Given the terrain you describe the most likely wireless solution is something in the 900MHz band - it'll work well through trees & such which is something that can not be said for 2400MHz solutions.
Waverider is the first name that comes to mind, I hear Alvarion has some sort of 900MHz product in the works also.
I'd suggest you go to http://www.isp-lists.com and sign up for the isp-wireless list - plenty of people there will have hands on experience with what you're trying to do - much better source than all of the arm chair quarterbacks that inhabit slashdot.
Looks like they've daisy chained three Linksys amplifiers in series to boost their power. These guys obviously know dick(a technical term) about wireless.
Amplifiers accept a certain input power level, probably 30mw (+15dBm) in the case of Linksys gear, and they output a certain power level, likely 100mw (+20dBm). If you over drive the amp, you don't get any more out of it, you just shorten its life dramatically.
On the return path side those devices usually have a low noise amplifier(LNA). Put three LNAs in series and you're going to pump up the background noise to the point where the AP sees a noise floor just as high as the signal. Typically the noise floor in an urban environment is around -90dBm and a good useable signal would be around -70dBm. Three times boosting both noise and signal by +10dB via an LNA and you get... useless crap.
I net these fellows have also 'hacked' their AP to put out 100mw - take a look around on the net and you'll find that you *do* get 100mw out of a hacker AP - 31mw in the channel you wanted, and 69mw of crap spattered all over 2300 - 2500 MHz.
Linksys is a cheap, wireless LAN product. Wireless LAN was meant to be deployed indoors and that goes double for this stuff.
If you must run 802.11b as an access product, stick with quality amps from YDI, Teletronics, or RFLinx, and use decent radios - Cisco or Lucent being the most common.
The FCC is gonna bitch slap the entire unlicensed wireless internet business over the behavior of a few clue free dorks with shiny new BestBuy credit cards.
It seems to me that a great many/. readers have a cursory knowledge of how TCP/IP works. This is true of almost every other topic and I don't have a generalized solution for ignorance, but in this case a quick read of the first volume of Stevens' excellent TCP/IP Illustrated Series should do the trick.
Reading that book will give you a foundation to understanding how a single endpoint behaves in an IP network. If you want some understanding of the guts of a large scale internetwork I'd suggest the Cisco Press IP Quality of Service book.
There are a great many things near and dear to/. reader's hearts - the god given right to steal music by treating a retail DSL/Cable connection like a dedicated wholesale circuit being the prime example - that are more easily understood after a read of these two books.
If you're impatient you can look at my journal - I've covered some of the issues there.
In the past I've managed peering with UUNet, Teleglobe, Level3, Concentric/XO, Genuity, Sprint, AT&T, and I currently manage a small AS that does provide transit for two peers.
I'm not sure what they're getting at in this article - the ISPs that are small enough to have security problems are generally at the edge of the Tier 1 guys and they're filtered to death - I offer five prefixes to Sprint and that is all they'll accept - the same goes for the AT&T and UUNet connections I manage.
I think the scenario of rogue network announcements could only happen between very large carriers - those who are so large (and disciplined) that they don't route filter between themselves.
The only way to make something like this work is to have a solid L3 encryption system between the remote and the head end - intermediate stations will certainly get snooped.
IPsec is the way to go, but its still something of a hassle on IPv4. I've seen a lot of noise about mesh networks - this isn't really going to take off until IPv6 gets moving under its own power - perhaps another five years.
It is amazing how much of this stuff goes on in design - if the executives of the firms involved in the standardization process can't understand the problem, it must not exist!
Every protocol out there is going to get picked apart... by people like me:-) If you're designing a wireless product today, get a real live hacker to look at it from the minute you put pen to paper - if you don't design it secure, you can't go back and retrofit security later - one has to look no further than the 802.1X bag on the side of 802.11b.
802.11g = indoors, 802.16 == outdoors
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I realize there is a lot of excitement about the OFDM and increased bandwidth 802.11g is going to bring to the ISM band, but don't hold your breath waiting for your local WISP to roll it in your area.
http://www.apertonet.com is very active in 802.16, they've got a $2k/channel head end unit, and $1k subscriber units. Its too expensive for resi but it *works* for business - both cost wise and radio wise, which is something I'll never claim about 802.11b. I've got Cisco 802.11b gear in five counties and base on what I've seen from Aperto the only place 802.11b will survive is in very cost sensitive rural areas.
