A Solution For Making WiFi Cost Effective

rkohutek writes "This whitepaper came out of my employer's desire to deploy high speed wireless internet to an underserved, mostly rural area. Although very easy to do on the ground level, I found it to not be a cake walk when it came to actually making it a viable network case -- in a "normally" deployed wireless network it is very easy to spoof an IP or MAC address and hop on the network and get free bandwidth. This is not acceptable and the acronym WARTA, Wireless Authentication, Routing, Traffic control, Accounting was thought up to cover the things that we needed to do. Read on for how we managed to make it work using Free Software: HTML or PDF." Update: 06/07 20:42 GMT by T : He sends along word of this mirror as well.

Comments

Dear God!

[PurpleFloyd]

Looks like someone finally found a use for PPPoE! I've wanted that damned protocol to die for quite a while, but I can see it being useful in this situation. DSL, on the other hand, is where it deserves to die a painful death, along with whatever suits decided that "emulating the dial-up experience" is better than an always-on connection.

Re:Dear God!

[jjeffries]

Indeed, I use PPPoE to authenticate the folks around my hood that I let use my connection. WEP slows things down too much and isn't much in the way on encryption anyway, and with SSH tunnels I was getting about 10k/sec through the wireless--my gateway router is a P100, perfect for routing but a little slow with the number crunching.

You'll need to be careful with machines conencting from behind a PPPoE link and force an MTU lower than 1500--I use 1412 and that seems to work. If you can ping and do other things with small packets, but web pages don't load, or load a little bit and then stall, that's a sign of an MTU problem.

PPPoE also makes shared-equipment DSL service a possibility, for better or worse (probably worse, coming from someone who works for an ISP that owns their own DSLAMs)...

Re:Dear God!

[Junkster Julian]

Looks like someone finally found a use for PPPoE! I've wanted that damned protocol to die for quite a while, but I can see it being useful in this situation. DSL, on the other hand, is where it deserves to die a painful death, along with whatever suits decided that "emulating the dial-up experience" is better than an always-on connection.

This might be the only chance I get to remind everyone that v.92 is probably the most undersold networking standard any of us have seen in years.

The v.92 standard (not to be confused with the simple v.90 standard) was released by Conexant (formerly Rockwell International Corporation, the dudes who helped pioneer MODEMs together with folks like USRobotics, Hayes, etc.) can interpret call-waiting signals and issue "modem-on-hold" command(s) to the remote modem.

This new feature is "pretty darn" useful as it re-establishes POTS as a viable networking channel as users will no longer feel like they are being forced to choose between: a) receiving telephone calls, b) being connected to the Internet, c) ordering, installing, rewiring, securing, and budgeting an additional POTS line, or d) subscribing to "overkill-type" high-speed services just to send someone an email.

Due to the sheer demographic penetration of POTS versus other newer high-speed and wireless technologies, ISPs might want to consider upgrading their modem pools to support the new standard (and market support for the new standard as the no-more-busy-signals-ever-again (and-we-mean-it-this-time) godsend it, well, is!). 'Nuf said.

Greets.

Re:I wouldn't worry

[rice_web]

Granted, I realize that the software was free, but what about maintenance and updates..... it is still a costly measure. I, for example, do not expect a virus-protection program to keep intruders out (I'd have to be naive), and this program certainly can't be foul-proof.

McDonalds and Starbucks

[Glonoinha]

Umm Starbucks seems to be able to lock down its Wifi, and McDonalds seems to be able to lock down their wireless connection (get a free two hour connection with a Happy Meal, or something like that) ...

Here is a thought, stop at Starbucks, buy a hideously overpriced ice-coffee or something, let the caffeine stimulate your brain, and buy an hour or day or however they sell it worth of their 'net access. Whatever they do to keep you from freeloading ... that's what you do to keep folks from freeloading on your network.

Simple. Don't reinvent the wheel, leverage the gazillion dollars Starbucks and McDonalds paid consultants, particularly if they use the same method ... if they both do the same thing it means that two different sets of consultants at $225 an hour were able to convince two massive corporations to go with it.