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.

Comments

bah

[Morphine007]

humbug... what a waste of time... 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??

Wireless.

[saintlupus]

Ah, what a time to have AirSnort. And I hear CompUSA is going to be putting Access Points on sale soon!

--saint

Wireless is great!

[Xafloc]

Wireless is just fantastic. I love sitting down on the couch, powering up my Dell (no cables attached), and watching as I recieve my DHCP assigned address. Unfortunately, I only get 26% on the quality of my connection. After all, I am connecting to my neighboors D-Link 150 feet away :)

Seriously, these people have not changed the admin password from "admin" in their Router, and they aren't even using WEP. Of course, I won't be the one to tell them they should :)

Re:Wireless is great!

[saridder]

Well hopefully RFC 3118 (Authentication in DHCP) will be implemented soon, meaning less unathorized addresses passed out. I doubt your neighbors would use it, but it is avail for vendors to implement in their access points.

Re:Wireless is great!

[stripes]

Well hopefully RFC 3118 (Authentication in DHCP) will be implemented soon, meaning less unathorized addresses passed out.

Ugh, what a stunningly bad idea. Now rather then having people stumble across your network and use it without getting in your way they come over have to run tcpdump, guess your netblock and DNS server, and pick an "unused looking" address. If they guess wrong one of your machines could be inaccessable.

As I see it people using your DHCP server is doing you a huge favor, they don't get in your way, and they get logged with the IP address assigned, so you can later figure out what happened. Now all you will know is some mac address wanted a DHCP lease and was denied, lord only knows what IP address they picked out after that!

Make Boingo for PalmOS

[5u5h1]

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.

Meanwhile

[wiredog]

The Supreme Court is going to review the decision allowing NextWave Telecom Inc. to hold on to its spectrum licenses that were thought protected in the bankruptcy proceedings. This could delay the use of that bandwidth for as long as two years.

No killer app yet

[Jack Admiral]

There still isn't a killer app for wireless access yet - either for cellphones, PDAs, or PCs, so I can't see wireless networks becoming successful. I can't imagine why one would use 2400 bps to connect when I can connect at 160 kbps at home unless you're on the road and can't use anything else. Probably the best use for wireless access are cellphones and yet even these haven't taken off. Of course, wireless networks would succeed if they were free which gives a 2400 bps/0$ (infinite) price performance ratio compared to 160 kbps/50$.

Re:No killer app yet

[Conspiracy Theorist]

No killer app?

Do you have dozens network drops in every room of your house or aparment? Does every conference room in your office building have a network connection for everyone in a max capacity environment? Have you ever surfed the web or checked your email while sitting on the front lawn, enjoying a summer afternoon? Wireless LANs themselves are the killer app.

Anyone remember this?

[Sapphon]

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)

This might be very good.

[Krapangor]

All these electromagnetic waves everywhere might make our brains grow and more intelligent. So we might look in the end like the aliens from "mars attacks".

And we all know that electromagnetic waves make flowers grow. At least light is electromagnetoc waves and flowers don't grow without light as you might know. So, all electromagnetic waves might be very very good for them.

Fixed Wireless is booming huh?

[Aexia]

I guess *that's* why AT&T Wireless laid off its entire Fixed Wireless division.

There goes my brainstorm...

[rbeattie]

I had this great "million-dollar" wireless idea a few months ago that I quickly emailed to all my friends and got all excited about. The idea was to provide software and a service that would let anyone with a wireless access point set up a custom access server where they could easily charge for use of their bandwidth. Not just businesses, but anyone with a good network connection and a WiFi hub. Any wireless users that wanted to use the network could sign up to service where they could buy hours or credits. Then the local server keeps track of the time spent using its bandwidth and the proceeds are split between the server owner and the billing service. The idea is that instead of relying on "free" networks to sprout up, this would give incentive for people to open up their wireless connections by allowing them an easy way to charge for it (making them franchisees in a sense). Also it would give users a bunch more access points for reasonable charges.