I was the porno cop at a 150 employee telecom company a few years ago. Highly paid programmers with tight deadlines turned out to have... other interests and not much real work. An executive who had netted the company several sexual harrasment suits slid through on his corporate position and a difficult to replace provisioning guy continued to http://www.imustlotto.com.
At the end of the day, two people left before the ax swung, the sexual harrasment was institutional and only slightly blunted... but everyone and I mean every last person... hated me with a passion for being the messenger.
3% - 5% in any company are going to have some sort of problem and it ought to be dealt with on a performance basis rather than using a squid enforced police state.
If you read the MAC layer for 802.11, which can be found in Matthew S Gast's excellent O'Reilly book on 802.11 networks, you'll discover that all 802.11 systems are carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance.
I won't bore you with the details - just trust me - when your media access depends on station cooperation, its not something you want running in the great outdoors where you have two stations on the same cell separated by four air miles and lots of tall buildings. Throughput suckage will ensue shortly if you don't know what you're doing with a system like that, and its inevitable under load even if you're a guru.
The 802.16 family of standards specifies a MAC layer that is meant to provide wireless access, not wireless lan service. I haven't read that one in detail yet, since it would only make me fear & loathe my 802.11b stuff, but its almost certainly got some sort of polling scheme along the lines of good ol' Arcnet, rather than the ethernet like CSMA/CA in 802.11.
We've had a generation of wireless ISPs cobbling 802.11b with a few running Alvarion's fine Breeze Access II product, now with 802.16 coming on strong we'll see *every* WISP of any size running that kind of gear.
I'd write more, but I'm slobbering on some lit I got from http://www.apertonet.com
Do a google for BioDiesel... apparently the next generation of filling stations for diesel vehicles are going to be... in the drive through lane at McDonalds.
Sounds screwy but its true - used oil from deep fat fryers can easily be converted to a CARBON NEUTRAL FUEL...
A national truck stop HotSpot infrastructure will allow smaller players to duplicate much of what Werner Enterprises has done with communications in their truck fleet.
Werner headquarters is just a few miles down the road from me and you better believe they're already aware that something like this is coming...
Think of the cell phone network - you can sign up for a phone in Seattle and probably make a call in Miami. 802.11b access today is not a lot different than the private radio systems that the cell business is slowly consuming.
For wireless hotspots to take off there really needs to be a standard behind it - I'd suggest something along the lines of broadcasting SSID so they're easy to find, then requiring authentication and strong layer three encryption for each client - so what if they're netstumbled:-)
Its going to be interesting... perhaps we'll even see OSP (Open Settlement Protocol), which was developed for VoIP, applied to this problem.
http://www.part-15.org http://www.wispcon.info http://www.isp-lists.com - sign up for isp-wireless mailing list
Go to google and look for the industry leaders - "Michael Anderson" (part-15.org, wispcon.info founder)
"Patrick Leary" (Alvarion Chief Evangelist)
"Marlon Schafer" (agitator, comedian, business consultant)
"Allen Marsalis" (WispCon II award winner... the biggest mom & pop out there)
"Roger Boggs" (Roger 'Obi Wan' Boggs - rf guru)
and there are a host of others who answer newcomer's questions and push on lobbying issues, FCC requests for comment, etc - Eje Gustafsson, Jeremy Parr, Neal Rauhauser, Bob Moldashel, Victoria Proffer, the guys at http://www.mikrotik.com, Lonnie Nunweiler, and we can't forget Steve Stroh at http://www.strohpub.com.
If/. really wanted to interview some people who know whats going on in the wireless industry, they'd start with Patrick Leary and Steve Stroh, then they'd contact some of the other people I've mentioned.
Geeks want them in coffee shops, but the real growth markets for Hot Spot are airports and... truck stops! Really - I've been invited to consult on a couple of truck stop projects but haven't done anything - I knew it'd be too big for me to have any serious influence.
Don't laugh - just start counting semis next time you're on the interstate - if you get 1% of all truckers using the service at the 100 busiest truck stops, you've got a winner. Market penetration will likely be more like 50%...
Our friends at Homeland Security view the uncontrolled internet access available via careless WISPs, careless wireless lan operators, and the like as a *major* problem. The telcos want to protect their monopoly so they're onboard with any efforts to squelch the booming wireless market.
I strongly suspect that we'll see legislation about such services before very long and the only cure for the complaint will be solid layer 3 encryption.
I run a WISP that covers five counties in a fairly large metro area and I'm already working this issue - business customers can get an affordable IPsec client like the Linksys firewall for around $100, Windows users have PPTP, and RouterOS from http://www.mikrotik.com provides a solid platform to terminate both sorts of connections.
