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Can 802.11 Become A Viable Last-Mile Alternative?
NikiScevak writes "As telco's around the world move from government hands to private investors the incentive for them to create compeition at the wholesale DSL level drops dramatically. The CSIRO in Australia are investigating the use of Wireless LAN technology 802.11b as a means through which to provide alternative broadband access, achieving range of up to 7km with standard components."
There are several isp's selling wireless access for the last mile in North Carolina. Overall, I wouldn't touch it. The networks are generally insecure, sniffable by anybody and their palmtop with the right hardware/software. From what I have seen and heard from people is that it works, but some days it dosen't work as well as others. *shrugs*
Honestly, I wouldn't mind being able to drive around and have allways on access in my car or something like that, but wireless does not cut it.... Collissions, and cordless phones reek havoc with 802.11b. I use a 100mw ap at my office... when I'm on my cordless phone... my laptop says the link quality is 10-20%.... and the ap is 20 feet away...
In theory, if you are going to use 802.11b on a large scale wouldn't you eventually reach a point where you would 'saturate' the frequency range alotted to this technology? Also, couldn't this cause problems with other electronic devices - if used on a large scale again?
And, last but not least, the damm networks are (usually) insecure as hell - not by nature but by incompetent setup. I remember an article about a bunch of 'hackers' who drove around downtown london's financial distric with a laptop and a wireless card and where ablet o log onto all sorts of networks b/c of lack of security.
The power company in Japan has set up a wireless ISP that boasts broadband speeds.
A google search would probably turn up some interesting information.
I have been pwned because my
Repeaters are not a very good idea with 802.11b. Most likely, High-Gain antennas on both ends, and maybe signal amps would be the best bet. Or maybe long distance links between two access points, then service the local area with an additional ap or two on another channel.
Surely you mean "Last 200 feet." At least, that's what it's like in any remotely urban area.
-b
I have noticed some small ILECs are willing to do whatever it takes to make their customers happy aslong as they continue to have a positive cash flow. I know of an ILEC that for like 230 a month, they basiclly pull a t1 to your house, kick your voice over the t1, and then use the rest for data. Ofcorse, they call it some bullshit, but everybody who knows their stuff knows its a t1 line. Ofcorse... there are the ILECs that buy other ILECs out, and then do nothing. I have sprint locally. The town has been polietly demanding broadband for several years (bedroom town between two decently large cities), and they are just now, three years after they said they would in a few months, to offer dsl. Sprint Sucks.
But try this in the valleys of South Wales and you'll soon realise that copper has its advantages.
At 500km no, just high-gain antennas will not work.. perhaps with amps maybe, but most likely not. At that distance, you would be running into signaling problems, because both ends will be saying "hey, i'm here" every 100 ms... what if one gets off a little bit.. there goes your link.
At that distance, I would say, do what the telco's do. Big tower, Multiplexed microwave signal.
Don't believe in privatization -> more competition as a dogma, since it is not always true. There are cases where privatization -> profit maximation of one monopolist.
It all depends on the market. As for local loop: there is only one local loop, it is fully uneconomical to make a second one. Alternatives (such as wireless) are inferior, especially on a large scale. Maybe a second local loop is possible (being cable) in some areas, but still, two companies with no chance for more doesn't really give competition. There shall be (silent, because it's forbidden) agreement between two companies to share and divide the market.
Nothing is worse than the combination of monopoly and privatization.
Privatization with true competition is best.
If this is not possible (true for many infrastructure markets such as railways, local loop, utilities such as water etc) then the next best alternative is to create a publicly owned non-profit organization that just manages the infrastructure.
Private companies should compete to offer sericces over that publicly owned infrastructure.
Old example is (publicly owned) roads where many transport companies compete to offer moving goods using trucks, using the public roads.
New example can be publicly owned local loop that is offered to customers at cost price. Then the customer can select a provider that delivers him full internet service via this (cheap) local loop.
The costs to the service provider may also be significantly less than using the full Telstra ADSL or ISDN service. In some areas they may only need to put an antenna on the roof of their office and pay Telstra for the connection to the backbone (instead of having to also rent wires to their customers).
