Slashdot Mirror
Wireless Internet Finally Coming To London
andylaurence writes: "NTL has issued a statement on their site of their intentions to trial highspeed wireless Internet access in London. They don't seem to know whether it will continue after the trial, but they have stated that it will cost £25 a month (the same as their cable modems). One would assume that this will be based on an 802.11b network, and the questions will then arise as to how secure this is. Another company also seem to be pioneering wireless Internet access this month, with a trial due to start soon. Seems to me like this might just take off." Wait -- I thought London already had wireless access.
Of course, in great brittish tradition, your internet use will be monitored by the sanctioned Almightly Monarchy and if you are found doing anything naughty or contradictory to the crown, your name will be cross-referenced with your driver's license, your picture pulled from the database, your face tracked down through the public video camera/privacy invasion systems and publically humiliated and flogged.
Let's just hope it turns out better than these guys did. Thud! ::ducks::
Do you like German cars?
I wouldn't trust a 'company' without a decent setup as far as I could throw them! Their domain name just contains an embedded FRAME which gets its content from a page on a Free ISP!
Quality...
We've only been putting photos on driving licences for a few years now (I forget when they were introduced, but it was =5 years ago). Most of the population still doesn't have them. Furthermore, IIRC you can't be hung for treason (e.g. burning bank notes) anymore, though this law was rarely used when it was in place anyway.
To be honest, the monarchy only has a symbolic power over the government. Technically, the monarch has the final say in which party gets elected, but I don't imagine they'd be too popular if they tried to go against public opinion. And we've got rid of monarchs before after all (search for British Civil War).
You are, however, pretty much spot on about the prevalence of CCTV - I hear us Brits (particularly Londoners) get our picture taken by these cameras more frequently than most Americans. And our government seems to be just as willing as as the US one to eat away at our rights.
I know you were only joking (or at least both I and the moderators thought so), but I just felt like being pedantic.
Because in the UK that spectrum is only allocated to non commercial use. You cannot setup a commercial wirless network in this spectrum.
[Please type your sig here.]
I can't find anything to back this up, but I'd imagine that this is using the spectrum recently auctioned in the UK for fixed wireless access. That covers spectrum in the 28GHz, 40 GHz, 3.4 GHz and 10GHz frequencies. See ZDNet article here for details.
We're not talking wireless in the home here, just wireless *to* to the home, replacing the NTL cable. As the FAQ points out:
"A signal is transmitted from various locations throughout London and is received by the outdoor transceiver on the side of the property. The cable modem recognises this signal and converts it into standard data packets that your PC will recognise."
As a previous poster has mentioned, charging for 2.4 GHz bandwidth in the UK is currently against the licensing regulations anyway.
Why would one assume that a city-wide wireless network would use 802.11b? Aside from the WEP encryption issues, 802.11b is such a short-range system that it would require a tremendous infrastructure to implement, and would also blanket the city with interference for people who wanted to use 802.11b for its intended LAWN (Local area wireless network) uses.
True, Ricochet failed, and 128Kbps is starting to seem paltry, but there are plenty of other wireless standards out there that are far more suitable for high-speed wide area wireless coverage, G3 being one of them.
If London is creating a new network from scratch, I would assume they'd use a current technology, and one geared specifically for their type of needs, and not create a piecemeal solution with microcells which either all have to be individually wired to the net via high-speed connection (every 100 yards) or act as repeaters (ala Ricochet) resulting in 500ms ping rates on good days.
Anyone know any other standards that would better apply to a high-speed wide-coverage omnidirectional wireless net?
Kevin Fox
If you'd spend two minutes looking at the website you would see that you can have up to 1Mbps each way, depending on how much you want to pay.
The absolute basic is 512 up 256 down.
If you look at some of their coverage maps for this trial NTL are actually ovvering their service across a fairly large part of Croydon from the Crystal Palace transmitter - Croydon is a telewest area!
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
UK GNP = $1042.7 billion
Portugal GNP = $77.7 billion
UK Population = 58.2 million
Portugal Population = 9.8 million
Therefore, GNP per capita =
$17,900 in UK
$7,900 in Portugal
Sure, there's a lot of poverty, but there's a lot of rich people too. With a population of 58.2 million (probably more now) there's always going to be a lot of people at either end of the bell curve. It sucks that we can't all be well off and have a high standard of living, but we're a G7 country for goodness sake - there's not really much question of whether we're a first-world country or not.
Yes, the telecomms infrastructure is still lagging at the moment (cellular networks not included, because they're pretty good) - that's largely a hangover from the days of British Telecom's rule. But every major aspect of the telecomms that's opened up has been invaded by companies who're willing and able to offer cheaper options. And there's plenty of companies (particularly in London, but elsewhere too, like Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester) who're prepared to invest in telecomms.
I'd also like to know how many people (percentage) in Portugal use the net, and what percentage of those are on broadband, and how that compares to the UK, but since I've already looked up some statistics, I think it's your turn.