If these guys are going to do a Hot Spot standard, which *is* needed on a national basis, it had better include a solid L3 encryption method.
You might have read it three times, but have you properly classified yourself yet? Moocher some days, looter on others, but a builder? Don't kid yourself...
I run a small wireless ISP that covers a five county area, three of them in a 700k population urban area, two rural counties that border the city.
A single T1 from a reputeable provider (Sprint, UUNet, AT&T on good days) still costs around $1,000 in this part of the country. You can get slightly cheaper T1s from [IC]LECs ($800 or so) but if you later multihome with a tier 1 provider you'll end up lopsided. If you grow enough to need a significant fraction of a DS3 your cost per T1 equivalent can drop from the $1,000 mark to about $500.
I've posted this little equation a number of times before and I don't think its worn out yet.
one 256k full time music/movie trader == 4 channels on a T1 == (4 channels/24 total channels) * $1,000 ~= $160/mo cost to an ISP, dropping to $80/mo if they're a big ISP.
In addition to circuit costs I pay antenna site leases for building roofs, towers, and the like. I've got a small office and the debt on the equipment used in the network.
Unlike various venture capital created wireless beasts flopping around in my market, my company is 'organic' - it has financing (money used to buy equipment) but no funding (money used for operations). My partners and I all have other sources of income (consulting, equipment sales, very tolerant spouses, etc) and we won't draw paychecks until we've got the recurring revenue to support that.
We face one other wireless player in our space with a first generation bridged only network and a not so good reputation (I love you guys! Don't change a thing!). We also face a large, agressive cable company turned CLEC, DSL is widely available from the ILEC and another CLEC, and the ILEC has a fairly useable, cheap ISDN offering.
At the entry level for business we get between $75 and $130 for a connection up to 768k. We charge $250 per megabit with the assumption that anyone using that sort of speed is going to have VPN apps on the connection and they'll require additional hand holding.
In addition to the business customers we have one of the rural counties that is actively producing residential customers @ $29.95 monthly. I wouldn't miss them if they all dropped dead tomorrow, since they're mostly those that wore out their welcome at their local DSL provider and now they're Kazaaing up my network.
T1s are full duplex. Did you know this? DSL/cable users are amazed when they learn this fact. I like to explain it to them on a phone call rather than in person, so I can interrupt them while they're telling me a T1 can't be 1.5 mbit symetric. Think about it:-)
So, I've got N T1s x 1.5 mbits of inflow and the same amount of outflow. The business customers use bandwidth from about 0700 - 1700, the residential customers from about 1500 when kids get home from school till about 2400 - basically two completely separate markets I can serve with the same inflow bandwidth. The ratio of inflow to outflow is about 5:1 with 'normal' customers.
The Kazaa thieves upset this 5:1 rule of thumb greatly and should really be counted as a wholesale symetric customer and charged accordingly. The CEO won't approve this charge plan, so I'm approaching it BOFH style, and anyone running Kazaa or similar services has just volunteered to be a victim^h^h^h^h^h^h subject in my various QoS experiments.
How did we decide how much to charge?
You need to understand that while I have an in depth understanding of what people are doing with the IP network I manage I *don't care* what they're doing, so long as they're not annoying the others trying to use it, or doing stuff that will get various three letter government agencies serving subpoenas to my office.
I happen to like playing with IP networks which makes being CTO a pretty fun job, but we could just as well have a warehouse full of various widgets that we buy for $2 and sell for $3 - its just an investment.
All networks built with more equipment than you can carry in one large RubberMaid(tm) storage container are investments. They depreciate a certain amount monthly, they have various expenses involved in operation including the next tier ISP cost, and hopefully, if you're doing things right, you're ending up with more $$$ on the 31st of December than you had January 1 of the same year.
So, there you have it. Its a *business*. Take a business class if this is all fuzzy to you, or better yet just start an ISP on your own and we'll see how long you think sharing MP3s and movies via the internet is a 'right'.
A zillion years ago there was a concept called the 'Xanadu file system' which, if I am recalling correctly, was very similar to what the author has actually implemented. I did a quick google and found one tangential reference to it for those interested in late 1980s/early 1990s history
http://tgif.fremont.ca.us/~mfw/diss/node39.html
That the author has produced working code is a HUGE INNOVATION. That this innovation has been produced by one person with a personal itch to be scratched is the reason that free/open software works so well.