I'm amazed by the number of people in Australia who ditch their ISP due to poor quality connections, and then have the same problem with the next ISP - and don't realise that everything is coming down the same wire controlled by the same telecommunications company.
To all those who are confused as to who Telstra is, it is the formerly government owned, half privatised telecommunications company that owns most of the communications in Australia. The remainder is owned by Optus/Singtel, a mainly Singapore government owned telecommunications company, which has a few lines, provides cable TV and broadband to a few small areas and has a mobile phone network. These half privatised companies have most of the worst aspects of both goverment (a we rule you attitude) and private enterprise (more charges for less service all of the time). The way they are heading, full privatisation will turn them into monsters that make the worst multinational mining corporations look like a charities. Therefore, anything that increases the choice here is good.
All the other telecommunications companies mainly just rent space on those two networks.
Everything is on 2.4GHz, theres not much to go arround though! wireless networking, last le, bluetooth, wireless video senders, cordless phones
Put it all together and none of it will work, except the microwave.
standard components...
...like pringles cans?
Seriously, as a consumer, I would have serious doubts about security, but I suppose I might just be underestimating the security of my current access.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
How's sniffing DSL any easier than sniffing a T1?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
As others have pointed out there are numerous technical problems with wireless if used at a large scale. It is all the more irrational knowing that there is already a good last mile in place: the local loop. Mostly it has been paid for with tax money, i.e. you could say that everyone owns its own local loop.
Thus, it is only logical to separate the local loop from the service providers. Create a non-profit (public owned) company that maintains the local loop and offers it at cost price. The telecom companies can compete to offer service over this public infrastructure.
Just like the road system (which is mostly public in most countries). Everyone can use them for a relatively small amount of money. Imagine the situation where there would be no public roads, but the 'local transport company' alone would build and own roads and offer their transport services (trucks, taxis) in one package; since you can hardly have 3 different roads leading to your house, you would be dependant on 1 or maybe 2 transport companies if you want to use the road leading to your house.
Would privatization solve such an absurd situation? No, since no true competition can't exist even if the transport companies would be privately owned (i.e. strive for maximum profit).
The only solution is to have a public infrastructure, and have private companies compete using this public infrastructure.
The polititians that essentially gave away the local loop to a privatized telecom operator (i.e. they gave away something that the public has paid for) made a huge mistake. This must be corrected.
consume.net in the UK are pioneering this kinda thing. There's also a whole raft of other community based wireless links at Wireless Anarchy.
Al.
HantsWireless - Hampshire Wireless
SurreyWireless - Surrey Wireless
> The stupid fucks couldn't use repeaters or use current technology to stretch the line
;)
If the arguments for using different aproach came from the same pool as the previous line, I bet the customer chose wlan just to play with you
I think i'm close to the average price of a 802.11 tranciever. Back to my point, I can buy 1000 feet of cat5 for $50 dollars a box. Maybe 2.5 boxes per last mile? In quantity it would be cheaper of course.
So i'm lookin at $125 dollars per mile VS $200 dollars per mile and i'm asking myself, ARE THEY COMPLETELY OUT OF THEIR MINDS? How hard is it to run a cat5 cable over someone's fence? Hell I share my DSL with my neighbor that way (Pesky teenager d/l on kazza screwin with my CS games)
So point is, this is what I would classify as an overengineered idea. Too expensive, too much stuff can go wrong, no no no no. Look at what happened to metricom a.k.a. Ricochet. Same plan basically and it died because they needed something like 300,000 subscribers just to cover their equipment costs.
At least the cable can be recycled for scrap metal. Not sure what you can do with a 802.11 basestation.
--My Sig is a warning that it's 1:30am and I can't be held responsible for this ramble because i'm pretty flipped out.
Similarly, very few people use cell phones exclusively.
Then you've never been to Europe lately? Here, we have a decent GSM-network that almost never fails (yeah, on New Year and on Valentine it always fails). I know lot's of people (both young, old, poor, rich, student or CEO) that have gone to GSM exclusivly. The only reason I still have a PSTN line is for the fax and (more important) the ADSL access on it!
