Slashdot Mirror
Cringely's Bank Shot
Michael A. Lowry writes: "You may remember how Robert Cringely used a couple of directional antennas to get an 802.11b link up across a 10.5 km wide valley. The original Slashdot discussion is here. Well Cringely has done it again. This time, he has set up a passive repeater in an oak tree on a nearby mountaintop to bounce a 2 Mb/s signal around a hill that lies between his house and the acces point in Santa Rosa. Read about it here. Details about the homemade hardware he used can be found here. There's going to be a lot more of this in the near future."
Let's say thousands of people do this in some general area to save a buck or two on broadband. Even with directional antennas, the noise floor could get pretty high. How much bandwidth will any one person have left?
I live in an area where if you are outside of a very small boundary, you cannot get high speed bandwidth regarless of what you're willing to pay. Some get satellite, the rest(majority) are forced to suffer with dialup.
This would be a big boon for us. I hope a clever company picks up the ball and runs with this.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
People want wireless access ANYWHERE.
I want it while I sit on the bus commuting to university. I want it when I'm relaxing at my friend's house. I want it when I'm sitting in my bathroom dumping core.
And no company is going to give this to us.
I want it unmetered. I don't mind paying a flat rate but I'm not going to sit in the dark ages of per minute cell phone charges. That would be useless.
And no company is going to do that, either.
So we all have to be like Cringely....
I already have a WAP in my house, albeit a low power one. Come summertime I might buy an antenna for it so I can get a decent connection when outside in my large property.
Imagine if everybody did this. Imagine if half the houses on your street had a WAP with the SSID set to something like "freewire" or something, seamlessly providing wireless access wherever you go via people's boradband links.
NAN - neighbourhood area network.
Now if only I didn't live in outer suburbia where my neighbours have never heard of the Internet and houses are too far apart to make this worthwhile...
Cringely mentions that he is indeed violating the DSL provider's TOS but doesn't think that he can be caught. What is to stop the DSL provider from TCP/IP fingerprinting his router and terminating service?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
What is sweet is that this is on PBS. I love public TV and I love it more that we get to see free cool stuff like this.
I bet that he isn't the first to do this either. I have a friend who lives accross the street from his ISP and has tried multiple times to get a strand of fiber run to the main switch (he is friends with the owner). Before I moved and lost contact with him he was working on a radio based method of getting 100Mbps using multiplexing and directional antennas. At less than 300 feet it seemed feasible. This was of course before 802.11x and I am sure he has looked into this. The company we worked for there has a few wireless net connections but the microwave setup we were looking at for 100Mbs and even OC-3 speeds was big bucks! About $10,000 for a single site. Are there any cheaper solutions for that kind of speed?
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
I work for a company that will be hosting an access point for an isp. In return we get a reduced rate on the bandwidth that we purchased (DS3). I live not too far from work/the access point and will be given free service (not relevant, but cool anyway :)).
The reason this company's solution just might work is this: They are installing multiple access points at businesses in my area. Each tranceiver (yes, everyone's antennae both receives and transmits the network signal, widening the effective range) that is brought online is assigned to a specific access point. As bandwidth starts to saturate a given access point, a new access point is to be brought online by splitting the cost with a business that will play host. That just may be what is needed to make wireless work, instead of becoming a choked alternative to 56k.
Just maybe it will make high bandwidth available to the poor saps (myself included) that can't get dsl or cable.
-Pride
I still don't understand how the FCC has any jurisdiction, considering that his transmissions don't cross state boundries.
We'd like a Cringely icon, please, to go along with his own section.
You can perform a simple search to see just how many times his material has been posted as a new story on the front of Slashdot.
He's not a God, but he's damn close. His articles are almost always interesting and sometimes he even manages to produce original ideas that are quite captivating.
I don't think I'm the first one to suggest this, either...