This sort of improvement in the user interface is what will allow Linux/BSD derivatives to drive right over the top of certain proprietary systems in common use today.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've found nirvana. In the last year I've ejected my "spend it before you can earn it" wife, ditched the first wireless ISP I founded due to some truly disgusting behavior on the part of the other people involved in it, and disassociated myself from that whole money/cars/keeping up with those annoying Jones folks.
Now when I get to work in the morning I can be a little late, look out the window and chill if there is nothing big planned, and there isn't some a$$w1p3 middle manager who drug his childhood sexual abuse issues (yes, Jamie, I'm talking about you) into work.
I hate to stir up you dateless wonders... but when I get home at night Ms. "save it after you earn it" is waiting for me. Long red hair, big green eyes, nearly tall enough to look me in the eye, and a perfect size six. I'm too much of a gentleman to disclose any more... just eat your hearts out:-)
Maybe I'll take up tai chi. Maybe yoga. My first ride was an early 70s muscle car and I got its corpse back from a junkyard three years ago - now I've got time to fix it before gasoline is outlawed and maybe my son can learn to drive with it. I really *should* finish college one of these days but I don't know what I want to do if I grow up.
On second thought, I'm starting to think this whole 'growing up" business is vastly overrated...
It seems to matter how 'big' an event was - I can clearly recall my fourth birthday - we packed up and moved from a large city to the middle of nowhere. Big yellow rider truck, I got to ride with my father, my little brother rode with mom.
I have one earlier memory that my father confirms, but I'm way too embarrased to post it on slashdot:-) It must have been when I was three, because it predates the big move...
I've been using Netsaint for a couple of years now and its a really nice monitor package - pretty easy learning curve with the well commented config files, easy to extend if you want to write a little perl or C, and best of all it understands hierarchy - if you lose a major link in your network instead of complaining about all of the hosts on the other side of the outage, it just reports the link failure and warns that the other nodes are unreachable.
I have to agree with the others that have posted - why drop a perfectly good (and recognized) name like Netsaint for something we can't even pronounce?
Re:big deal. ydi.com and rflinx.com have quality a
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802.11 RF Amp
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· Score: 1
YDI and TT are $400 - $500 depending on form factor and output. RFLinx are $200 complete or $100 for just the board (you solder).
big deal. ydi.com and rflinx.com have quality amps
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802.11 RF Amp
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· Score: 5, Informative
A while ago on slashdot there was breathless coverage of a Linksys hardware 'hack' that raised their 30mw AP to 100mw. Some knowledgeable RF engineer took a look and it *was* putting out 100mw - 31mw in channel, and 69 mw of crap spattered all over 2350 - 2550 MHz. All that 'hack' accomplished was giving more ammunition for those satellite radio folks that want to regulate the ISM band.
Instead of building a 100mw radio with good sensitivity, Linksys is building a cheesy amp to go with their cheesy AP.
If you genuinely need some amplification I've used YDI.com and Teletronics.com amps in the 250mw to 1 watt range and not had much trouble with any of them. RFLinx or RFLynx(sp?) has come out with a 750mw amp for $200, but I haven't tried that product yet.
FYI half of the reason to deploy an amp is for the LNA (low noise amplifier) effect - besides boosting output they pump up the return signal by 10 - 14 dB. There is a real call for a 150mw output amp with a solid LNA for client side problems, but that is a story for another day.
Children in Japan might find Hello, Kitty to be the driving force behind 3G, but here in Amerika I've got a 750k population metro just busting with possible mobile data applications, and the cellular carriers collective heads are so far up their poop chutes we'll have an 802.11b mesh with a node on every block before they figure it out.
The problem in a nutshell is this - they believe they'll make more (like 10x) more for mobile data and they think they can charge per bit. Users are staying away in droves and they'll continue to do so until mobile behaves like DSL/cable modem, or low speed frame relay. I'd happily shell out $99/mo for something that got me ISDN speed at home and everywhere else in town, but that rate for an account with a 20 meg/month cap is utterly useless.
So much that could be done and its a darned shame we have to stay in business whilst doing our artwork, isn't it?
Full Disclosure: I own an evil, rate shaping ISP, that persecutes P2P users in such a zealous fashion as to inspire the admiration for various third world dictatorships.
I don't know much about this stuff, merely having the Cisco Certified Network and Design Professional certifications, and not yet having the CCIE, but here goes.
