Slashdot Mirror
New York To Get Free Wi-Fi Network Via Livery Cabs
AndyAndyAndyAndy writes "NYC may finally have a viable plan for free, ad-supported public Wi-Fi service. A company named LimoRes Car & Limo plans to roll out 1,000 cars with transmitters by the fall, and 20,000 by 2011, providing in-car Wi-Fi and externally with a radius of 200 feet. Each car will be able to support up to 16 separate connections. It may be a long shot to say this will provide complete coverage in Manhattan, but if each cab company in New York got onboard... although the brief article notes that the tougher regulation environment for taxicabs means that Wi-Fi won't be coming to Yellow Cabs any time soon."
Now, you don't only have to worry about what your neighbors are doing on their wifi. A traffic jam full of taxis in front of your apartment will totally screw your wifi.
Over-wifi. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
You's seen it at Apple and Android announcements. They wifi is to crowded and somebody has to find an ethernet cable.
Are all these wifi connexions safe for the drivers health when most of the cars equiped with these wifi boosters are parked in the same place?
I am not sure that I understand, isn't it possible to have a huge wireless mesh of L3 roaming AP's? If you had enough of them in one area can't you just jump from between them without dropping your connection at all? If every single car had this, it would make the VoIP cellular phone that switches between free public wifi and the cell carriers towers a viable possibility in bigger cities at least.
They could do a WDS and have all the access points use the same name.
I still see huge problems with this. If you have one car per block, and they are stationary, the mesh idea is pretty good. When I've been in New York, that's not what I've ever seen. I wouldn't worry too much about a lack of signal. I'd worry a lot about too many towers in the same place on the same or neighboring frequencies. I'm sure quite a few of us have encountered what happens when you have too many access points on the same channel too close together. Apartment complexes are great for it. I've had it happen where there were too many small homes close together.
What's going to happen when you have a view like above. There aren't enough channels to segregate everyone off to somewhere different. The cars can't constantly be changing channels. There's no way to manage the cars to keep the different channels apart. If it's a mesh network, you're also going to find saturation on various cars, as the signal is bounced around between relay points. I am curious to what they expect the uplinks to be. To provide Internet service, they'll have to (oh my gosh) have a connection to the Internet.
I can think of a few solutions, but none are standard WiFi. They'd be looking at resolving the problems that cell phone providers have already done, except they're expecting to have their towers moving constantly too.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.