One and half years ago at least nortel, most likely the others had a last mile box in the making. To be more exact a real last mile box. For the last mile between the patch board in the street and the customer house. At least the Nortel project was a DSL/Voice/ISDN concentrator that was supposed to be deployed in the street as a replacement for those grey ugly distribution boxes most telcos use since the days of Bell. Concentrate close to the customer premises and carry over fiber or vDSL to the exchange.
Most of these projects got cancelled during cost cutting exersies. You know the drill: it is something new, so you should not do it and stick to the areas of "core expertise".
If they were not cancelled the question of "out of range" would have quickly stopped to exist. Same for line noise and line-to-line interference (the usual problem with DSL).
Just comes to show that some cost cutting exercices during the dot-com burst have been outright stupid...
Anyway, back to the 802.11 topic. Once sanity is back and some startup (or the classic switch vendors) starts putting these out the 802.11 broadband will be as dead in the water as wireless local loop. It is not something that can be used to beat the telcos at their own game. It is a great office network, hotspot filler, neighbourhood network but broadband it aint.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
It's too bad even a publically owned non-profit organization is going to end up like the government. Very few consumers/citizens will get involved. If the organization's main goal is to maintain the infrastructure, then it will just stagnate. With no true competition, there is no motivation. If you've ever done executive or director-level charity work, you'd know that the decision making process is slow as molassas. Often incompetant people are put in places of authority whom usually just get in the way of the productive persons and cause general grief for the organization.
Also, I'd disagree with you on the point that "two isn't enough for competition." Two is quite enough, as evidenced by the technological advances cable companies have made now that they are threatened by DirecTV. Currently I have hundreds of high-quality digital channels streaming into my household over the cable infrastructure. I'm sure we'd still be watching 40 channels of analog television if it wasn't for the competition.
<Amanda`> I just went out to the parking lot in my bathrobe to exchange warez CDs.
Two comments have been made in this discussion that warrant reply. The first is that 802.11 cannot be used because of signal problems. Nonsense. Those who read the article would realize that you're going to use antennae that focus the signal (i.e., use hyperbolic dishes). This lessens noise and increases signal strength. For those in the Bay Area, a great example of this can be found in The Exploratorium, where two people can sit *inside* a pair of hyperbolic dishes about 40 ft away from each other and hear each others' whispers.
In addition, this nonsense about being afraid of wireless access to the Internet due to security is *silly*. You're connecting to the Internet. What sort of security do you expect on a normal *wire*? Want real security? Use IPsec, TLS, or ssh.
Remember, here in America we have our own troubles with last mile access, the cost of getting into COs and all that fun. This is a good alternative in other countries where access is even more impeded.
I believe your parent post said 400 meters _out of range_, which by your suggestion would make about 9,4km...
True, legally enforced government monopolies are bad... But private monopolies are worse.
.de is pretty much what you'd expect: The ex-monopolist pretty much owns the market, and you can switch to a competitor only if you're in a big (and therefore profitable) city.
Take a look at what happened in Germany, for example:
The government-enforced monopoly on telecommunications was dropped, and all the hardware (including cables) was given to the ex-monopolist.
Potential competitors must use the ex-monopolist's lines for virtually everything, and even if they have a couple of exchanges by themselves, they have to route the last line through the ex-monopolist's network, at a price mostly dictated by the ex-monopolist (and it's slightly higher than what they charge their direct customers; the EU has recently filed a suit against them because of this, but because of the "whoever has the cash owns the courts" rule which seems to be prevalent almost everywhere these days (Microsoft trial, anyone?), I don't expect much to come out of it.
The current situation in
If you're in a rural area, your only choice is still (and will remain for quite a while) the ex-monopolist, and they're much more evil than in their government times.
Privatization is the right thing to do only if you do it right (such as not giving the ex-monopolist an unfair advantage), which AFAIK hasn't happened anywhere.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Then you've never been to Europe lately? Here, we have a decent GSM-network that almost never fails
GSM has an intrinsic part of its design to ramp down the power that the phones transmit at when the signals are strong. It was always designed to work in a crowded network. After all, it has a 35 Km range in its design, yet a cell in the centre of a city would theoretically cover most of even a large town.