In the bad old days before layer three switches became inexpensive networks were either routed or bridged. Spanning tree is a tool used on redundant layer two networks to detect and eliminate loops.
If these guys were a hardcore Cisco shop and they used Cisco's Inter Switch Link (ISL) VLAN technology it is possible they might have a very complex topology with multiple spanning tree roots. That can't be done with the IEEE 802.1Q VLANs more commonly used today, but this sort of thing was deployed for campus redundancy in the mid 90s.
The right solution in a case like this is... messy. If they've really got a situation where they've got one big a$$ subnet with 1024 or 2048 IP addresses in it they're pretty much going to have to *build a parallel network* with proper L3 equipment and an IP address allocation plan, then go floor by floor and convert users to that scheme.
It sounds crazy, but I've been responsible for a campus with 800 MAC addresses in the core switch's CAM table and it is the easiest, safest route to take.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the terrain you describe the most likely wireless solution is something in the 900MHz band - it'll work well through trees & such which is something that can not be said for 2400MHz solutions.
Waverider is the first name that comes to mind, I hear Alvarion has some sort of 900MHz product in the works also.
I'd suggest you go to http://www.isp-lists.com and sign up for the isp-wireless list - plenty of people there will have hands on experience with what you're trying to do - much better source than all of the arm chair quarterbacks that inhabit slashdot.
Looks like they've daisy chained three Linksys amplifiers in series to boost their power. These guys obviously know dick(a technical term) about wireless.
... useless crap.
...
Amplifiers accept a certain input power level, probably 30mw (+15dBm) in the case of Linksys gear, and they output a certain power level, likely 100mw (+20dBm). If you over drive the amp, you don't get any more out of it, you just shorten its life dramatically.
On the return path side those devices usually have a low noise amplifier(LNA). Put three LNAs in series and you're going to pump up the background noise to the point where the AP sees a noise floor just as high as the signal. Typically the noise floor in an urban environment is around -90dBm and a good useable signal would be around -70dBm. Three times boosting both noise and signal by +10dB via an LNA and you get
I net these fellows have also 'hacked' their AP to put out 100mw - take a look around on the net and you'll find that you *do* get 100mw out of a hacker AP - 31mw in the channel you wanted, and 69mw of crap spattered all over 2300 - 2500 MHz.
Linksys is a cheap, wireless LAN product. Wireless LAN was meant to be deployed indoors and that goes double for this stuff.
If you must run 802.11b as an access product, stick with quality amps from YDI, Teletronics, or RFLinx, and use decent radios - Cisco or Lucent being the most common.
The FCC is gonna bitch slap the entire unlicensed wireless internet business over the behavior of a few clue free dorks with shiny new BestBuy credit cards.
God save us all
It seems to me that a great many
Reading that book will give you a foundation to understanding how a single endpoint behaves in an IP network. If you want some understanding of the guts of a large scale internetwork I'd suggest the Cisco Press IP Quality of Service book.
There are a great many things near and dear to
If you're impatient you can look at my journal - I've covered some of the issues there.
In the past I've managed peering with UUNet, Teleglobe, Level3, Concentric/XO, Genuity, Sprint, AT&T, and I currently manage a small AS that does provide transit for two peers.
I'm not sure what they're getting at in this article - the ISPs that are small enough to have security problems are generally at the edge of the Tier 1 guys and they're filtered to death - I offer five prefixes to Sprint and that is all they'll accept - the same goes for the AT&T and UUNet connections I manage.
I think the scenario of rogue network announcements could only happen between very large carriers - those who are so large (and disciplined) that they don't route filter between themselves.
The only way to make something like this work is to have a solid L3 encryption system between the remote and the head end - intermediate stations will certainly get snooped.
IPsec is the way to go, but its still something of a hassle on IPv4. I've seen a lot of noise about mesh networks - this isn't really going to take off until IPv6 gets moving under its own power - perhaps another five years.
It is amazing how much of this stuff goes on in design - if the executives of the firms involved in the standardization process can't understand the problem, it must not exist!
Every protocol out there is going to get picked apart
I realize there is a lot of excitement about the OFDM and increased bandwidth 802.11g is going to bring to the ISM band, but don't hold your breath waiting for your local WISP to roll it in your area.
http://www.apertonet.com is very active in 802.16, they've got a $2k/channel head end unit, and $1k subscriber units. Its too expensive for resi but it *works* for business - both cost wise and radio wise, which is something I'll never claim about 802.11b. I've got Cisco 802.11b gear in five counties and base on what I've seen from Aperto the only place 802.11b will survive is in very cost sensitive rural areas.
