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Wireless Mania
burnsy and others sent in links to stories about 802.11b that are cropping up everywhere. The New York Times has one. (Well, two, actually.) Salon has one. InternetNews has a piece about Boingo, a new wireless start-up, that's also covered in this Forbes article. (The NYT article above also mentions Sputnik.) Both Boingo and Sputnik are trying to leverage the existing community wireless networks to speed their network build-outs. MIT's Tech Review has an interesting piece about a wireless start-up that has already tried and failed. Fixed wireless is also booming, according to an industry study.
Boingo sounds like a good idea, but what they really ought to do is make it available for PalmOS. There's already an 802.11b SD card available, and this could be the perfect application for it.
I'd personally rather see more initiative in securing wireless networks, instead of proceeding in a definitely windowsesque fashion and just ship ship ship the damned thing... who cares if it's ready??
Nah, it's a scam by apartment management companies: "Free internet access with every downtown apartment!"
Look at it this way. Differently clued execs sell more wireless networks and related equipment. Differently clued people buy them. Clued people support them and make money. This could be the next economic bubble.
IIRC, there's a group in Australia who have been forming their own little wireless network with rooftop antennas. The trouble they have been facing is the amount of space between nodes, but they were well on the way to having a network between Melbourne and Adelaide (though several users in Albury/Wodonga were isolated in their own little network)
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
This may be the best shot at ensuring free flow of information we ever had. He who controls the hardware controls the information flow. A network full of backdoors sounds very flow friendly to me.
However, according to this quote from the TechReview article, I've got the business model upside down:
It seems that providing the infrastructure is the cheap part (the part that I was trying to solve) and doing all those "extras" is where the costs come in. Doh! Was really excited about it for a while though...
-Russ
Me
I've tried using consume.net and sflan.com. I even used to enjoy Ricochet. I was unable to connect to either free ISP because their node maps were either innaccesible or just wrong. I have visited the consume.net page many times and the node database has not worked for at least a year. At SFLan.com they actually have pictures of base station locations, yet when I have sat in immediate proximity to a base station, no signal at all is available. The problem with the anarchistic, volunteer, free wireless lan projects is that they do not, and perhaps cannot, provide even the most basic quality of service. It should not be easier for me to "hack" (and I use that term very loosly) into an unsecured wireless base station than to connect into a legitimate station. As well, the free base stations tend to be in houses and offices. Although I spend quite a bit of time in my house and office, that someone twenty miles away has a working wireless setup really does not amount to a hill of beans. I think that most of us here on Slashdot would give several major bodily organs to have true pervasive free wireless internet, if only in places like SOMA or SoHo. For even this pipe dream to sober up, we need to vastly increase the signal strength of the wireless access points. Instead of concentrating on building wireless ghettos, we should try to lobby our congress, and for you non-Americans your legislative bodies, to increase the broadcasting strength of our wireless access points (wap). Perhaps it might even be prudent to have two legally allowable types of waps. A legally non-open hub facing the current power restrictions and a hub open to the public, by law, that would have ten times the signal power. That would cause this movement to gain resonance.
"...What is good for General Motors is good for America." -Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense and fmr President of GM
I've been experimenting with different APs and cards - range issues seem to be related to the quality of the card, not the AP. The Cisco 350 for example seems to get a great signal most anywhere inside or out while other cards can't seem to maintain a good signal in the next room - all from the same AP. YMMV.
Do you have dozens network drops in every room of your house or aparment?
;-)
Why would I need dozens of network drops in every room of my house? My family has 6 PCs and laptops in different rooms spanning two houses (close together) and planning to add more PCs and yet we still use cables. We probably will stick with cables until wireless is cheaper and has better peformance and consistency. For longer distances, I'd rather dial-up to my PC at home even if I had to pay for an extra phone line. The only time I'd choose wireless is if I didn't have a phone to use in an isolated location in which case I wouldn't be really thinking of using my PC.
Does every conference room in your office building have a network connection for everyone in a max capacity environment?
From the articles posted, the wireless network seems to be more consumer-oriented rather than business-oriented. Most wireless services today target consumer applications - cellphones and PDAs. A wireless LAN is very useful but for widespread use of wireless technology, I still believe in a killer app. From where I come from, the killer app for the widespread use of cellphones was text messaging.
Have you ever surfed the web or checked your email while sitting on the front lawn, enjoying a summer afternoon?
If I were outside trying to enjoy a summer afternoon (which is pretty rare for me), I'd be reading a book.
"Conventional wisdom" says that hooking up to WiFi networks on the fly is as easy as falling off the turnip cart. But as the Salon article notes, for the average joe that isn't the case.
I'm not down at "average" - I eat TCP/IP for breakfast - but I haven't figured out wireless yet, either. I've got a ZoomAir card but none of the interesting software (NetStumbler mostly, but others too) seems to support it. I'm probably just missing some totally basic groundwork, and making it too complex because I'm used to delving details.
What's the general experience? Is this stuff easy and I'm just on the wrong page? Or are the only people who're surfing like mad the people who understand this shit inside out?
Can anyone recommend wireless primers for regular usage as well as um, more 'dynamic' usage?
From the Tech Review article: "Assuming an organization already has a high-speed Internet connection and has spent $100 for a wireless transmitter, the only real cost associated with providing this service is the negligible..." T1, T3 and backbone connections are free, YEA! To my eye, that is a BIG assumption. His startup went broke providing security and other services. Protecting users from each other must be free for the organizations that are allowing free connections. Am I liable for data loss from one user cracking another on my 'free' network? HUMBUG.
I don't understand how the MIT author believes offering bandwidth for free will not drive up marginal use.
Whenever something is free people use it as if it's free, that is to say freely. This is not a good recipe for an economical campus (or office) network.
In economics this is known as the Freeloader problem, and is ubiquitous amongst public goods.
Remember, nothing is ever entirely free, someone always pays. In this case the MIT author's bandwidth was being paid for by students.
You are not allowed to use the unlicesed bands "by way of business". Despite that, Boingo still included UK Consume nodes in it's database, without permission.
Check the Consume mailing list archive for the furore it caused.
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