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."

Comments

Tragedy of the commons

[Waffle Iron]

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?

What I see

[talonyx]

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...

Wireless will scale...if done right

[pridefinger]

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

Cringely Icon, Please

[ekrout]

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...

When the ISPs all start blocking P2P....

[Mr. Neutron]

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*.

10.5km bah - try 14.6km's at 11Mbps

[CRC'99]

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.

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=02/02 /07/4863496 regarding this.