Community Networking Made Easy

Rob Flickenger writes "I for one am sick and tired of all of the work it takes to build out wireless community networks. Evidently, so was the Linksys Community Network: a Real Network project for the masses. It's about time somebody did something to bring Wi-Fi to the People."

Comments

Re:a good thing

[toast0]

since this story is crap anyhow, i just wanted to point out that i enjoyed your .sig

This is too stupid for words

[puzzled]

Looks like they've daisy chained three Linksys amplifiers in series to boost their power. These guys obviously know dick(a technical term) about wireless.

Amplifiers accept a certain input power level, probably 30mw (+15dBm) in the case of Linksys gear, and they output a certain power level, likely 100mw (+20dBm). If you over drive the amp, you don't get any more out of it, you just shorten its life dramatically.

On the return path side those devices usually have a low noise amplifier(LNA). Put three LNAs in series and you're going to pump up the background noise to the point where the AP sees a noise floor just as high as the signal. Typically the noise floor in an urban environment is around -90dBm and a good useable signal would be around -70dBm. Three times boosting both noise and signal by +10dB via an LNA and you get ... useless crap.

I net these fellows have also 'hacked' their AP to put out 100mw - take a look around on the net and you'll find that you *do* get 100mw out of a hacker AP - 31mw in the channel you wanted, and 69mw of crap spattered all over 2300 - 2500 MHz.

Linksys is a cheap, wireless LAN product. Wireless LAN was meant to be deployed indoors and that goes double for this stuff.

If you must run 802.11b as an access product, stick with quality amps from YDI, Teletronics, or RFLinx, and use decent radios - Cisco or Lucent being the most common.

The FCC is gonna bitch slap the entire unlicensed wireless internet business over the behavior of a few clue free dorks with shiny new BestBuy credit cards.

God save us all ...