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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.
what kind of unit is a sq/km?
seriously now...this sounds kind of neat. cellular WiFi in a sense.
i wonder what kind of interference it would cause to other devices on the same frequency (other WiFI devices not associated with their network, cordless phones, etc).
and wouldn't this make drive by hacking easier? heck, you don't even need to drive by.
I wonder how bandwidth changes with distance from the transmitters.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
It tells how many nerds ('squares', daddy-O!) there are in an area. AOL=1 'square' per kilometer. Slashdot=10000 'squares' per kilometer.
sq/km is a metric measure of old-fashioned adults per unit of area.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
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.
You need Pringles cans!
Get 9 cans. Set up 8 of 'em together at 45-degree angles, so they form a "wireless hub". Connect them all together and you can communicate in a 5-mile radius of your location. Now just find someone within that range who can get high-speed Internet access, and use the 9th Pringles can to connect to them.
Then you could offer wireless access to others through your "hub", and all chip in for the cost of the service.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
..he just LOVES shared medium.
1)Today, Wifi Zealot wants to test his new ultra wide wifi 2
2)Wifi Zealot heads for his local $tarbuck$
3)Unfortunately, the connection has to be shared with 120 Mac Biggots, 120 Linux Zealots and 200 fat MSCE neighbours
4)Linux Zealot explains WiFi Zealot that after all 75bPs is pretty 7331 and just enough for surfing gopher.
--
moderators : Linux Zealot is a linux zealot who appears frequently on adequacy
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.
This is good news. I have really been missing the BBS times! Now that these wireless unlicensed spectrum miracles keep pouring in, we wil soon be in the position to have enough users to drop down the bandwidth to effectively emulate the Hayes Micromodem 100. Excellent!
It's more of a circle, with a sort of flange on one end and a type of, well, thing on the other... with a cut out in the middle in the shape of a gazelle.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Why is this even news? Wireless internet access that you have to pay for? Hasn't that been around for a while. There's also been free wireless internet access in other cities for a while, here's one in NYC http://www.nycwireless.net I haven't gone down there with my laptop and wireless network card yet but I'm sure it's probably very fast. Although you probably can't do anything fun (like share warez) because they would probably block certain ports (or wonder what this one person is using all the bandwidth for.) The NYC Wireless site has links to other places for free wireless internet access also. There's also people who just setup there own wireless internet access for the block or neighborhood. Letting everyone share there connection, for free. I guess it's news because it's going to be 100sq km, but I can drive across Manhatten and stay online the whole time, there are some huge wireless networks available already.
Uhm... WiFi is WAY faster than 3G. I can set up a WiFi extension to my existing network for about $500. Can't do that with 3G (GPRS/GSM what have you).
WEP has security issues, but none that can't be overcome with some creativity (VPN perhaps?).
BTW, WiFi is broadband, 3G is not.
Geez....
PS Nice Troll
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
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)
Nope---old fashioned adults per unit of length.
km is not area; it is length.
km^2 is area.
If you are going to mock a typo, at least get it right.
So does this network support 3 old-fashioned adults per km or require 3 old-fashioned adults per km?
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
http://www.immigration.govt.nz/migration/index.htm l
Score your chance to migrate to New Zealand. If you have IT experience and a degree, you're pretty much in.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Shit. I wish. Do you know what a complete pain in the ass it is to get a hold of a good yo-yo anymore? Yeah, you've got to order them online! I went to 8 different toy stores the other day trying to find a Duncan Freehand 2. Only ONE store had anything resembling a yo-yo, and it was just a vanilla Playmaxx wood axle ProYo. Sigh.
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.
True 3G is broadband, the soup of 2.5G that the US will get is barely broadband. 802.11b is 11Mb/s on a 2.4Ghz carrier. 802.11a is suprisingly(from the name anyways) a newer and faster protocol that achieves 54Mb/s with a 5.2Ghz carrier. 802.11g uses the same encoding as 802.11a but over a 2.4Ghz carrier and also achieves 54Mb/s but has to share the airwaves with 802.11b and everything else in the 2.4Ghz ISM band. All speeds are raw wire speeds and actual throughput will be roughly half to two thirds wire speed in ideal circumstances. At fringe reception distances all protocols will drop speeds to some fraction of the rated speed. Having too many devices on a channel or close together will also cause backoff storms similar to a broadcast storm on unswitched ethernet.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Pretty soon people will be able to set up a CityNet: imagine everybody gathering together on a common IP subnet just like your home LAN except that it's multiple people who show up anonymously by simply setting their IP to within a particular submask.
