Slashdot Mirror
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.
As an article poster, I saw that it was gonna get hit pretty hard, so here's a mirror:
http://129.19.75.194/~jakalowiw/warta/
Cheers,
Randal
Free software being used to keep people from getting free bandwidth. How ironic.
How do I make WiFi Cost Effective?
Simple, I use someone else's network.
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Just like with 802.11b you might as well assume the wireless part is insecure and use something like an SSL pipe to actually connect the user to the net.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
"Read on for how we managed to make it work using Free Software: HTML or PDF." I didn't realize that one could route wireless signals with nothing but HTML and PDF standards.
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.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Take a long time to look things over and ask: is the piracy worth the risk? If a few individuals use the service illegally, but you have a solid base of paying users, isn't that better than not entering the market at all and missing out on an opportunity or implementing a costly security feature that could mitigate any profit?
The Political Programmer
I thought we were supposed to make WiFi affordable by using empty Pringles cans and Floppy disks as the antennas rather than shelling out big bucks for custom made ones?
Why slashdot? Why not?
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.
At my school anyone with a wifi card can get onto the network, but it just takes you to a web page where you have to put in a userid and password to access anything else on the network and the internet. They never ask for any information about your computer such as MAC address.
On our side, the actual tower itself is pretty cheap. We started out with a single T1, (we're waiting on our third one to go in next week), $350 install for that, $250 for a used cisco 2501 + dsu/csu, we already had the AP and antenna laying around. And our tower is $200/mo ... so, the physical setup was, in total, maybe $900? CPE is running us right around $150-200, depending on which model is required.
... man. I spend probably 20 hours a week upgrading / tweaking / maintaining. I'm sure that to startup, you could do it all for free with OS stuff, but it would take a lot of work. A *LOT* of work. Especially making everything tie together -- that's the really hard part. So to answer your question ... that's the really, really expensive part.
The OSS backend, though, is what I usually spend my day maintaining. Mail servers, billing, customer management, all that stuff
randal