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Austin Becoming Wi-Fi Hot Spot
Omega1045 writes "The Austin Chronicle is running an interesting article on how Austin is fast becoming the Wi-Fi Capital of the Free (as in beer) Wireless World. With the industry standardization board Wi-Fi Alliance moving to Austin earlier this year, and groups like Austin Free-Net helping local businesses, the article quotes Austin has having more hotspots 'than anywhere else on the planet'. While this article does quite a bit of bragging about Austin, it also does a great job of highlighting how businesses and local non-profits can work together to promote and profit from free Wi-Fi Internet access. This provides an excellent model for other cities to follow using tools like Less Network."
The abundant Wi-Fi saturation in the area is actually causing interference between access points. The over-propagation in the area is incredible.
Props to GNAA!
http://www.wirelessleiden.nl/english/ is well in the lead with over 50 nodes (not just hotspots) on churches, schools, offices and other tall buildings :-) And all open source to boot (fetch yours at http://wleiden.webweaving.org:8080/svn/node-config ) or persue the configuration http://www.wleiden.net/cgi-bin/g_list.pl and actual status: http://uuu.wirelessleiden.nl/nodemap.jpg.
Dw.
What you're saying might be true for towns say, Bryan College Station in Texas, where Texas A&M is located.
That may have been closer to true 15 years ago, but not now. With the huge expansion of Austin during the dot com years, the UT Campus doesn't make up anywhere near 90% of the city. Heck, it didn't make up 50% 15 years ago. Have you been to Austin, and if so, did you make it out of downtown?
The "Northern Coridor" up highways US 183 and IH 35 are where many of the tech companies are located (IBM, Motorola, Dell), and where many of the techies live. It is hard not to find a coffee shop in the this area that doesn't have wi-fi, at least from my experience. And I would be willing to bet most of those campuses are WiFi.
In closing, RTFA.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Portland's Personal Telco Project has well over 100 free hotspots throughout the city. Austin Free Net has 36 (based on their listing of hotspots which have libraries listed from 1-22 and other places as A-O). The city of Portland is also working, in cooperation with the local university, the city government, and various megacorps (such as Intel) to blanket the entire city with free WiFi (see Free For All).
But, it doesn't matter much who wins. What's great is that independent groups are popping up all across the country (and presumably, the planet). I know that Portland, Boston, and Austin all have growing free WiFi organizations, and I'm sure there are others.
Do you know how nice it is to take your iBook, Vaio, whatever, down to the local park and have free high-speed WiFi access? Thanks to these people (and others!), some day you will.
Let me tell you, it's nice. It's the sort of thing you'd expect from the 21st century.
802.11 B isn't the way to go anymore either. Move on over to 802.11 g and experience faster data transfer. The basics are that you have to know what kind of monster you are trying to attack here. What kind of building do you live in? Do you have copper pipes? What about plaster walls? Do you have a microwave oven and a keg-a-rator next to where you are going to be surfing the web? If so, you need to step you the transmission a little. Do some googling on boosting your signal.
I don't want to flame you, but you can't kill a technology that has tons of potiential and may alter the future only because you have had some bad experiences. For all you know, it could have been that 2.4 ghz cordless phone you bought at Best Buy that killed your connection. Or maybe you may leave in a nuclear fall out bunker. I bet a Wi-Fi WAP wouldn't transmit 10 ft in one of those.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Additionally, and as someone else has pointed out before, UT Austin does not make up 90% of the city. Austin, TX has almost a quarter of a million square miles, according to this site, whereas UT Austin only has 0.5 square miles associated with it, according to this site (you can do the unit conversion from acres to square miles yourself).
If the princetonreview.com figure and the conversion by http://www.onlineconversion.com/area.htm are correct, UT Austin does only have ~.56 square miles (357 acres). Have you been there? Most (nearly all?) of the buildings have basements, some as many as 4 floors down, and there's many, many levels above ground in nearly all of the buildings. UT Austin is not designed like Texas Tech; it's designed to take up a small amount of space. It started as a mere 40 acres, just north of Austin, and has been enveloped by the city. Only a portion of the students live on campus.
I get about 4 and a half hours of real use time out of the battery in my Dell Latitude D500. When I get the second battery installed, that should jump to 8 hours. Being able to do a full business day of computing without plugging my laptop into anything, is a nice thing. I hear you on some older laptops though. My last Inspiron got a mere 30 minutes of battery life - one of the reasons for the move.
The ECE dept here at Univ Texas-Austin just opened a newly $1.5 million remodeled lab for the Wireless Networking & Communications Group. Austin is moving up the ladder in WiFi. Here's the WNCG webpage: WNCG.
For those of you interested in wardriving or what's out there, here's a look at Austin Texas from a wardriver's point of view.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Light rail would be a $1 billion waste. The majority of the people live in the many widespread suburbs and happen to work well away from the proposed train stations.
Not many people are going to walk the 15 or 20 minutes from the train station to work in 100 degree heat in the summer. The idea of light rail is nice, but our cities are just not laid out for it. Plus, Americans in most cities are too lazy to walk any amount of distance at all (i.e. people get mad if they have to park on the far side of the Wal-Mart parking lot).