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.
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.
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.
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