I hope my article didn't sound like I was dissing the rest of Maine. Midcoast is a perfect area for this kind of service because of the relative hub-and-spoke density of small towns and lines-of-sight between them, plus access to the island. Imagine the change in Matinicus with this kind of access. The Internet doesn't change everything, obviously, but for anybody who is running their own business, no matter how small, and trying to stay in touch with the rest of the world, broadband or cheap access (dial-up in this case without metering) is transformative.
I know you're calling this an already-wealthy person's service, but it isn't. What it is is an alternative for small businesses and people who want to work in Midcoast and couldn't otherwise without a reliable broadband connection. I know several people that without the local DSL or 802.11 service MIS offered wouldn't be able to live on the Midcoast.
For the individual user, dial-up is still the only affordable option in rural areas and small towns that aren't lucky enough to have MIS.
Now, MIS is all the way up to Belfast now! You should talk to them about extending. Equipment prices are dropping. There are lots of local alternatives, too, as one of the other slashdotters mentions.
Also, I'm not sure why you're criticizing MIS indirectly for not pricing this service better. Get your awesome governor, Angus King (who I had the chance to meet briefly and shake his hand on a visit last October) to put some of the development money that he's good at raising at extending high-speed wireless out to you all! Lots of hills, lots of silos, lots of potential with a few hundred thousand of seed money.
No, this is point-to-point for subscribers who would be stuck with dial-up or expensive ISDN otherwise. The idea is that you could actually run a business or work remotely in places where formerly that would be impossible for Internet-based folk. Did you read the article?
I wasn't clear enough in my Slashdot suggestion: when I said "deurbanize," I meant the more generally accepted definition (I thought) of "how do we reduce the necessity of suburb-to-urban commuting" as well as the related concept of allowing decreased density without commensurate increases in traffic or infrastructure problems.
Maine itself is a great example of a great mix of urban and rural that could be a model for other states. Maine is just hard enough to live in (the weather, the distance, the long-established communities) that it self-restricts the kind of urbanization you get. I lived there for two years and loved it!
I didn't have the room to put it into the original article, but the ISP urges its customers to use SSH, VPN, etc., for anything secure, such as terminal sessions, email, etc. Now the advantage of 802.11, by the way, is that it's much harder to piggyback on.
802.11b is direct sequence: you just pick a channel and can intercept all data. 802.11 is frequency hopping: you have to know the hopping pattern to follow what's going on. This isn't impossible, but it raises the how-easy-to-intercept limit way up.
You could use it for as little as 20 cents a minute with a basic plan, but, you know, they didn't want casual users: they wanted business users. If they'd wanted to goose signups, they should have done a deal with Starbucks: every dollar you spend would equal free minutes that day. In any case, business travellers would see it as a godsend versus paying for toll calls, etc. Once airports were "unwired" (which is still on track), a lot of business travellers will probably stay at the airport to download before heading to the hotel, which often charges $10/day for data access at high speeds.
You're completely right, but the deal MobileStar struck with Starbucks to get access to their stores was to install T1 lines in *every* facility they went into at their (MobileStar's) expense. This always seemed too generous to me. Starbucks wanted a corporate network; MobileStar wanted to use Starbucks to leverage a national deployment. The money just wasn't there, nor would the revenue ever meet the probably $200 million ticket for deployment. (They burned through about $100 million, I believe.)
it doesn't work that way. Trademarks are arbitrary combinations of words, letters, and symbols that don't have a specific generic meaning in in the industry in which they're applied. You can *always* register common words, you just can't register them in fields in which they are generic.
So IBM can trademark "blue" for computers, because "blue" didn't mean anything. Owens-Corning registered "pink" as a trademark for fiberglass because it allowed them to stand out, but it's not a fundamental property or term in the field.
Yahoo could register Yahoo as a trademark because the Internet and computing doesn't define yahoo as anything except people who are unable to properly explain what a yahoo is and why it should suddenly choose to collapse on the stock market.
Oddly, a copy of Microsoft Encarta that fell through a wormhole from the future defined yahoos as a "bunch of guys who were the first ones up against the (trading) wall when the revolution came."
The whole 3G spectrum debate has been a weird strawman for the lack of comprehensive spectrum policy in the U.S., as opposed to the agreements by which most of the rest of the world now operates.
Because of poor allocation of scarce resources back when analog devices needed huge bandwidth to transmit, the actual usage across the military bands isn't uniform, comprehensive, or necessary. But it would cost upwards of ten billion dollars according to several reports issued by the military itself, the FCC, and the spectrum offices at the NTIA, among many other agencies.
Another issue: the military has to use an entirely different set of frequencies when deploying missions abroad. Outside the U.S., in the next couple years, there will be millions of people using the various 2.x GHz bands that the military uses here. (Most of the domestic uses are for fixed radios and dishes, but still...)