This was one of the biggest problems with older analogue networks - they always transmitted at full power and had trouble with crowding out in densely populated areas.
As a bonus, your phone's batteries last alot longer in a city than in the country on a GSM network (but not on analog phone).
Yours,
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Dude, you read an article about sniffers? Wow, can I touch you? Yes, this is a flame because I'm sick of hearing such bullshit.
Here's ignorance taken to a new degree. I once heard a story about the whole internet being insecure, a place where all sorts of "hackers" could break into all sorts of machines. They even were able to phreak the phone system. And this new fangled email? Thanks to poor implemetaion, I'm told that the very internet itsel was shaken (routers destabilized) by a silly VB script. Can you believe it? Who would use such an insecure media? I'm sure glad no one ever persued those crazy things!
Want security? You can start by tossing out your M$ crap. You might then consider the virtues of encryption routines, such as provided by OpenBSD and used everwhere people have sense. If you really really don't want anyone to see something, don't write it down. In the long run, it would be adventageous to get governments to extend mail fraud and tampering laws to electronic formats. Remember those things that protect your precious documents from those bold enough to rip open an envelope?
Run along and play in traffic now.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
This is simply false. Legally enforced government monopolies have zero incentive to compete.
Hhhmmm... Many Americans (at least on Slashdot) seem to think that anything that is government controlled must be crappy. It may be the case that government provided services in the USA are rubbish, and that your local governments are no good, but that doesn't mean that it is the case everywhere in the world.
Many countries in Europe have extremely efficient state controlled services. Now I know this is going to set some of you rabid freemarketeers into flame mode, but it is simply true - Europe has many examples of efficient, high quality state run services.
Under the influence of Margret Thatcher and Ronald Regan, the UK decided to try to adopt the US model of having everything privitized. Now they have some of the worst and most expensive public transport and health services in Europe. As a result of this, the UK government has recently increased taxes (shock! horror!), with general public consent (no! it can't be true!).
All I'm saying is this - free markets and competition does not guarantee quality and low price, and government controlled does not necessarily mean high prices and poor service. The sensible solution is to have free market competition and public funded services, and use the most appropriate one for the situation.
I can't comment on Australia directly but I wouldn't be surprised if, like in the UK, broadcast satellite TV had a greater share than cable. Here we have about 2m cable subscribers and 6m satellite subscribers. Cell phones in the UK are huge - the largest of our four networks has 11m subscribers - the other 3 have similar numbers - this compares very well to the number of single line land line installations.
I think that the problem with most of these ideas for least mile (or 7km) technologies come down to marketting more than the customer's reluctance to try them - they simply don't have enough information to make an informed choice.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
An amazing organisation. Depsite the vagaries of public funding it is a network of insitutions with a proud history of discovery and invention.
:-P
The specific research in question here is to determine the feasibility of the idea and to answer (with facts rather than BS we have seen here) the question of whether the wireless technology is viable. And despite the erudite position of some of the "interesting" slashdotter's, I'll take CSIRO's results before their opinions any day
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
I use a wireless net in my house because I like to be able to move around with my laptop. My experience has been this: even with just me on the net, low ping times and fast transfers are only attainable by wire. Sure, wireless is great for browsing and other misc. taks, but if you get somebody that games, don't expect it to happen. Also not good for too much past entry-level DSL. If you're a wireless ISP, cool - there's a place for that. But I'd shudder to see everybody trying to make this a standard last mile...
SIG: HUP
Cable is trivial. A pci cable modem and some good drivers will go a long way.
DSL loops, T1 loops. Your talking specialized hardware that costs more then the adverage car. Somebody once told me that a T-Bird (T1...T3 packet sniffer) cost 40 grand. I have no idea how much DSL coperable hardware would cost.... and even if such a thing exists. A T-bird can most likely sniff dsl anyway.
Most make the mistake of wanting ADSL, which your at like a 4km limit on cable lenth with it. With SDSL, it can go 9.8Km if memory serves. Thats something like 4.something miles. Ofcorse, at 9.8Km, you only get something like 144kbps, but that is decent....