See http://www.radio.gov.uk/publication/press/2000/20o ct00.htm for the spectrum (10 GHz) used by NTL - this rules out 802.11b, which works at 2.4 GHz only.
/ broadband_ovum.html
They are using some variant of 'fixed wireless', also known as wireless local loop (WLL) - this is intended only to serve fixed sites, as the name implies, and uses a variety of spectrum from 2 GHz up to 30+ GHz - these technologies go by various names including MMDS and LMDS.
The good news is that this is licensed spectrum, so performance is determined by the network operator, not by the number of people near you with wireless LANs, and coverage is generally much better (802.11b would be quite an expensive way to try to cover a whole city).
Fixed wireless access (FWA) is already being deployed by various operators in the US (Sprint, Worldcom) and UK (Tele2, around Reading). It has a chequered history with various bankruptcies (Teligent in the US, Ionica in the UK), but if the costs come down and standards are agreed, it could be a useful competitor to Cable and xDSL, particularly for areas they don't address (e.g. industrial/business areas, and rural areas).
For more information, see http://www.watmag.com/technologies/Broadband/ovum
The key to understanding this announcement is that ntl own all the transmitters up and down the country that are used to transmit all non-BBC television and radio.
If ntl can get this trial working in London, they should be able to roll other the service nationwide.
This would beat anything done on any cabled (both cable TV and phone lines) service, and be cheaper too.
Some people will doubtless think that 802.11b is still an attractive protocol. These people might argue that people won't be sniffing wireless ethernets anytime soon, as the exploit requires a high degree of technical proficiency. However, it only requires one person to discover a network's password.
So, I am totally against any move anywhere which entrusts the public's data to a broken standard like 802.11b with WEP. I think it is important to convince people of WEP's almost total lack of value.
Help convince people not to trust 802.11b WEP. Use AirSnort to crack 802.11b networks. I won't be happy until hardware manufacturers are pressured into releasing a standard which doesn't suck (what a novel idea.)
And remember, friends don't let friends fall victim to a partially known key attack.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
I've actually had a really good experience of using NTL. They have just about the only free-free-free ISP that is actually just that. I had a student phone line for 5.50 a month, and could use ntlworld as much as I liked for free (though annoying 2 hr cut-offs). Their connectivity and bandwidth was better than Demon is now - I never had any problems...
Tele2 already provide a wireless broadband service to a fair chunk of England (but not London at the moment).
They charge £39.99 ($60) for 512k downstream/256k upstream, which compares pretty well with the fixed UK broadband (I have a 512/128k cable modem from NTL which is £19.99 ($30) a month).
In our particular case it took 23 phone calls and 2 weeks to arrange for a telephone and a cable modem in our new house which the previous occupants had already had NTL installed in!
NTL are and talk shit.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Because that's all you've heard of?
There are other protocols that are more suited towards wide-area distribution of internet access....
http://www.waverider.com
There are other protocols that are better suited towards the larger distances associated with giving everyone internet access to the home wirelessly.
With 802.11b, sure, you could have access points all over the place... but it's by no means the most efficient or best way to do it.
I suggest you travel to a few 2nd and 3rd world countries before making that judgement.
Also.... beelive it or not, a good wireless system is the *answer* to lack of telecom infrastructure; it's much cheaper to deploy.
http://www.waverider.com
GNP/GDP are *Not* measures, by any means, of quality-of-life. They are purely financial. War and death also make them go up; they are indifferent indices.
,Canada, and the UK than I've seen anywhere in Portugal.
Portugal may have a low GNP, but they are certainly not in 'Poverty'. They work the land; are largeley self sufficient from region to region, and simply are not that modernized; they don't HAVE to be. They are comfortable, healthy people from what I've seen. I've seen MUCh worse living conditions in the US
It's the nature of their economy; their self-sufficiency and lack of exports that makes them 'appear' poor.
The 2.4Ghz ISM band is licensed for localized use in the UK. Cordless phones, wireless LAN, medical and scientific insturmentation, microwave ovens, etc....It's NOT licensed for telecom-type use. You can't 'sell' internet access, and build up towers and tramist all over the place using the 2.4Ghz ISM band... it violates the license. It's NOT licensed the same way it is in North America.
Well, licensing issues aside (commercially selling 802.11b would be illegal in the UK, it violates the 2.4GHZ ISM band license), this is entirely possible.
I've had 802.11b connectison going 10 MILES using the proper antennas (and staying within the regulations). You are only limited to 100-300 meters using 0db gain omnidirectional cheap antennas.
...it was just a counter to the suggestion that the U.K. is too broke to implement a wireless network in London (back up the thread a way). I accept that GNP per capita is a pretty basic means of comparison, but it does give you an idea of the situation. Please don't mis-interpret my defence of the U.K. economy as a slur on the Portugese economy.
....yet. Let's do what we can to make sure we don't ever get it. Write to your MP!