The answer for 3G is probably to make current bands more efficient. On the flip side, though, the military has ever more telemetry, requiring even more bandwidth.
Back and forth, back and forth...it may be too late to fix this comprehensively.
I don't know why someone would by the WAP-only mode
Somebody contradict me, but as far as I understand it, only the WAP11 is designed to take the bridging firmware upgrade. Likewise, once you've switched to bridge mode, you can't use it as a plain access point, too.
I'm guessing the original purpose was to have two price points, when they were $50 or $75 apart in price.
Can't be 36K - there's no support in the protocol for that. It's possible that you were hanging off a node that had a "56K" modem connecting it to the Net, or something like that. The protocol supports 1, 2, 5.5, and 11 Mbps (raw, not throughput), but you're, of course, relying on the broadband (or not) connection.
If you can build a Linux box and stick a generic wireless card in it for less than $185 (the Linksys including rebate) and a couple hours of your time, then it's certainly a good idea. I know that BAWUG (www.bawug.org) is working on a platform reference for a 486-based, low-power system that would be a Web server, access point, authentication server, and lots else.
It's bizarre that Cisco said it couldn't be done as they in fact sell an $800 (or what used to be $800) AiroNet wireless access point that does this! I don't have the model number handy, but if you have two or more of these, they can act as bridges and access points simultaneously.
Don't confuse commercial use with private use. I still think there are questions out about this in the U.S., too. But in most countries in the world, the 2.4 GHz band has been harmonized enough to clear 1 or more 22 MHz (full bandwidth) channels necessary to run 802.11b. You can use them for business purposes, but you cannot deploy and resell network access, as MobileStar, Wayport, and others are doing in the U.S.
Actually, the Linksys units come with simple, standard connectors that folks sell antennas to attach to for cheap or expensive, as you prefer. Try the lists.bawug.org archives - they have a lot of posts on companies that sell antennas, connectors, etc. Some requires soldering, but a lot are just order the right part and attach. (The Lucent/Agere cards from Orinoco, for instance, have a cover on the female plug - you remove it and plug an antenna right in. Orinoco sells its own, or you can go third party.)
This is pretty funny, as the Sears Tower is already running a service! But not free. Sprint Broadband is using the licensed ITS/MDS band (licensed via nonprofit/ed institutions) in the 2.5 GHz band to offer line-of-sight at megabits per second from the Sears Tower.
The issue with 2.4 GHz is licensing. You probably couldn't offer enough power with a device and antenna that complies to FCC Part 15 regulations that would have enough range, support enough users, etc. Still, interesting idea!
How entertaining that you commented on this without actually using one. I have no idea on what information you based your post. I used the Handspring Visor module from Xircom for a week with a variety of equipment, including an Apple AirPort. It worked seamlessly, including with WEP keys (for what that was worth), on all the devices. It's not a proprietary piece of technology. Check your facts.
Also, Xircom is a member company of WECA, the organization that certifies Wi-Fi equipment. Look at the member list under Intel, which bought Xircom in January. Member companies of WECA are required to ultimately receive certification for their equipment.
3G is an idea right now, not an implemented technology. If and when it's fully built it, you'll get a few hundred K per second from fixed outdoor locations according to the spec. 3G will cost hundreds of billions to retrofit all existing cell towers, distribute new phones, build more cells (for denser coverage), and pay for licenses. European telcos are about to all go under due to debt load from paying over $100 billion total for 3G licenses.
The U.S. hasn't even selected the 3G frequencies yet. When it finally rolls out, if it rolls out in its current form, you'll be paying metered rates for it, plus subject to all the limitations that cell phone carriers currently insist on.
By the time 3G would or does roll out, free and for-fee wireless networking using 2.4 GHz (802.11b at 11 Mbps and later this year or early next, 802.11g at 22 Mbps) and 5 GHz (802.11a, later this year, at 54 Mbps) will have filled every reasonable niche.
3G might be better in the sense that it could more easily offer ubiquitous coverage. But it's not going to be better for us or for the average traveller or consumer who needs access on the road.
When I talk to cell and wireless companies, I keep asking: tell me why, if 802.11b has 95% coverage for all the typical places people congregate and travel to and from in a year or so, why do I need to reach 98% with 3G at lower speeds and higher costs? Haven't gotten a straight or good answer yet.
I doubt corporations will resist this phenomenon. They want to make money off of wireless, and to do that they don't need the whole wireless spectrum. Sure they'd love to have it, but all they really need is a chunk to buy and force everyone else off of.
