soon -- and big business is the only one with a scale to do it... except for the government.
Some things in this world should remain a public asset ...
We'll see. People are trying to cons up various wireless Internet access schemes using 2.4 Ghz. If it can be implemented, fine enough. But if everybody tromps on everyone, then perhaps you'll allow as how public assets can be misused?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
There's a lot of spectrum out there - think 5-50 GHz short-distance line-of-sight. (There isn't enough technology development up there yet for really general applications, but it can happen if FCC stays out of the way, which it won't, or if it's too hard to avoid interference with other people in that range.) Some of the Ultra WideBand stuff may also be effective.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Consume is still a myth. No interoperating infrastructure exists. Just a couple of geeks who have worked out how to boot the wlan drivers under u*nix and to boot ISC's dhcpd.
The hard problems still to settle are
how to negotiate access point intercommunication - will it be IPIP, IPSEC, PPTP, mobileIP?
How to perform routing? OSPF over VPN's? Mobile IP tangles?
When cooperation gets beyond tech egos, and decisions made mean ubiquity of connection, it might just have a chance.
coward@free2air.net
Time flies like an arrow -- Fruit flies like a banana
The UK already has such a scheme in the form of tele2. They sell "Wireless [A]DSL". 500Mb of transfer for £34.99 ($52) a month (They don't say the speed... ~1MB?). They also do leased-line standard symmetrical services (at a price).
It's not that cheap, and 500Mb isn't even enough to download a decent Linux distro. Also, the coverage isn't much yet, but they are increasing it.
Anyway, the UK government has allocated a vast swathe of the 35Ghz microwave band for wireless Internet, of which, AFAIK, tele2 is the only licencee. It was a bit of a flop.
I wouldn't settle for anything less than the hard-wired stuff (I have an NTL cable modem myself. Very rare in the UK). Cable modem has much potential (>10Mbps downstream. That I want to see).
Russ
Sf lan is a small wireless LAn located on a former Army base in San Francisco .The presidio isnt all that big but its a start.oh yea and its free!
http://www.sflan.com
Unfortunatly, the laws of information theory place an upper limit on how much information can be transmitted within a given section of the radio spectrum.
True, you can improve things by putting up more towers and transmitting over shorter distances, or possibly point to point links, but there really isn't much available spectrum LEFT for new services, with the exception of the analog TV signals (which the TV stations seem very reluctant to give up).
Also, the trend has been towards commercial allocations, based on auctions, so that any spectrum opened up for wireless communication won't be free to use, because those who bought the rights to that EM real estate are going to want to make money on their investment.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Test your net with Netalyzr
And more than likely break the usage agreement you have with your ISP not speaking of bandwith increase here.Even though more ISP's will close their eyes at ocasionally "jumps" over the allocated bandwith a sudden monthly increase will catch their attention and get you in trouble for sure.
The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it. Alan Saporta
Hi. I started a group in Portland, OR to build community wireless LANs. We've recently joined forces with another local group, PersonalTelco. They are going to be the info portal for all things wavey, and PDXwireless is going to be the local registration page. I encourage everyone to go out, buy some hardware, and start you own community LAN.
OK, I'm far from an expert on 802.11, it suits my purposes (no cables runing through the flat) but I feel the guys in London doing the community wireless network must have to do some hacking to get long distance out of 802.11?
If anyone is in the center of Amsterdam (Rembrants plein area) and has 802.11, feel free to try and reach my box, NAT is enabled, the network name is "dolphin", encryption is disabled. Chose an IP address in the 192.168.0.128/25 range (I'll keep the lower half for my machines). The mask is /24 and the gateway is 192.168.0.1.
I seriously doubt that you'll be able to reach it but its there if you want to try it and you never know?
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
But what you'll notice in areas like Miami is that because of piracy the legitimate stations are forced to boost their power to overcome the interference. Then instead of having 24 hr. Desi Arnaz at 98.1 you get him bleeding from 97.3-98.7. The pirates then try to cut through the bleeding, other stations complain about picking up The Mambo King in Atlanta, and the whole thing just turns into a ridiculous mess.
And your point about HAM packet transfer just proves my point. The group who is doing the most with this is l0pht, and who are they? That's right, a bunch of hackers with very questionable morals and motivations.