Exactly, GSM is *great* in Europe. Most of the new (mid level or higher) phones comming out onto the market have GPRS - so telcos charge for traffic (about $1.50 US/MB right now) instead of connect time. I have friends who sit online, chit chatting on IRC and IMs 5 days a week, who pay $10-15 for all that connect time. It's not 801.22b speed (more like 56.7) but still, it's a lot better than paying per minute.
I think it's UTMS (next-gen protocol - post GSM/DCS) that will start getting speeds of over 500kbps from a standard phone.
I've yet to see a hardware AP that does SSH tunneling between nodes. I've yet to see any implimentation of any other encryption over a link. With the recent insecurity of the encrytion in 802.11b wouldn't it be a good idea for manufacturers to use alternate encryption in their products and still support the old encryption?
Wrong - at least in the case of Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS, the system still in use in the USA). In AMPS, a phone is commanded by the cell site to adjust its power as needed to maintain the connection to the cell site. In fact, you have to do this for almost any radio system with multiple transmitters (more on this later).
The problem was the granularity of the control and the rate of control - in AMPS the phone only had a very small number of power steps (like about 5) and was only commanded to change on the order of once every few seconds - in GSM, the power is adjusted much more finely (like many tens of steps) and much more quickly, and in CDMA the power is adjusted hundreds of times a second, and over hundreds of levels.
You have to do this for any system with multiple transmitters, otherwise the more powerful signals will dominate the receiver at the cell tower, and the weaker signals will be lost in the IF noise (the technical term for this is "desense"). It's bad enough with Frequency Domain Multiple Access systems like AMPS, where each conversation is on a different frequency, but it gets worse on Time Domain Multiple Access systems like GSM (because the receiver has to react in microseconds to the different power levels of each signal), and it will KILL Code Domain Multiple Access systems (where a strong signal will wipe out all the other signals - no amount of code gain will pull them out from that far under the noise floor).
Besides - I've been to the UK, and I've watched people cuss at their GSM phones as they drop calls. The double-edged (no pun intended (inside joke for folks in the cellular industry)) sword is the fact that GSM digitizes and compresses the voice, unlike AMPS - when the signal is weak, GSM will error-correct and continue with little degredation until the bit error rate exceeds the forward error correction capability, then BAM! you drop the call. In AMPS, you will hear the signal to noise ratio increase (the static in the background), and you will have an idea that you are losing the signal before you get dropped.
www.eFax.com are spammers
... we walked 5,280 feet to school! Without any shoes! In the snow! Took over 5 boxes of 1000ft Cat5 to lay a cable so we could find our way home again! And we STILL came up a football field short of the front door! But we LIKED IT!
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
What if the current 56kbps modem links up to the 1M cable links are sufficient for most people's networking needs?
Its not the speed that will drag people away from 56K modems. The speed of ADSL, Cable, 802.11b, microwave wireless, etc is nice.
But constant connection is more important. There are uses for constant connections to the internet that do not require much bandwidth at all - eMail, control systems (eg., lighting, traffic signals), being able to serve data (like some file on your computer at home) plus the joy of always having the web available.
I think that alot of people on 56K dialup would be more happy for a 33K permanent connection if they had a static IP address to go with it.
A further (non speed) reason why 56 K connections will probably be replaced - lag. For any gamer, its the lag that kills even more than the lack of bandwidth. Modern modems add 100ms or so to a ping time, and fancy compression algorithms increase throughput AND lag simultaneously. Most other technologies (except satellite) don't.
In short, 56K modems are a stopgap data over voice solution that was cheap to deploy with the existing network structure. It is in no way likely to hold out against these other technologies. Even if the fixed connection stuff doesn't take off in a country, GPRS will do (even in the third world).
My 2c worth. Actually I've posted about 4 times this thread, must be my 8c worth.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Somebody once told me that a T-Bird (T1...T3 packet sniffer) cost 40 grand.
Yeah, and a PC used to cost $4G, too.