This is uninformed opinion. Wireless generically encompasses all radio spectrum voice and data. This particular type of network, 802.11b, uses just the 2.4 GHz band, which is not available for commercial limitation. It is free and open, and the way in which the laws have been constructed in the US and most of the rest of the world, there is no good way to push non-commercial users off, partly because manufacturers are making billions selling equipment for these frequencies. (They have powerful lobbies, even if we individual users, don't.)
Spectrum rights aren't an issue: 2.4 GHz (along with a couple other bands) are free and unlicensed subject to specific regulations (FCC Part 15) about the kinds of devices and their power output and signal type,
You're not really shocked, are you? The case law establishing the right of employers to monitor employees' email goes back a few years, almost to the dawn of the Internet. The fact is that you should never use a work account or work machine to do anything remotely unwork related because your employer should be assumed to be monitoring your communications. This is the fact of life in the U.S. (And partly the fact that employers typically own the equipment and have an implicit or explicit contract with you that states that during your time on the job, you won't do personal stuff.)
Many employers let a lot of personal stuff slide, but just wait until there are either layoffs or firings. You'll see that old email and Web browsing patterns and content show up at the exit interview. "We're not paying you severence and are firing you with cause because on these 700 occasions you violated a clearly established workplace policy."
A friend recently emailed from his work account that an event at his company wasn't going to take place. That event, a product launch, was private, and he had told me face-to-face about it. However, sending email from his work account! I warned him. I said, those kinds of emails will show up when the company doesn't want to pay unemployment.
That's the facts. Employees should probably be explicitly granted limited privacy rights at work, but it's more about the nature of work in the U.S. and our lives than it is about the law. We can't be expected to both have privacy rights and carry out a job, because we're children, as opposed to the adults in Europe. (Who have lower productivity, enormous unemployment rates, and erratic economies.) I admire Europeans' work ethic, actually, and perhaps we'll one day adopt it.
The big problem here is man-in-the-middle attacks, right? So you have to be sure that when you exchange random keys, there's no way for someone else to insert themselves in the transaction.
The point isn't people reading your email. The point is that POP passwords and simple HTTP based authentication not via SSL are sent in the clear. If someone can sniff your network, grab your password, and crack your network merely by extracting a WEP key, then we're all doomed.
Of course, sensible folk are using SSH tunneling (I'm about to get this set up, once I read all the man pges) or SSL-based email (Eudora and MS Outlook both support it, as does sendmail and Exchange), and SSH terminal software and so forth.
(The related story isn't that WEP was cracked, but rather that thousands of open, free and for-fee 802.11b networks are being deployed, and those don't even have WEP on them. Sit at Starbucks, transmit your POP password in the clear, and find your mailbox ransacked later, etc., etc.)
Anyone could read my email; how boring. But I'd rather that everyone not crack my accounts.
Corporations don't have first amendment rights, except as a few, unfortunate Supreme Court decisions have attempted to institute. Corporations have rights of commercial speech, which a government can typically not limit egregiously, but free speech rights only come out if the company is a media firm or publisher. Spam is advertising at its worst form, and courts and the legislature have proscribed many restraints on advertising, whether phone calls made in the middle of the night or ads on TV.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope my article didn't sound like I was dissing the rest of Maine. Midcoast is a perfect area for this kind of service because of the relative hub-and-spoke density of small towns and lines-of-sight between them, plus access to the island. Imagine the change in Matinicus with this kind of access. The Internet doesn't change everything, obviously, but for anybody who is running their own business, no matter how small, and trying to stay in touch with the rest of the world, broadband or cheap access (dial-up in this case without metering) is transformative.
I know you're calling this an already-wealthy person's service, but it isn't. What it is is an alternative for small businesses and people who want to work in Midcoast and couldn't otherwise without a reliable broadband connection. I know several people that without the local DSL or 802.11 service MIS offered wouldn't be able to live on the Midcoast.
For the individual user, dial-up is still the only affordable option in rural areas and small towns that aren't lucky enough to have MIS.
Now, MIS is all the way up to Belfast now! You should talk to them about extending. Equipment prices are dropping. There are lots of local alternatives, too, as one of the other slashdotters mentions.
Also, I'm not sure why you're criticizing MIS indirectly for not pricing this service better. Get your awesome governor, Angus King (who I had the chance to meet briefly and shake his hand on a visit last October) to put some of the development money that he's good at raising at extending high-speed wireless out to you all! Lots of hills, lots of silos, lots of potential with a few hundred thousand of seed money.
No, this is point-to-point for subscribers who would be stuck with dial-up or expensive ISDN otherwise. The idea is that you could actually run a business or work remotely in places where formerly that would be impossible for Internet-based folk. Did you read the article?
I wasn't clear enough in my Slashdot suggestion: when I said "deurbanize," I meant the more generally accepted definition (I thought) of "how do we reduce the necessity of suburb-to-urban commuting" as well as the related concept of allowing decreased density without commensurate increases in traffic or infrastructure problems.
