Lanlink Linking The Coasts

Dan Bricker writes "A guy in Parma Heights, Ohio has a website to promote an idea of linking the east coast to the west coast using standard off-the-shelf 802.11 equipment. He is aiming for a July 4th, 2006 first coast-to-coast ping. This project appears to be totally volunteer based, With no other stated reason than fun with pringle cans and bad weather, and do it just to do it. Can this be done? What real world applications does this have?"

Comments

Any Gen Xers out there?

[gmhowell]

Haaaannnndddssss Across A-mer-i-ca. I leave the kazaa links as an excercise for the reader.

Remember aiming laser-pointers at the moon?

[rdmiller3]

This "coast-to-coast 802.11" idea is just another proof that far too few people know how to do a quick mental exercise called, "reality check".

Remember the time when someone was trying to get everybody to point their laser pointers at the moon at a certain time on a certain night, hoping to light up the moon? A "reality check" turns up the fact that they wouldn't even make it through the atmosphere, diffused like headlights in fog.

Even so with this 802.11 idea.

802.11 can be stretched only so far. Let's be really generous and give it 10km. That means that quite a few volunteers would have to be willing to buy or build autonomous nodes to stretch across the more desolate areas... and likely they'd have to haul them into hazardous positions on their own backs to get maximum range (across mountains, for example). That equipment will have to be left in place for extended periods of time, without service... so that'd require solar or wind power too. How 'bout standing up to the weather? Most off-the-shelf equipment wouldn't take the extremes of hot and cold.

Now how likely does this project sound?