Rural Oregon Leads the Way for Large-Scale WiFi

atkulp writes "While cities and incumbent telecommunications operators are fighting it out over municipal WiFi, it looks like rural Oregan is leading the way for large-scale deployments of WiFi and WiMax." The privately funded $5 million dollar wireless network services a modest 700 square miles and seems to be the only show in town.

Comments

Political bribes are accepted practice nowadays?

[RKBA]

"Similar wireless projects have been stymied in major metropolitan areas by telephone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at discouraging such competition."

Doesn't anyone care that our politicians accept bribes (aka; campaign donations) to pass laws that are against the interest public interest (ie; the people the politicians are supposed to represent)?

CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, Article. II., Section. 4:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Surveillance?

[ChrisGilliard]

"Internet service is only a small part of it. The same wireless system is used for surveillance, for intelligent traffic system, for intelligent transportation, for telemedicine and for distance education," Uhhh, I don't know about this. I don't like the idea of the feds using my internet traffic for "surveillance".

Oregan?

[bladx]

"it looks like rural Oregan is leading the way" let's spell it Oregon

security of WiFi/WiMax (DoS potentials)

[IDkrysez]

From what I've seen, normal Wifi (802.11b and 802.11g) can suffer denial of service fairly easily, even with simply misconfigured clients. I'm not sure if WiMax addresses this, I hope so, but TFA says that the wireless network will cover surveillance presumedly for the chemical depot(s) as well as the shipping yard, and also that various emergency signs can be controlled by WiFi. Assuming they've got these devices and monitoring/control [sub]nets setup securely, it seems that they're still quite vulnerable to a simple denial of service attack. Taking out traffic lights and/or jamming radios is not a new idea to Bad Guys (and Bad Girls), it seems this makes it fairly easy to accomplish criminally-intented DoS with OTS components. I hope there's more to it, possibly a followup article from Wired, which has gotten so damned fufu in recent years.

Yay Oregon!

      -IDkrysez

GOOD!

[Foktip]

My town is in the same situation. I have developed the equation for political drag on wifi:

Dp[wifi] = n/(1/2pU^2A*Re)t^S

where S stands for stupidity factor, and n is the number of telecoms, p ~ politicians, U ~ potential userbase factor, A ~ land area/size, Re ~ Retardation number, and t ~ reasonable time expectation

the Tragedy of the Commons issue...

[Douglas Simmons]

Every time a new large scale public wifi deployment story hits the wires, the topic of preventing abuse while maximizing usability emerges. Maybe it's just my 4:23am weirdness, but I think I'm on to something: Given that all unsuccessfully throttled bandwidth will always get sucked up by people who will inevitably figure out how to procure gigs of entertainment/warez, thereby screwing over people downloading important shit, both, rather all types of data transfering people will be left frustrated. However, as bandwidth improvements continues to enable us one not-to-distant day to transfer real quick-like the highest quality five channel 30 frames per second 1600x1200 pr0n, to use video as an example, bandwidth will eventually surpass what we could possibly need to keep ourselves "busy" and there eventually will be enough public juice to go around without throttling (pingflooding usage being an exception of course).

Yeah this brings us back to Bill Gates quotes paralleling my pr0n res hypothetical to be good enough to suit us (like the 640KB did), but, I mean, c'mon, won't that video quality suffice?

The answer is yes, until the market fully adopts 3D holograph pr0n that will require some more zeros and ones.

I mean, c'mon.

Re:the Tragedy of the Commons issue...

[MacGod]

4:23AM weirdness? Your time stamp says 4:44AM. Did it really take you 21 minutes to write that post? Be honest now, you were "researching" high-res pr0n at the same time, weren't you?

Re:Political bribes are accepted practice nowadays

[douthat]

I happen to have a copy of Black's Law Dictionary here, so I decided to look it up:

Bribe:
Any money, goods, right in action, property, thing of value, or any promise or undertaking to give any, asked, given, or accepted, with a corrupt intent to induce or influence action, vote, or opinion of person in any public or official capacity.

abbreviated, that would be:
Any money given with intent to influence action of a person in any public or official capacity.

Given the legal definition of a bribe, I'd say that any incident where a politician accepts campaign contributions from a lobbyist and changes stance on any particular issue or votes favorably towards the cause of the lobbyist should be suspect.

Politics and big business

[CharliePete]

A couple of yearss back I started looking into using an alternative ISP for my DSL service. After checking into several that had packages that more closely suited my needs I quickly discovered that the rates that the few providers that offered service in my area were 2 - 3 times higher that what I was already paying for with my telco based ISP. It seems that the FCC regulations that required telcos to open their networks to regional ISPs at discounted rates applied to everyone except Verizon. Economic legislation should only be used to encourage competition not stifle it as we see with any legislation promoted by the Bigs (like the DMCA an the idea of software patents). My hat's off to Mr. Ziari and the people of Hermiston, Oregon for getting this set up on their own.

Re:Political bribes are accepted practice nowadays

[vandan]

The only way to address this is to stip all parties of all funding, and then allocate money for campaigning from tax revenue. Then you make the accounts books of all parties open to public inspection, as well as bank account and tax details of all politicians AND their families. If people want to 'serve' the public, then they can start out by being honest. And you know what the politicians always say about such invasions of our privacy ...

Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you don't have anything to worry about

Time they applied this to themselves.

Equal funding of ALL political parties. Equal media access to ALL political parties. People implicated in bribery get charged with treason.

Re:Political bribes are accepted practice nowadays

[kkohlbacher]

>

I think it's more like: "Stop talking politics! What happened on Big Brother last weekend. OMG look what the girl is wearing!? Fat people SHOULD NOT be wearing Abercrombie and Fitch!?!" Wow. (Sorry, OT rant...) (Most) Americans are elusive and close-minded when it comes to politics. We have the big guys patting us on the head saying, "Everything will be ok. Don't think. Don't question. Go about your regular daily routine and everything will be fine." I met a 26 year old last night that said, "The President will pass the law for Christians. He can do anything!" My response: "No, he is not a dictator. Bills must be passed through the H.O.R and the Senate first." Her response: "Who are they!?!?" She could probably tell me Tom Cruise's foot size and what Jennifer Aniston had for breakfast on the second Monday in August though... Anyways, it looks like its starting to hit the fan finally with Rove, DeLay, Brown and all these other morons. About time. I thought the checks and balances system was done for. These people need to be strung up, cause the little guys are always footing the bill. (Now if I could just figure out a way to get high-speed from a non-conglomerate...) BTW, I'm from Dayton, OH--I think it was more like 45 degrees this weekend Alex...!