Thanks but no thanks. I'll take a little government regulation here any day.
I live in a rural area and at this point only have dialup access. I have been looking for an affordable broadband solution that I could potentially bring into my area. In my search I have found that there are two forms of bradband service, besides sattelite, that may very well be the future method of delivery for rural, and quite possibly urban, internet service.
One of these delivery methods is powerline broadband. I won't go into detail on this since this about wireless. The second, of course, is wireless broadband. Fixed Wireless broadband is already being put into use in a few areas and looks like it will quickly gain in popularity for residential use because the cost of equipment and delivery is competitive if not less then other forms. The primary reasons for the reduction in cost for delivering wireless service are 1) you do not have the cost of using the phone company for the "last mile" of delivery to the user, and 2) the frequencies being used, in the U.S. at least, are open for use by anyone.
PrairieInet is one ISP that is already offering fixed wireless broadband for both home and business use, in a rural area, and at rates competetive rates. malibu Networks is another company that is working on delivering fixed wireless broadband. The eZine ISP Planet, which is a online periodical for ISPs, has a new section dedicated to wireless service which includes articles on how to setup a wireless ISP.
Overall it looks to me like Wireless Broadband is one of the up-and-coming internet technologies. This may be something to really look at if not jump into soon.
Can it be created on a grassroots level? The only way that I'd use a wireless 'net is if it's similar to the now-dead (?) GeurillaNet project. It was to be a completely WWW, seperate from the "real" internet, with full encryption and anonymity. I have been thinking about starting something like this, first running on the present networks, but then moving to a seperate wireless 'net. But, to do this, requires LOTS of money and time... maybe after exams...
If anybody's interested in helping, mail me.
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% fortune -o
internet per se, but the ability to use radio direction finding to pinpoint the location of spammers.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The amount raised in spectrum auctions wouldn't pay half the interest on the national debt. Much fanfare is made of the revenues from spectrum auctioning, but realistically, it's a drop in the bucket.
:)
And you're wrong, anyway. On January 9, 1997, the FCC issued a rulemaking establishing the Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) band. It provides unlicensed (i.e. "free") use of 300 MHz of spectrum at 5.15-5.35 GHz and 5.725-5.825 GHz.
Some products do exist for use in this band, bur ironically, they are about as far from the "spirit" of the band as you can get. Last year I installed a Wavespan (brand) point to point microwave link in the U-NII band. It carries 20 Mbits/sec plus two T1 circuits over a 1.2 mile span. Cost? Around $60,000
So the frequencies are there. Anybody want to develop "free" radio hardware for the "free" band?
... thought not....
It's underway in London already - by being a non-profit, loose organisation of volunteers just donating spare bandwidth and putting kit together to blanket as much of the public area as possible with 802.11.
It's interesting, to say the least.
See the consume.net site for more info. If it works, this might be a good model for replicating across other cities.
-- Yoz
I suppose the recent launch of the amateur ham radio satellite gives some hope, but personally I've gotten used to ~300 ms Oz-US ping times and I'm not really keen to give them up :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
My theory is that eventually very large chunks of bandwidth will have their users evicted. That bandwidth will be used to cover every populated bit of the US with high-bandwidth digital data. And of course, cellular voice will be subsumed by this network as voice-over-IP.
Just give it time....
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Just what we need, more large towers belting out radiation.
Do you want cheap, city-wide, wireless internet? There is a company that can do it very cost effectively. They are currently targeting 3rd world countries who are in desperate need for wireless communications. Currently the FCC has not allowed such a platform. (blame AT&T)
Using blimps to be able to cover a very large diamater (300 - 600 km) of high bandwidth wireless internet!
Check out their site:
www.platforms-intl.com
Cd
This
The problem with keeping wireless free to the masses is limited spectrum space. Thankfully the gov't in the US realized how problematic this could be many years ago and created the FCC to regulate the airwaves.
The net as it is now is virtually unlimited in growth potential, and we can lay as much fiber as we want without interfering with each other's communications. This is not the case with wireless, as evidenced by all the problems radio piracy causes.
