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Wireless Mesh Network Trial in the UK
Huw writes "With cable only in selected areas and ADSL only available within three miles of selected telephone exchanges, residents of the South Wales valleys are pretty much stuck with dial up connections to access the internet. BT may have the answer with a wireless solution according to this article from the BBC. Quite how wireless networking will cope with a hilly area like this remains to be seen, but hopefully we'll soon see broadband available for anyone who wants it." The company home page has some more information about their system.
I haven't had any experiance with wireless at all, so I was hoping that anyone out there who's used this technology could enlighten me.
;) )
I would think (?) that there's got to be some latency with wireless access, but how much is it? Is it as bad as satilite access? Or is it just a little worse than, for instance, a regular cable hookup? (read: can you play quake without getting horrible lag?
Moreover, with all the cable companies limiting the use of cable modem service, and (I'd assume, please correct me if I'm wrong) wireless resources must be a lot more limited, are there large restrictions on what you can do with a wireless connection? For instance, running any sort of servers what-so-ever (I know my cable ISP hates it when I simply have ftpd running to transfer files from another machine). Of course, I doubt you'd run a server off a wireless connection, but, like in my case, sometimes you must, if only for a short period of time.
Anyone who's had experiance, I'd love to have your imput.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Don't confuse this with the 802.11b networks BT are setting up, this is the fixed wireless in the ~15GHz range I believe. Anyway, I have cable... but the mesh I'd really be interested in is a mobile P2P Mesh
All forms of wireless connections are much more prone to manipulation and hax0ring than the good old fashioned fiber connections.
While wireless might be much easier to set up the total cost of ownership might be much higher due to hacking attacks and financial damages caused by the theft of personal information like credit card numbers etc. There are, of course, ways to secure wireless channels but usually administrators which non-academic background and managers without technical skills ignore the problems of open channels and therefore no decent security measures are applied.
It's also questionable if the existing encryption possibilities are strong enough. For some critical data doesn't become uncritical after a long time, therefore introducing new possibilities for a hacker with some decent equipment and enough time (3-4 months) on his hands.
I also wonder if the bad weather conditions in Scottland might render the service useless too. After all, in a decent thounderstorm both optical and radiobased wireless links become pretty useless.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I've been using wireless for broadband for a few months now. In downtown Philadelphia the local cable company is not very serious about taking on new customers. We were told that someone would be there to set us up next week for about 4 months. We offered to pick up a box and install it, but they kept giving us the runaround.
The last time I had DSL the company went out of business a year into my 2 year contract. We also had problems with the local phone company using our DSL wire to string up new phones. (I'll never forget the Covad service guy: "Sir, your DSL line has a dialtone.")
My 802.11 wireless rig is going through a few trees and doesn't seem to mind. Hills are easy, it's called a rooftop mount.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Trial customers in the 80-square-kilometre area will receive movies, music videos and entertainment shows on-demand to their living room.
And just think, Verzion won't even roll out DSL in my area, unless it is to piggyback a more expensive service. (Verizon currently sells us a T1 which enters the building over a DSL line...won't sell us DSL, go figure.)
Communities have done things like this before, but never a phone company to my knowledge. That is where the news is with this.
Maybe the US telecom's could learn a lesson from the Brits.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
UK approval of 802.11a was delayed by the fact that military and satellite networks also use spectrum in the 5GHz range.
Intel's agreement with the UK regulator, the Radiocommunications Agency, sidesteps this problem by limiting users to undisputed parts of the 5GHz spectrum. (A similar agreement will allow users in the Netherlands to buy systems there too.)
Because of this limitation, UK users will have a maximum of four 802.11a access points in a given area, while the fully licensed product allows users in the US to have up to eight.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2118153,00. html
The BBC article, however, makes this new system look very restrictive. They spew on and on about "Interactive TV", and video on demand. They then go on to say , "That technology has so far been used by eclectic hobbyist and community groups to exchange information and videos between computers. ... it threatens to make redundant wireless technologies such as the 802.11b standard." This "ecclectic" bunch would be you and me trying to run away from interactive TV and pay by the minute communications charges. I imagine that BT's "community web" will have the same dependency and restrictions on BT as the current BT. Your "redundant" 802.11b http server will be silenced when it interfeers with Girl Power or some other mass produced shit. USA telcom has made my cynical.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Actually the ADSL range from the exchange was increased with the introduction of RADSL which varies the upstream bit rate according to line quality. The limit is now about 5.5km of average copper quality line.
Got the solution. Put the antennas on top of hills.
Can I have my multi-million dollar consulting fee now please?
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
I'm a bit suspicious of "it works great for the beta users". The question is how it will work under load. See the cable modem cap discussion for the issues.
Siting for gigahertz-range services in hilly terrain is tough. For an awful example, drive Topanga Canyon Road in Malibu, CA. It's a winding road in a narrow canyon, heavily used by film industry types who expect cell phones to work. There are little cell sites on phone poles every few hundred feet.
The radiant system uses 28 or 40 ghz point to point radios and they run ATM over that. The main feed to the messh is a 155mb atm link. Each hub has 4 directional antennas so it can talk to 4 other sites. The problems with this is it only goes about 3km (but 1km is more typical) and the hubs were about 7 grand each and I have now idea how much the main feed point would cost.
There are several compaines working optical mesh networks which I think will work as well if not better because they have much longer range (when the weather is good you can do a 20km hop but when the weather is bad you do a bunch of 1km hops) and are cheaper.