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802.11b Urban Network - 3 sq km!
wireless junkie writes "NZ Herald has an article
about a 3 sq km wireless network. Roaming, seamless handoff, VoIP, and its only the demonstration network. 100 sq/km coming soon (according to the RoamAD site) MiniStumbler on an iPaq shows a whole heap of signal on and near downtown Queen Street. All I want for Christmas..."
All I want for Christmas...
... is a wireless network with absolutely no security so people can walk within a 3km diameter space and just hack in on a whim?
I wish you programming fucknuts figure out how to use units... we've lost a lot of expensive space equipment because dumb software engineers.
km^2 (square kilometers) != sq/km (square/kilometer)
And if only the slashdot editors would... shit, i'm preaching to the choir, aren't I.
I'm wondering if a public networking system is really worth the risk. By offering a public service, you simple open so many problems caused by unadept users, malicous users, and abuse. Broadband is an excellent tool to be used, however the nightmare of getting everyone hooked up correctly, not to mention managing to keep those users connected must be a nightmare.
By offering it as a wide user base, it allows a malicous user to have a network of people to choose from. Due to the general publics disregard of security, updates and firewalls, this make them sitting ducks to becoming pawns for a Denial of service attack. How long would it be before hackers have a huge network of computers to do their bidding, by simply making a few stokes of the pen on his PDA?
My ignorance is a perfect shield against your logic.
Recently I investigated GPRS availability where I live.
I can switch to a GSM network (Rogers/AT&T is rolling out GSM as we speak) and get 53kbps of always-on internet. Not fantastic, but not bad.
Unfortunatly they charge per Kilobyte. Yes. You heard me, Per Kilobyte. Even a few cents per K it adds up quick and becomes pointless.
Ok, so check out another provider. Ok, GSM/GPRS service as well. Always on, blah blah, $50/month unlimited. Ok, good deal. fine print: for 12 months. After that, who knows? They revert to their regular rates(?), which aren't any better than Roger/AT&T.
Ok, so how about CDCP? Hmm, about $50/month but it's 19200 Maximum. They add compression, but that won't solve the whole speed issue. And of course, only works with appriopriate modem, dead end technology, etc.
No wonder these companies can't recover costs... nobody will pay the rates they want.
To all you morons complaining (in almost every thread currently) that sq/km is not a measurement of area, you're right.
The problem is (and i've seen 4 of these already) that you're defining it as a count of something per unit of area.
A km is NOT a unit of area measurement, it is a unit of linear measurement... Single mono-dimensional geometry here people. I know you USians have trouble with the metric system, but c'mon... not being able to tell the difference between a square kilometre and a kilometre is like not being able to tell the difference between an mile and a sqaure mile.
Quit complaining when you can't even get it right...
PS. I may have spelled kilometre wrong, depending on which spelling of the word you use (i.e. kilometer)
I dislike the fact that this seems to be little more than advertising promo echoed by slashdot. I have no interest in deploying a proprietary extension to 802.11b when folks like NoCat.net, nyc wireless, personal telco, and so on are all trying to provide wide area access within the 802.11b published standard. I'd think the Ciscos and Linksyses of the world would be more interested in solving the multihop networking problems within the 802.11b standard and open the results up for others to use, so that they can sell more radios.
In my opinion, any company that sells a proprietary extension to a standard will most likely fail, esp. when the standard is free (free spectrum, free implementations, just buy the radio). After all, there are plenty of better, proprietary networking standards, but we all use TCP/IP.