I was the porno cop at a 150 employee telecom company a few years ago. Highly paid programmers with tight deadlines turned out to have
At the end of the day, two people left before the ax swung, the sexual harrasment was institutional and only slightly blunted
3% - 5% in any company are going to have some sort of problem and it ought to be dealt with on a performance basis rather than using a squid enforced police state.
If you read the MAC layer for 802.11, which can be found in Matthew S Gast's excellent O'Reilly book on 802.11 networks, you'll discover that all 802.11 systems are carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance.
I won't bore you with the details - just trust me - when your media access depends on station cooperation, its not something you want running in the great outdoors where you have two stations on the same cell separated by four air miles and lots of tall buildings. Throughput suckage will ensue shortly if you don't know what you're doing with a system like that, and its inevitable under load even if you're a guru.
The 802.16 family of standards specifies a MAC layer that is meant to provide wireless access, not wireless lan service. I haven't read that one in detail yet, since it would only make me fear & loathe my 802.11b stuff, but its almost certainly got some sort of polling scheme along the lines of good ol' Arcnet, rather than the ethernet like CSMA/CA in 802.11.
We've had a generation of wireless ISPs cobbling 802.11b with a few running Alvarion's fine Breeze Access II product, now with 802.16 coming on strong we'll see *every* WISP of any size running that kind of gear.
I'd write more, but I'm slobbering on some lit I got from http://www.apertonet.com
Do a google for BioDiesel
Sounds screwy but its true - used oil from deep fat fryers can easily be converted to a CARBON NEUTRAL FUEL
A national truck stop HotSpot infrastructure will allow smaller players to duplicate much of what Werner Enterprises has done with communications in their truck fleet.
Werner headquarters is just a few miles down the road from me and you better believe they're already aware that something like this is coming
Think of the cell phone network - you can sign up for a phone in Seattle and probably make a call in Miami. 802.11b access today is not a lot different than the private radio systems that the cell business is slowly consuming.
For wireless hotspots to take off there really needs to be a standard behind it - I'd suggest something along the lines of broadcasting SSID so they're easy to find, then requiring authentication and strong layer three encryption for each client - so what if they're netstumbled
Its going to be interesting
Mom and Pop are not operating alone
http://www.part-15.org
http://www.wispcon.info
http://www.isp-lists.com - sign up for isp-wireless mailing list
Go to google and look for the industry leaders - "Michael Anderson" (part-15.org, wispcon.info founder)
"Patrick Leary" (Alvarion Chief Evangelist)
"Marlon Schafer" (agitator, comedian, business consultant)
"Allen Marsalis" (WispCon II award winner
"Roger Boggs" (Roger 'Obi Wan' Boggs - rf guru)
and there are a host of others who answer newcomer's questions and push on lobbying issues, FCC requests for comment, etc - Eje Gustafsson, Jeremy Parr, Neal Rauhauser, Bob Moldashel, Victoria Proffer, the guys at http://www.mikrotik.com, Lonnie Nunweiler, and we can't forget Steve Stroh at http://www.strohpub.com.
If
Geeks want them in coffee shops, but the real growth markets for Hot Spot are airports and
Don't laugh - just start counting semis next time you're on the interstate - if you get 1% of all truckers using the service at the 100 busiest truck stops, you've got a winner. Market penetration will likely be more like 50%
Our friends at Homeland Security view the uncontrolled internet access available via careless WISPs, careless wireless lan operators, and the like as a *major* problem. The telcos want to protect their monopoly so they're onboard with any efforts to squelch the booming wireless market.
I strongly suspect that we'll see legislation about such services before very long and the only cure for the complaint will be solid layer 3 encryption.
I run a WISP that covers five counties in a fairly large metro area and I'm already working this issue - business customers can get an affordable IPsec client like the Linksys firewall for around $100, Windows users have PPTP, and RouterOS from http://www.mikrotik.com provides a solid platform to terminate both sorts of connections.
If these guys are going to do a Hot Spot standard, which *is* needed on a national basis, it had better include a solid L3 encryption method.
You might have read it three times, but have you properly classified yourself yet? Moocher some days, looter on others, but a builder? Don't kid yourself
I run a small wireless ISP that covers a five county area, three of them in a 700k population urban area, two rural counties that border the city.