Dallas Semiconductor makes E1/T1 framer ICs which you could interface to a Motorola 68k or something nice and fast for peanuts. It's been a while since I went through the Dallas datasheets but I'm certain that you can use them to sniff the data stream with a little extra circuitry to block any transmissions from the third (sniffer) framer. The actual data stream on the wire is very well documented and if you put something like this on a PCI card and modified some Linux WAN drivers I'm sure you could make a sniffer without too much difficulty. Hell it'd be even easier if you modified an existing supported WAN card with an internal DSU, like the LMC 1200.
No matter how you look at it, it'll be hardware mods + software mods, unless the framer can be programmed NOT to emit anything, which I'm not sure is possible. Also DS2/3 sniffers will be a good sight more expensive I'm sure. The loop lengths on those are not very long for copper and there's a lot more critical timing.
Now you could say that this knowledge is specialized and that the design of such a thing could be $40k -- true enough. I happen to have the knowledge and I do contract design work... :-)
However, the services you mentioned in the UK seem to be screwed up whether they are state run or privitized.
Yes, but I think most people agree that they are even more screwed up now than before. Prices to travel by train have certainly increased considerably, with no increase in quailty of service. And the NHM is considerably worse off than it used to be.
If you hit the balance sheet (the only way you can hurt a company), the private model is best. If it's more abstract e.g. private contracters running airport security, then they'll just take the chance that Osama binLaden won't strike again, and if he does then screw it, the company running airline security goes bust and the CEO puts on his resume, "Head of airline security" and gets another higher paid job in 5 minutes. Nobody cares that much about the company they work for, not even the CEO. Federal workers would shut down the airport if they're not sure about something, and would go by the book. Bad for the customer, good for security.
Federal workers go by the book very slowly, private workers just maximise shareholder benefits - and so MUST be IMMEDIATELY massively fined if they screw even 1 customer. Now go choose the most appropriate one for your needs.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
GSM has an intrinsic part of its design to ramp down the power that the phones transmit at when the signals are strong.
So does AMPS. That has been part of cellphone network design from the very outset.
Sorry I was a little quick to post. My previous post is good, but I forgot to add this.
As a bonus, your phone's batteries last alot longer in a city than in the country on a GSM network (but not on analog phone).
The only reason your digital (PCS, GSM) phone's batteries last longer (and stays cooler, too) is because the signal is either on or off, 1 or 0. Analog phones consumed a lot of current in the switch (transistor) and PA because it had to dissipate a lot of power being half-on.
Yes, I know the PA and such still generates an analog signal but you're talking about the difference between night and day; one has to generate two signal states (I'm not certain of the actual encoding method so I'm not positive that there is a carrier), where the other has to accurately produce every possible state between fully off and fully on. I don't believe that PWM is practial at these frequencies.
(spinning offtopic) It's like the old variable frequency drives for AC induction motors; they used to generate beautiful voltage waveforms because they essentially used big op-amps with huge output stages. Unfortunately their efficiency was shitty because the output stage had to dissipate any power not being delivered to the motor. Any design in the past 6 years or so uses IGBTs and PWM to digitally switch full voltage/no voltage to the motor, generating an average waveform that looks like a sinewave. It makes for shitty voltage waveforms and the fast risetimes tend to destroy the first few windings of the motor coils but the power consumption went from kilowatts to watts on the drives themselves since the transistors never had to dissipate much power. Same thing on digital cellphones, except at milliwatt levels. :-)
...as long as a large Milo tin counts as `standard equipment', that is. One end of the link is a Milo tin in Osborne Park, the other end of the link is a half-omni in Lesmurdie. Standard cards. Good old Aussie `we won't know until we try it' technology. No worries. (-:
Mind you, there are people claiming to run DSL along barbed wire fences...
I don't know what the line quality is. I think `working' is good enough at that distance. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"Private investors and consumers create competition."
Consumers? Perhaps. Investors? Heck no. As has been shown repeatedly in recent years, your stock is far more attractive to investors if you work to stifle competition (and screw over the consumer in the process) than by trying to compete on a level playing field. Monopolies aren't a problem unless the monopoly power is abused, and a corporation is practically guaranteed to abuse monopoly power (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) in their effort to attract new investors. Investors would rather corporations force the consumer to spend more money and increase the stock dividend.
