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Speakeasy Will Test IEEE 802.16 In Downtown Seattle
An anonymous reader writes "Speakeasy will be testing a WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) network in downtown Seattle. If successful, plans to roll out similar networks in other cities will follow."
Isn't this the kind of thing you'd want to try out first in rural areas? After all, this should be complementing DSL and Cable modems at first, then replace them eventually, not vice versa.
"There are no such things as mutual fantasies. Yours bore us and ours offend you."
- Bill Maher
I don't get it $650 for 3Mbps? Isn't DSL also 3Mbps? What I am missing here? --
Wouldn't you rather say 802.20 phones?
If you use six sectors per cell, that means 360-420 customers per cell, which is quite a bit. If they have more customers they can always turn down the power and use more, smaller cells.
Not with 50km range, it doesn't.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Anonymous access through 802.11 hotspots is already a law-enforcement headache, especially in crowded (sub)urban areas like NYC, Seattle, and No. Virginia. It's too easy to wardrive until you find a nice open access point, do some dirty deeds (dirt cheap!), and be gone within an hour. As long as there are enough of them around to make blanket stakeouts infeasible, there isn't much that law enforcement can do.
The question of whether wide-area 802.16 access can be anonymous/untraceable will be a HUGE deal. And it depends on a lot of factors. Maybe somebody who knows more about the standard can help me sort this out, too...
In order to get anonymous access, you can't have a billing relationship with the ISP. This would require that you hijack a legitimate user's connection, or fool the base station into granting you a session without really being authorized.
1) What kind of security features does the protocol offer? Do they have WPA or something like it, or do they expect encryption and auth to happen at a higher level? Because if traffic isn't strongly protected, I can envision a whole range of piggy-backing tricks to inject traffic into someone else's session, mostly centered around spoofing.
2) What kind of cheap/hackable client equipment will be available? If the user-premises gear is ISP-owned (likely) and expensive (also likely), it's not going to be easy for the geeks to run down to Fry's and start pulling them apart to make them do neat tricks. WiFi has been so hackable and popular for exactly that reason.
3) A side effect of having costly, ISP-owned quipment (#2) may be to affect the speed at which security problems get fixed. In my experience, the expensive, telco-like equipment doesn't get as much maintenance attention from vendors (firmware upgrades) as the cheap, million-run devices that are owned by the end users. But I could be wrong about that--any ideas?
4) Has the working group learned anything from the experiences with 802.11 and its various security issues? Somehow I doubt it, but this might be their big chance to show the world.
If it's free who's paying? City residents who pay taxes?