This has got to be the RIAA absolute worst nightmare. With the Internet if you set up a service that an anonymous person can find and download files from, then so can they and they send you a C&D letter. With multi-user anonymous LANs, not only would they have to have a presense in each city, but even if they do, once they know that IP 198.168.31.331 is trading the whole Metallica collection, they have no way to track you down.
Medium range wireless offers an opportunity to remove, at least locally, the last barrier to a truly free internet : corporate/government regulation of the backbone.
Netstumbler + 802.11b = Internet access in most every location.
I know a rep from a computer company who just came from Boston down to our office in Connecticut to advertise some of his latest line. He always has his Netstumbler w/GPS running on the road, and when someone calls him, he just looks at NetStumbler to see where the nearest access point he has previously passed is, and heads there... the just pulls over, hops on their network, and uses his VPN connection to do the rest. He said the farthest he usually has to travel on the MassPike to find a hotspot is 10 minutes away. Not much along the 395 corridor yet, though.
Granted, these are corporate networks that aren't using WEP, and ethically he SHOULDN'T be getting on their networks.
Now if something like an ISP or maybe a company like this one in New Zealand were offering similar service for mobile users like him, or if the cell companies would quit advertising 3G and actually IMPLEMENT it for mobile users to use with laptops in this area and at a reasonable price (say, all the Internet you can browse for $49.95/month), then there wouldn't be any ethical issues.
legally. It's criminal, completely. Theft of services.
It's not cool, it's sleazy. Especially for a professional.
For those of you old enough, remember when it seemed like every town (even the small ones) had at least one BBS to dial into, and inter-node email through FIDOnet at night (long distance rates being cheaper)? Couldn't something similar to this be done with WiFi? Hear me out:
Imagine if every individual set up a WiFi hub node, with some kind of high-gain omni, and kept it open. This hub is connected to a web server - and NOTHING ELSE. It isn't connected to broadband, or even to the individuals home network (or only through a good firewall). Basically, it is a lone machine.
Others set up similar machines, people in the immediate neighborhood (both fixed and mobile stumblers) could "connect" at leisure, just like the old BBS's - except without needing major numbers of phone lines, etc. Maybe the website on the server could show how to build such a system cheaply, where other nodes are, and where intermediate nodes are needed to bridge gaps in an area. These nodes could then form a more "permanent" mesh.
Ok, perhaps this is what is basically happenning already - but what many of them do is have broadband connections that aren't legally allowed to share. I guess what I am aiming for is more of a return to the grassroots local scene, and perhaps certain nodes could be "volunteers" to "FIDOnet" (just the term - not actual protocols, of course) packages of emails, etc, across the internet via broadband/etc connections in bursts, to other nodes that could disseminate the contents of the package. IE, make it as legal as possible - but still "open/free"?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
We have running water too.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
shouldn't it be 802.11 UBER network?
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
They've updated their APs to software that tries to find an open channel now, there was a post on BAWUG about it recently.
('they' being Starbucks or more specifically the provider of their service which is now T-Mobile)
Heh, the editors have fixed the "3 sq/km," but as of this post, it still says, "100 sq/km coming soon."
My dear Mr. L00zer,
3G is low speed and it doesn't exist everywhere, nor will it be ubiquitous. There are a few popular places where companies are trying to roll it out, but the overall cost is somewhere north of $100 billion to get major cities hooked up.
3G is microcell based, meaning that you have relatively high power transmission compared with Wi-Fi, but large enough cells that you have a lot of people sharing a very few available channels. Thus when more than a handful of people are using 3G data services, the 100 Kbps or 300 Kbps or whatever they claim today as a maximum is split down into 3K chunks.
With Wi-Fi, because it's picocell, tiny itty bitty cells, you can typically increase density (and the equipment's cheaper and requires fewer towers or other spots to make work) and keep overall bandwidth closer to the 4 Mbps that most devices throughput.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
It's very rare to see a Slashdot post about an event far away without hearing from an on-site participant. The press release went out about this new service down in Kiwi-ville, and some of the specs they describe seem, well, a little difficult to swallow as they exceed some of the physics and technology that major manufacturers are employing.
Any Kiwis read Slashdot and can confirm coverage? Or is this Slashdot-by-press-release?
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
I am busting my butt trying to get people in Houston interested in something like this. Except, of course, that the ninth can doesn't point to an internet access point, but to another hub. And maybe the same for the tenth and eleventh cans too.
funny munging
Me and the guys over at the dashpc site would definately have a problem with a law like that. I know of one module (that I use for demos) that features [said content] on the displays. It really goes ever quite well actually...
DISCLAIMER: I'm the car owner (and site maintainer).
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
The square/km is a measure used to figure out how many kilts, one can make out of a length of cloth.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.