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Introducing The Wi-Fi-Mobile
tech writer writes "A Twin Cities tech entrepreneur has retrofitted an old TV-station truck to serve as a roving hot spot for Internet access. His technology firm has blanketed the metropolitan area with WiMax transmitters atop local skyscrapers, so all he needs to do is grab bandwidth using the truck's telescoping mast and convert it to Wi-Fi for use in the vehicle's immediate surroundings. The dude happens to be in a band, so his wireless arrangement has been great for streaming outdoor Savage Aural Hotbed performances!"
Assuming the signals are 802.16 and not compatible with 802.11*, you'd have a much wider audience rebroadcasting over something everybody uses.
Plus, I wonder about whether or not he was harvesting information from people hooking up.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
The first things that pop in mind is ruarl schools can have an "Internet Day" when the truck pulls up in front of the school, or possible military operations, extending internet out into the desert or jungle, or high steppe, or wherever they want to go next.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
Precisely.
Basically what this guy is doing is pulling bandwidth from his own company's WiMax (802.16) system, and pumping it out for the peeps 802.11b (Or b-g? or a-b-g? The article didn't say.) stylee with his truck.
Nothing illegal is going on here. This is a dynamite piece of guerilla marketing, though. I wish this guy all the best.
OK, so who's got links to some places online where a guy could actually buy some of this mystical Wi-max gear? A single, strategicly placed, Wi-max base in my town could easily cover ALL OF IT. Yea, pretty small town. What with the lack of DSL coverage, something like this would make a real invenstment opp for some eager geek (me?!).
I find one place "Wi-lan.com" via google - but not only are they not in my country (type accepted???), they've got some marketing channels outside of what I'd prefer to use.
Come on slashdoters - share the 'insight'!
Senior NCO in the fight against entropy. I've seen things, man. Things no one should have to see.....
Airport Express is a wireless repeater, but it says it only works with AirPort APs to extend the network. Is there something similar, perhaps, for non-Apple networks?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
If everything he is using is already FCC ceritfied and he hasn't modified the actual equipment it shouldn't be a problem. Plus since he is working for the ISP he might have access to the propper equipment already. It is really when you go slapping power amps and antennas(or opening up the boxes and removing the shielding to get it into a smaller container) that aren't cerified by the manufacturer for use with that equipment that you might get into trouble. In the sense that they[manufacturer] can say that yes, using this combonation of equipment is still within the allowed part-15 regs.
Odds say that I could take 2 wireless APs set them up to bring the signal in, go via an ethernet cable to the other and rebroadcast it, put it in a big box, and sell it as a unit and not have problems. But I don't know that, it is just a good guess. Or a better way, include instructions to build the contents of this "box" with the 2 APs and set them up to just be in a bridge mode (or one be a DHCP server and the other be a bridge).
I don't know what your floors are made of, but right now I am connected to one of my APs which is on top of a building two buildings away and three floors up. The AP is a Seneao CBS+ Deluxe with an 8dbi omni on it. I have a 200mw Seneao card in my laptop on this end. No problem ever. Customers (I sell bandwith) within a one block radius get a cb3, in bridge mode, inside near their computer and customers up to 1.5 miles away get an outdoor mounted 14dbi rootenna with the same cb3 inside of it. A cb3+ deluxe (the deluxe model works in AP mode also) will run you about $115 from wisp-router.com. If you want more gain, add a six dbi antenna available from hyperlinktech. Because you are trying to push your signal up and not out, I wouldn't recomend using an antenna over 8dbi.
CP
Not me. I'm not wondering about that at all. I think it's fairly safe to say that such folks are in it more for what they can get via sniffing than the $1/hour.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I've been doing this for a while with my cellphone and laptop. I was half of a traveling crew some time back, and the job took us to all sorts of towns that were just big enough to have a Wal-mart but not big enough to have wifi at the motel, nor a local dialin to any big ISPs.
I have the all-you-can-eat data plan on my Nextel, so sharing that connection over wifi meant we could both get online without having to share a laptop or toss the phone back and forth. Nextel's great firewall is horrid (NAT up the wazoo, no UDP, mangles JPEGs on the way in), and the latency makes SSH excruciating, but it's better than nothing.
The amusing bit was watching people associate. I set the SSID to something like "MySlowPhoneBeNice" and figured anyone who finds it deserves it. It's funny being the only WISP in hickville and finding the only wardriver.
As far as I can remember, Nextel's AUP only prohibits reselling service, so I was even in the clear for sharing it with a coworker. (The resulting throughput is its own penalty, I guess.)
I wish like anything that Ricochet was still up, I'd love to have a serious upstream for these antics. I guess WiMax will come someday, but without a unified back-end it'll still be a comedy of overlapping signals and non-roaming. Ugh.