However, it has been shown that non-corporate monopolies are workable. The US Postal Service, for instance, has a monopoly in letter delivery (and only letter delivery) in the US. Because they aren't a corporoation, they have no incentive to pad their profits to attract investors, and what money they're allowed to keep (ie. not sucked up by Congress to pay other federal debts) simply gets spent on improving services and offering new ones.
"Private investors and consumers create competition because, unlike taxpayers, they can take their money elsewhere."
Are you serious? Have you looked at what's happened when communications markets get privatized? Corporations, in their quest to pad their profits, have no incentive to compete in areas with a low population density. If the return in their investment isn't quick and large, they simply won't do it. So while there may be competitive markets in cities and their surrounding areas, there is no longer any service (let alone competition in trying to provide that service) once you get 10-15 miles away from the Interstate. Privatization means eliminating any markets that don't have an immediate return on their investments, so they're by definition less competitive.
Again looking at the example of the USPS, it has been shown that quasi-government businesses with monopoly power can offer a truly universal basic level of communications service without draining a single cent from public coffers. Because they have no reliance on outside money (whether you call them "investors" or "taxpayers"), the only people they have to listen to are their customers and potential customers. I can't think of any corporation that asks for as much customer involvement in decisions about such things as pricing and service offerings as much as the USPS.
I'm sorry, but investor-driven markets are just as anti-competitive as state-driven ones. Unless the businesses involved in the privatization are truly private (as opposed to public corporations), there will always be the drive towards a monopoly marketplace and the eventual abuse of that monopoly power.
I don't know about that. My cell phone bill the same price as my regular phone bill today, and I never use my regular phone. My cell phone includes extras on the land line (voice mail, caller id, and others that I don't use). It seems that even though wireless is expensive to get going, the costs are much less than wired for moderate bandwidth. When you need large amounts of bandwidth you need wires, but most of us don't use that much, so wireless is cheaper than running wires.
802.11 probably won't stand up to video, but it is enough for most internet users.
In a nutshell, each time you double the power, the signal strength goes up by 3 db (by definition). An omnidirectional antenna has a typical gain of about 3 DB. (it doesn't radiate in some directions like straight up or down) A 36 DB antenna has 33 DB more strength in it's beam than the typical 3 db whip antenna. That is the same as 11 times more power transmitted. Use a directional high gain antenna to go a long distance in one direction. Use a one at each end for even better results. Many dish antennas have much more than a 36 db gain figure. Your milage may vary.
The truth shall set you free!
Just because a GSM phone transmits digital (encoded, compressed and encrypted) doesn't mean it just pushes ones and zeroes out the antenna! You still need an (analogue) radio part.
Yes, and that is what I tried explaining. You're correct; there is an analog output but your transmitter and its PA can be optimized for sending digitial data as opposed to analog data. If you're only sending binary data you only have a discrete number of output patterns. And since your switch is always fully on or always fully off, you have minimal losses in the switch. Kind of (but not exactly) like how a light switch doesn't (normally) get warm, but a light dimmer does.
Actually, there is something much worse than privatizing a monopoly, keeping it public. I'd prefer I be gouged by a legitimate businessman than a government-protected one.
/always/ good because government control of industries invades our rights to do peaceful business how we see fit. Unless of course you don't /want/ to live in a free society...
And if removing legal barriers to market entry doesn't induce "competition", then that's what we call a "natural monopoly", where economies of scale exist to the point where few, large firms is the efficient market structure.
And on another level, privitization is
Yeah, but think the cost, I mean, only people who have a good amount of cash are going to be sniffing a t1 loop. A 1SSI card from SBE (Formally LMC) costs like 800 bucks with the propritary cable.
No, I know my memory is not failing me, because they use diffrent encodings, at tipicly diffrent frequencies on the line. Go pull up an SDSL modem spec sheet.
The only solution is to have a public infrastructure, and have private companies compete using this public infrastructure.