However, according to this quote from the TechReview article, I've got the business model upside down:

One of the most surprising things we learned from launching our Internet startup was that providing wireless Internet service is really cheap. What ended up bankrupting the company were all the ancillary services we had to develop--credit card billing, technical support, the corporate Web site and the various security measures we had to put in place to prevent unauthorized use of the network by nonsubscribers. Organizations that aren't trying to make money providing wireless Internet service can do away with all of these measures and offer the service for free.

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

WiFI looks great, but...

[lfourrier]

... all those community networks seems quite anti-american to me.

(at least anticorporateamerican ;)

What we need is...

[swordboy]

It would be really great if they would start releasing 802.11x telephone PBX equipment. Blanket an area in wireless internet and telephony. Now *that* is my idea of sticking it to the Comcasts and Ameritechs...

Like anything else, Your Milage May Vary

[greensquare]

I see a couple of postings from people complaining about WiFi Stuff. One guy says the public Access Points don't work. And he wants to increase signal stregth. Somebody else is bitching because his range is only 40 feet.

This is just like anything else.

If you put your stereo and your TV right next to each other and try to play music and watch TV at the same time, it is going to suck. If you put your 802.11B 2.4 Ghz Access Point right next to your 2.4 Ghz Wireless phone, and your microwave oven that you use to do all of your cooking, then your throughput and your range are just going to suck.

If you put your stereo in your bathroom, and then close the door, you can't hear it for shit out in your living room. If you put your Access Point between the fishtank, and your metal filing cabinet, your range and throughput won't be too good. ( 2.4 Ghz can't go through metal or water very well.. )

If you leave your linux box on an open network, and leave the root account without a password, and then tell people to log into it, soon it will be trashed by someone, either on accident or on purpose. If you leave your admin account on your Access Point unprotected, and tell people to use that access point, pretty soon it wont work either.

In my opinion 802.11 B does work pretty well in terms of range and throughput. Using an off the shelf Cisco access point with only a standard rubberducky antenna, and PC Card with an integrated antenna in a laptop, I have maintained 1 and 2 Mb/s connections at a range of 1800', in direct line of sight, and through a glass window.

In a typical cube farm office environment ( 5' high partitions made of metal frames, and cloth/cardboard ) I have demonstrated a good reliable 5 - 11 Mb/s connections in a 150' radius.

In a home, 40' radius should be no problem, assuming typical drywall/stud construction.

Kevin

Is it, or is it not, easy?

[bourne]

"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?

Re:Is it, or is it not, easy?

[laserjet]

Most likely, you just haven't had enought time to play with 802.11b. Once you do, it is a cakewalk, and proably the best money I have spent on computer equipment since my first modem (2400baud).

head over to 802.11 Planet and look at their tutorials to get started.

there is nothing like surfing on your ibook from your couch, playing an mp3 in the background streaming from your linux box. i leave my inernet connection wide open 1) because I want people to use it. My internal network is protected behind a good firewall, but anyone in the area can have internet access. and 2) i think it's the right thing to do to help the community. think if everyone shared their connection. it would make the world a much better place.

MIT Economics?

[skeptic]

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.

It's actually illegal in the UK

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:How long?

[praedor]

Where you been? This has been happening for a while. I use kismet. You can also use airsnort, prismdump, prismsnort and give a shot to wavestumbler - for the linux side. There is netstumbler for the windoze side. I've found dozens of networks in my city, most of which are totally wideopen. A few use strong WEP, others use VPN. I've parked outside an apartment complex I found on my way home from work one day within which someone had set themselves up with a wireless lan/AP. I connected no problem.

I've sat in airports (Detroit and St Louis) and picked up wireless networks there - though they were all encrypted/using strong WEP and there was no data transfers at the time so I couldn't get ANY real useful information from them. This has been going on for a while.

How long indeed.