Imagine if the wireless data spectrum were being polluted in much the same way that AM & FM bands are these days. Dropped connections, interference, and eavesdropping would be so rampant that nothing useful would ever come of your wireless gadgets. Instead of reading your email you might unexpectedly have a kiddie porn image pop up on your PDA. Instead of that report going to your boss it might end up in the hands of some 15 year old wireless hacker who will send it to your competition.
So if any of you are thinking about advocating opening up the airwaves to the public, I advise you to seriously consider the consequences first. Maybe having most of the spectrum allocated to large, pre-existing corporations isn't the best in the interest of freedom, but the anarchy of having a handful of geeky HAM dweebs trashing our data communications is simply something to be avoided at all costs!
As I said, I Am Not A HAM, so I am not sure I am right on all of the details, but the ARRL site should tell you everything you want to know. Might be a good read for everyone interested in wireless internet.
Also, this whitepaper outlines some of the ARRL's plans to allocate data channels within their own bands. Perhaps there are some good ideas in there on how to deploy a wireless internet over a larger scale?
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
This is much like your TV, which has many channels sent to it, but only shows you one at a time.
Have you ever used Ham radio? Do you know Ham operators? Those ``geeky HAM dweebs'' are much better-behaved than your typical AOL user. When someone starts acting inappropriately, it's the Hams who find her first and report her to the FCC.
Do you quite understand what you're saying? By your same logic, the US government should control all the networks because otherwise geeky computer users might be able to trash our data. Sheesh. Just because something is wireless doesn't make it inherently less secure. Wireless communication is just another way to transmit information... instead of transmitting over a wire or a fiber line, you're transmitting through the air. People can snoop your data, yes. But this isn't much different than wires today... especially consider Ethernet, where everyone gets everyone's traffic by design!
Having public communications channels isn't the end of the world. It is nice to have the FCC to have set frequency ranges set aside for different purposes. But I think you don't understand wireless communication or HAM radio operators at all.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
InfoAnarchy.org recently posted a related article about guerilla.net. Go check it out.
Even if you could communicate over some kind of wireless LAN that spanned over your city, what userful network would you be connected to ? The internet, you say ? There aren't enough addresses to share so that you would end up with one. If you connect to a public wireless LAN, the best you'll have is an address behind a NAT. An unreachable address. That's not so good.
There is a need for a network to connect to, that wouldn't have those address limitations. Something based on IPV6 would fit the bill. From that IPV6 network, you could open tunnels that'd lead to the IPV4 internet. Perhaps even request a real, tunnelled IPV4 address from an IPV4 provider somewhere.
There is the 6bone ( www.6bone.net ) that has been starting to create an IPV6 network. But it's not progressing. There is no content or services on the IPV6 network, so nobody will go there. A chicken-and-egg problem. If the 6bone or some other IPV6 network grew, it would solve one of the major impediments to a wireless internet.
That and micropayments. Micropayments remain something that would enable a lot of services to be offered. There are a couple of interesting systems.. www.e-gold.com is one. It allows one to purchase gold, kept in trust by the e-gold corporation. You can give any amount, no matter how small, with only a 1% transfer fee (0.50$ max). The problem is that getting money into an e-gold account is going to cost you at least 4%, probably more. And there is a 1% per year maintenance fee. So the system still is pretty costly.
www.standardreserve.com does things a bit differently. Perhaps in a more useful way. And then there is www.mojonation.net which promises to also create another virtual currency, but which is aimed at file sharing. However, the possibilities of such a virtual currency do not end there.
If you had an easy-to-buy, easy-to-trade virtual currency, that allowed micropayments among other things, and that had some popularity, that would enable many things. A wireless network ran by people in their homes would be one of them. Reflectors, tunnels, lease of addresses, and other network services further enabling a new network, they could all prove interesting to run, as you'd charge for their use. A minor fee, yes, but still a fee. Mojonation aims to do that. Combine the goal of mojonation with working software (instead of pre-pre-alpha quality mojonation software) and valuable e-currency such as e-gold (100% backed by metal).. And you'd have something truly interesting.
I imagine a parallel network developping along the internet. Any geek in his home, with a 30$ transmitter, could setup an access point. He would charge small sums for each KB transfered and sent through a tunnel, via the internet, onto that new network.
Dreams...