:-)
A single T1 from a reputeable provider (Sprint, UUNet, AT&T on good days) still costs around $1,000 in this part of the country. You can get slightly cheaper T1s from [IC]LECs ($800 or so) but if you later multihome with a tier 1 provider you'll end up lopsided. If you grow enough to need a significant fraction of a DS3 your cost per T1 equivalent can drop from the $1,000 mark to about $500.
I've posted this little equation a number of times before and I don't think its worn out yet.
one 256k full time music/movie trader == 4 channels on a T1 == (4 channels/24 total channels) * $1,000 ~= $160/mo cost to an ISP, dropping to $80/mo if they're a big ISP.
In addition to circuit costs I pay antenna site leases for building roofs, towers, and the like. I've got a small office and the debt on the equipment used in the network.
Unlike various venture capital created wireless beasts flopping around in my market, my company is 'organic' - it has financing (money used to buy equipment) but no funding (money used for operations). My partners and I all have other sources of income (consulting, equipment sales, very tolerant spouses, etc) and we won't draw paychecks until we've got the recurring revenue to support that.
We face one other wireless player in our space with a first generation bridged only network and a not so good reputation (I love you guys! Don't change a thing!). We also face a large, agressive cable company turned CLEC, DSL is widely available from the ILEC and another CLEC, and the ILEC has a fairly useable, cheap ISDN offering.
At the entry level for business we get between $75 and $130 for a connection up to 768k. We charge $250 per megabit with the assumption that anyone using that sort of speed is going to have VPN apps on the connection and they'll require additional hand holding.
In addition to the business customers we have one of the rural counties that is actively producing residential customers @ $29.95 monthly. I wouldn't miss them if they all dropped dead tomorrow, since they're mostly those that wore out their welcome at their local DSL provider and now they're Kazaaing up my network.
T1s are full duplex. Did you know this? DSL/cable users are amazed when they learn this fact. I like to explain it to them on a phone call rather than in person, so I can interrupt them while they're telling me a T1 can't be 1.5 mbit symetric. Think about it
So, I've got N T1s x 1.5 mbits of inflow and the same amount of outflow. The business customers use bandwidth from about 0700 - 1700, the residential customers from about 1500 when kids get home from school till about 2400 - basically two completely separate markets I can serve with the same inflow bandwidth. The ratio of inflow to outflow is about 5:1 with 'normal' customers.
The Kazaa thieves upset this 5:1 rule of thumb greatly and should really be counted as a wholesale symetric customer and charged accordingly. The CEO won't approve this charge plan, so I'm approaching it BOFH style, and anyone running Kazaa or similar services has just volunteered to be a victim^h^h^h^h^h^h subject in my various QoS experiments.
How did we decide how much to charge?
You need to understand that while I have an in depth understanding of what people are doing with the IP network I manage I *don't care* what they're doing, so long as they're not annoying the others trying to use it, or doing stuff that will get various three letter government agencies serving subpoenas to my office.
I happen to like playing with IP networks which makes being CTO a pretty fun job, but we could just as well have a warehouse full of various widgets that we buy for $2 and sell for $3 - its just an investment.
All networks built with more equipment than you can carry in one large RubberMaid(tm) storage container are investments. They depreciate a certain amount monthly, they have various expenses involved in operation including the next tier ISP cost, and hopefully, if you're doing things right, you're ending up with more $$$ on the 31st of December than you had January 1 of the same year.
So, there you have it. Its a *business*. Take a business class if this is all fuzzy to you, or better yet just start an ISP on your own and we'll see how long you think sharing MP3s and movies via the internet is a 'right'.
A zillion years ago there was a concept called the 'Xanadu file system' which, if I am recalling correctly, was very similar to what the author has actually implemented. I did a quick google and found one tangential reference to it for those interested in late 1980s/early 1990s history
http://tgif.fremont.ca.us/~mfw/diss/node39.html
That the author has produced working code is a HUGE INNOVATION. That this innovation has been produced by one person with a personal itch to be scratched is the reason that free/open software works so well.
This sort of improvement in the user interface is what will allow Linux/BSD derivatives to drive right over the top of certain proprietary systems in common use today.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've found nirvana. In the last year I've ejected my "spend it before you can earn it" wife, ditched the first wireless ISP I founded due to some truly disgusting behavior on the part of the other people involved in it, and disassociated myself from that whole money/cars/keeping up with those annoying Jones folks.
... but when I get home at night Ms. "save it after you earn it" is waiting for me. Long red hair, big green eyes, nearly tall enough to look me in the eye, and a perfect size six. I'm too much of a gentleman to disclose any more ... just eat your hearts out :-)
...