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Ultimately the Internet is going to become useless, taken over by AOL/Time-Warner and a handful of other major providers, all in control of Big Media. At that time, we'll need to set up our own nationwide, underground, wireless IP network. And it's ideas like this that are going to make it work. Here's how:
We start with neighborhood wireless LANs. A few WAPs on the block, and forthcoming wireless technology will allow the WAPs to uplink to one another. It's not all that different from the old BBS, except that it's over the airwaves, rather than over the phone, the bandwidth is about 1000x better, and it's completely public.
Then we get some Cringely-esque techniques in place to route between different neighborhood LANs. Set an IP router in front of several microwave links to other IP routers, each in a nearby town/neighborhood. This would be like a wireless version of the old FidoNet.
If we can get the whole nation connected, we can then have P2P-paradise that the Media companies can't touch. Well, except that bandwidth would suck, and it would be able to scale for anything. Only, I'm looking at 5 or 10 years down the road, after technology has taken a few leaps forward.
And, you could have access to this network virtually anywhere you can take an 802.11 device. And don't get me started on the Voice-over-IP possibilities.
That would *rule*.
dinner: it's what's for beer
I'm part of the crew at www.wireless.org.au - and we've been doing some distance testing on standard 11Mbps 802.11 equipment.
2 /07/4863496 regarding this.
We successfully negotiated a link at 11Mbps over 14.6km and are trying to go for 36.5km when time allows.
check out the quick post at http://www.wireless.org.au/stories.php?story=02/0
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
i've just set up with a local wireless isp in arcata, california (yay!). i have no trouble getting a signal where i am -- my question is wheather i can use one-or-fewer thingies (eg wireless access point, unpowered repeater) to bridge from the wireless isp to a wireless lan.
currently my transciever is an old aironet uc4800.
it can't bridge wireless networks. apple and linksys claim their products can't, but admit they haven't tried. anyone actually done this?
you have trouble understanding concepts that are either new, or outside your comfort bubble. Basically, all flame-bait and no value.
End Of Line. PLEASE MODERATE.
With all due respect, you should at least consider the possibility that your argument could be more clear. Immediately ending a discussion because someone needs clarification is rude, and would seem to indicate an unwillingness to subject your point to debate.
you believe I am wrong, even if my assertions are true;
The argument I was trying to make outlined relatively clearly:
Second, the complaints you make do not show a problem with economics, even if they are true. You allege that people are making bad business decisions, but if your points are correct, neoclassical economic theory would agree that these decisions are bad.
However, unlike you, I'm willing to clarify. You argue that we need a new form of economics. Your argument is that currently business decisions are being made that are obviously bad, that these decisions are supported by economics, and therefore economics is bad. I am agreeing that at least some bad decisions probably are being made, but I can in any case just stipulate that all your points about bad decisions are true, because I am arguing that these bad decisions are not supported by economics. If they aren't, we don't need "Quantum Economics." This is all I am trying to argue.
My first claim, that your post had no relation to its parent, was just dumb. Sorry.
I see now that you interpreted the statement in the parent about 100% loss incorrectly, and attributed it to 19th-century economics. When that post said the "unsold bandwidth is a 100% loss," that didn't literally mean that it would be recorded as a loss on the balance sheet, any more than I could claim a $100,000 business loss on my taxes if I try to sell a banana for that amount, but it goes unsold and becomes spoiled and I throw it away. Now THAT would be voodoo economics :) All I lose is the cost of producing the banana. There is nothing in economics that says otherwise. However, you seem to think that there is, because you say that multiplying the bandwidth must multiply the loss (that is, you say that economics says that). By analogy, suppose I had a device that produced 10 bananas per minute ex nihilio. If I can upgrade the machine for $1000 to produce a million bananas per minute, I would do so as a rational economic agent as long I can recoup the $1000. The value of excess bananas that might spoil is of no concern. I believe the burden is on you to show why any economics, even from the 19th century, would have me do otherwise.
I hope this accurately represented your argument.