... I wanted to start running some Free Sites (freenet nodes) in my home and play around with some other server stuff that is difficult to do on my cable modem with its ever changing IP address (and I was greedy for more bandwidth).
... almost everyone I know has dumped Ameritech in favor of one cellular phone service or another, which means all those technically savvy people ... a prime market for Sprint's DSL service if there ever was one ... are disqualified from ever being able to buy their product.
That is exactly right.
I recently tried to acquire Sprint DSL (8 Mbit down, 1 Mbit up) in my home
I've had DSL in my home before (but it was expensive and slow in comparison), so it shouldn't be a problem.
It was.
I do not have a landline phone, having developed a sufficient hatred of our local Telco Monopoly (Ameritech) over the years that I will now only use a cellular service (currently AT&T, but I can change to whatever service I like whenever I like, in contrast to our local monopoly). This wasn't a problem the last time I had DSL installed, but apparently that has changed as the local Telco chokehold on the local loop has tightened.
The bottom line, if I don't buy phone service from the local telco monopoly, I cannot get Sprint DSL service. Period.
Quoting the correspondence I had with Sprint on the matter (for anyone else who is interested):
SPRINT:
I'm sorry I've been trying all day to get someone to tell me why another DSL provider was able to give you service w/o a phone number, but they said we have to have a phone number to service a location. Is there any way you could get a basic phone line just to have a phone number established to have the service installed?
ME:
No, I can't and won't do that. (I already have copper pairs going to my unit, having had DSL here previously.) My dislike for Ameritech is sufficient to avoid doing that, even if it means sticking with a cable modem. These services typicall charge installation fees, require people to take time off work to wait around for them (and then often don't show up when they are scheduled to do so), are expensive, difficult to work with, and then sell your contact information to telemarketers as a final slap in the face. I won't do business with them, period.
SPRINT:
I'm sorry that I was misinformed and told you we'd be able to set up service the way you said your previous provider did. I hope in the future if you ever get a phone line at home you would still consider us for home DSL service. Again I apologize for the miscommunication.
As you can see, despite having the copper already in my unit and having had a DSL service previously (despite never having had a landline telephone in that Unit, ever), it is apparently no longer possible to get DSL service (at least through Sprint) without buying telephone service from the local telco monopoly.
Sprint is losing $160/month on me alone because of either the local telco monopoly or their own incredible denseness, and I'm missing out on a DSL service I would like to have had. I doubt very seriously I am alone
It is past time for the government to break the local telco monopolies and nationalize the last mile of copper (local loop) exactly as you describe. Anything else is going to lead to a communications oligarchy that will stall the telco and broadband industry and likley stagnate the technology indefinitely.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Can 802.11 Become A Viable Last-Mile Alternative?
* Burning1 posts from the new 1.5 megabit per second syncronous 802.11b wirless internet connection he's been beta testing for his local ISP (at no cost...)
Um... I'll get back to you in a year or so, when I've thoroughly tested this thing. ; )
The only reason your digital (PCS, GSM) phone's batteries last longer (and stays cooler, too) is because the signal is either on or off, 1 or 0.
You might be right, but I was very much of the opinion that the phone's transmission power was much more finely controlled in a GSM network. Aside from the obvious reason to do this - If you have a GSM phone pumping out at full power all the time it will take up the time/frequency slot allocated to it in a 35 km (or more) radius. In a densely populated areas that would cause a very hard limit on the number of mobile phones that can ever be used at once.
This is (one of) the reasons for banning mobile phones in aircraft. As your 737 comes in to land, everyone rings up their loved ones to say "I'll be home soon". While you are in the air, you are transmitting over the whole city, pretty much equally, taking out every base tower in that frequency (and with GSM, time) slot.
The other reason I believe that they phones output can be regulated was I lived in a small country town for a while and was the first user of a GSM phone there. The base station was badly set up, leading to multiple dropped calls. One of the temporary fixes that the technicians did was to instruct the phones on that cell to work at full power all the time, and warned me that my battery life would drop. (This trick didn't work, they had to put in a multi-sector transmitter and a few more base stations anyway).
My 2c worth, though probably much of this would apply to using 802.11b to covering highly dense areas.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.