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Cops, Wifi, Treasure Hunts, And More!

Posted by timothy on from the look-ma-no-cat dept.

Rob Flickenger writes "This month's SeattleWireless TV show reveals how the Yakima County Police have built a wireless infrastructure using Cisco Aironet products. Utilizing omni and directional antennas, they cover 650 sq miles with just 8 access points. There is also a segment on the NzWireless group's wireless treasure hunt, where users roamed around the city plotting hidden access points set up for the hunt." Note the bittorrent link.

2 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Details? by Quixote · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Talk about being skimpy on the details. Why did /. accept this story?

    Assuming no overlap between the 8 base stations (i.e., maximal coverage), this works out to each AP having a range of 5 miles. That is a heck of a lot in an urban setting.

    I, for one, welc^H^H^H^H would love to know the technical details behind this.

  2. this is not good by penguin7of9 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    WiFi was never intended to allow people to cover huge areas--there simply isn't the bandwidth allocation for it. It gets even worse when a small number of access points are used to cover a large area. If all police departments started doing this, you'd probably not be able to use WiFi for anything else anymore, or your WiFi nodes would interfere with police operations.

    Let's hope that this will cause the US government to release much larger chunks of spectrum for WiFi-like use, some regulated and some unregulated. And some bands should really be reserved for private use only--no businesses or government entities should be allowed to touch such parts of the spectrum for any purpose.