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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...
Surely you mean "Last 200 feet." At least, that's what it's like in any remotely urban area.
-b
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.
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.
That's very incorrect. Directional antennas won't
help that much from interception and interference. You will still get the signal
out of their projected beacon (which is still several degrees wide, BTW),
but a bit lower. Radio waves don't work the same way
light does, it's like thinking that nobody will hear
you shouting when you go behind a building..
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!
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.
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.
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."
This way companies are supporting the ultimate open-source. If M$ was an open-source corporation /. wouldn't bitch about them so much (as in all internal network traffic and servers open)
Damn you *BSD and *nix people giving companies security, making them closed. Using open source code to make corporations closed. Oh man. You *nix and *BSD people are self-defeating.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
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... :-)
At my previous residence, which was situated in the middle of an Ohio corn field, there was no cable TV. The telco CO was 20 miles away. 802.11b provided an excellent last-mile solution.
Standard equipment all 'round, on my end. Cisco Aironet 350 in the garage, a white plastic Pringles can-looking antenna on the garage, and Cat5 running to the FreeBSD box inside the house.
Real-live, actual, sustained file transfers of 300 kilobytes per second were pretty common between myself and anyone else in the world with good connectivity to att.net. VCDs flowed forth from the ether with astounding ease, while mp3 downloads became nauseating, as one begins realizing that they're downloading hundreds of times more music than they'll ever have time to sort, let alone seriously listen to.
Hard drives, even those of several hundred gigabytes, start feeling pretty small with that sort of bandwidth.
There was no rain fade to speak of. Storms which completely disabled a well-tuned directv system had no effect on the net connection. Having the antenna turn 90 degrees in an intense wind storm did not phase it.
Of course, the antenna arrays on the ISP end were several hundred feet in the air, and I had a clear view of the entire tower (and the small buildings at its base), which was just over 2 miles away.
I'm sure that there are others who were less fortunate. This ISP (comwavz) claims to be able to cover entire counties with a single tower, which (around here) means a radius of perhaps 15 or 20 miles.
Even with the ruler-flat landscape here in the upper-left corner of Ohio, it is difficult to imagine that a wireless link of 15 miles would work very well, with only a quarter-Watt of output power with which to play. OTOH, it's also a little past last mile territory, either, so this last conjecture might be beginning to stray off-topic.
Thus, I'll conclude: The last -2- miles work fine with 802.11. So fine, in fact, that I was happier with it than any other consumer broadband choice I've ever had the pleasure of abusing, from dual-channel ISDN to 1.5Mbps SDSL, and the spattering of ADSL and cable and satellite that rests in between, irrespective of cost.
Kid-proof tablet..