Now when I get to work in the morning I can be a little late, look out the window and chill if there is nothing big planned, and there isn't some a$$w1p3 middle manager who drug his childhood sexual abuse issues (yes, Jamie, I'm talking about you) into work.
I hate to stir up you dateless wonders
Maybe I'll take up tai chi. Maybe yoga. My first ride was an early 70s muscle car and I got its corpse back from a junkyard three years ago - now I've got time to fix it before gasoline is outlawed and maybe my son can learn to drive with it. I really *should* finish college one of these days but I don't know what I want to do if I grow up.
On second thought, I'm starting to think this whole 'growing up" business is vastly overrated
It seems to matter how 'big' an event was - I can clearly recall my fourth birthday - we packed up and moved from a large city to the middle of nowhere. Big yellow rider truck, I got to ride with my father, my little brother rode with mom.
I have one earlier memory that my father confirms, but I'm way too embarrased to post it on slashdot
I've been using Netsaint for a couple of years now and its a really nice monitor package - pretty easy learning curve with the well commented config files, easy to extend if you want to write a little perl or C, and best of all it understands hierarchy - if you lose a major link in your network instead of complaining about all of the hosts on the other side of the outage, it just reports the link failure and warns that the other nodes are unreachable.
I have to agree with the others that have posted - why drop a perfectly good (and recognized) name like Netsaint for something we can't even pronounce?
http://www.ydi.comt tp://www.rflinx.com
http://www.teletronics.com
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YDI and TT are $400 - $500 depending on form factor and output. RFLinx are $200 complete or $100 for just the board (you solder).
A while ago on slashdot there was breathless coverage of a Linksys hardware 'hack' that raised their 30mw AP to 100mw. Some knowledgeable RF engineer took a look and it *was* putting out 100mw - 31mw in channel, and 69 mw of crap spattered all over 2350 - 2550 MHz. All that 'hack' accomplished was giving more ammunition for those satellite radio folks that want to regulate the ISM band.
Instead of building a 100mw radio with good sensitivity, Linksys is building a cheesy amp to go with their cheesy AP.
If you genuinely need some amplification I've used YDI.com and Teletronics.com amps in the 250mw to 1 watt range and not had much trouble with any of them. RFLinx or RFLynx(sp?) has come out with a 750mw amp for $200, but I haven't tried that product yet.
FYI half of the reason to deploy an amp is for the LNA (low noise amplifier) effect - besides boosting output they pump up the return signal by 10 - 14 dB. There is a real call for a 150mw output amp with a solid LNA for client side problems, but that is a story for another day.
Children in Japan might find Hello, Kitty to be the driving force behind 3G, but here in Amerika I've got a 750k population metro just busting with possible mobile data applications, and the cellular carriers collective heads are so far up their poop chutes we'll have an 802.11b mesh with a node on every block before they figure it out.
The problem in a nutshell is this - they believe they'll make more (like 10x) more for mobile data and they think they can charge per bit. Users are staying away in droves and they'll continue to do so until mobile behaves like DSL/cable modem, or low speed frame relay. I'd happily shell out $99/mo for something that got me ISDN speed at home and everywhere else in town, but that rate for an account with a 20 meg/month cap is utterly useless.
So much that could be done and its a darned shame we have to stay in business whilst doing our artwork, isn't it?
Full Disclosure: I own an evil, rate shaping ISP, that persecutes P2P users in such a zealous fashion as to inspire the admiration for various third world dictatorships.
I don't know much about this stuff, merely having the Cisco Certified Network and Design Professional certifications, and not yet having the CCIE, but here goes.
... messy. If they've really got a situation where they've got one big a$$ subnet with 1024 or 2048 IP addresses in it they're pretty much going to have to *build a parallel network* with proper L3 equipment and an IP address allocation plan, then go floor by floor and convert users to that scheme.
In the bad old days before layer three switches became inexpensive networks were either routed or bridged. Spanning tree is a tool used on redundant layer two networks to detect and eliminate loops.
If these guys were a hardcore Cisco shop and they used Cisco's Inter Switch Link (ISL) VLAN technology it is possible they might have a very complex topology with multiple spanning tree roots. That can't be done with the IEEE 802.1Q VLANs more commonly used today, but this sort of thing was deployed for campus redundancy in the mid 90s.
The right solution in a case like this is
It sounds crazy, but I've been responsible for a campus with 800 MAC addresses in the core switch's CAM table and it is the easiest, safest route to take.