Maine itself is a great example of a great mix of urban and rural that could be a model for other states. Maine is just hard enough to live in (the weather, the distance, the long-established communities) that it self-restricts the kind of urbanization you get. I lived there for two years and loved it!
I didn't have the room to put it into the original article, but the ISP urges its customers to use SSH, VPN, etc., for anything secure, such as terminal sessions, email, etc. Now the advantage of 802.11, by the way, is that it's much harder to piggyback on.
802.11b is direct sequence: you just pick a channel and can intercept all data. 802.11 is frequency hopping: you have to know the hopping pattern to follow what's going on. This isn't impossible, but it raises the how-easy-to-intercept limit way up.
You could use it for as little as 20 cents a minute with a basic plan, but, you know, they didn't want casual users: they wanted business users. If they'd wanted to goose signups, they should have done a deal with Starbucks: every dollar you spend would equal free minutes that day. In any case, business travellers would see it as a godsend versus paying for toll calls, etc. Once airports were "unwired" (which is still on track), a lot of business travellers will probably stay at the airport to download before heading to the hotel, which often charges $10/day for data access at high speeds.
You're completely right, but the deal MobileStar struck with Starbucks to get access to their stores was to install T1 lines in *every* facility they went into at their (MobileStar's) expense. This always seemed too generous to me. Starbucks wanted a corporate network; MobileStar wanted to use Starbucks to leverage a national deployment. The money just wasn't there, nor would the revenue ever meet the probably $200 million ticket for deployment. (They burned through about $100 million, I believe.)
it doesn't work that way. Trademarks are arbitrary combinations of words, letters, and symbols that don't have a specific generic meaning in in the industry in which they're applied. You can *always* register common words, you just can't register them in fields in which they are generic.
So IBM can trademark "blue" for computers, because "blue" didn't mean anything. Owens-Corning registered "pink" as a trademark for fiberglass because it allowed them to stand out, but it's not a fundamental property or term in the field.
Yahoo could register Yahoo as a trademark because the Internet and computing doesn't define yahoo as anything except people who are unable to properly explain what a yahoo is and why it should suddenly choose to collapse on the stock market.
Oddly, a copy of Microsoft Encarta that fell through a wormhole from the future defined yahoos as a "bunch of guys who were the first ones up against the (trading) wall when the revolution came."
The whole 3G spectrum debate has been a weird strawman for the lack of comprehensive spectrum policy in the U.S., as opposed to the agreements by which most of the rest of the world now operates.
Because of poor allocation of scarce resources back when analog devices needed huge bandwidth to transmit, the actual usage across the military bands isn't uniform, comprehensive, or necessary. But it would cost upwards of ten billion dollars according to several reports issued by the military itself, the FCC, and the spectrum offices at the NTIA, among many other agencies.
Another issue: the military has to use an entirely different set of frequencies when deploying missions abroad. Outside the U.S., in the next couple years, there will be millions of people using the various 2.x GHz bands that the military uses here. (Most of the domestic uses are for fixed radios and dishes, but still...)
The answer for 3G is probably to make current bands more efficient. On the flip side, though, the military has ever more telemetry, requiring even more bandwidth.
Back and forth, back and forth...it may be too late to fix this comprehensively.
Somebody contradict me, but as far as I understand it, only the WAP11 is designed to take the bridging firmware upgrade. Likewise, once you've switched to bridge mode, you can't use it as a plain access point, too.
I'm guessing the original purpose was to have two price points, when they were $50 or $75 apart in price.
Can't be 36K - there's no support in the protocol for that. It's possible that you were hanging off a node that had a "56K" modem connecting it to the Net, or something like that. The protocol supports 1, 2, 5.5, and 11 Mbps (raw, not throughput), but you're, of course, relying on the broadband (or not) connection.
It's an oreillynet article - not sure why it wasn't available at a certain point, but it's fine now.
If you can build a Linux box and stick a generic wireless card in it for less than $185 (the Linksys including rebate) and a couple hours of your time, then it's certainly a good idea. I know that BAWUG (www.bawug.org) is working on a platform reference for a 486-based, low-power system that would be a Web server, access point, authentication server, and lots else.
It's bizarre that Cisco said it couldn't be done as they in fact sell an $800 (or what used to be $800) AiroNet wireless access point that does this! I don't have the model number handy, but if you have two or more of these, they can act as bridges and access points simultaneously.
Don't confuse commercial use with private use. I still think there are questions out about this in the U.S., too. But in most countries in the world, the 2.4 GHz band has been harmonized enough to clear 1 or more 22 MHz (full bandwidth) channels necessary to run 802.11b. You can use them for business purposes, but you cannot deploy and resell network access, as MobileStar, Wayport, and others are doing in the U.S.
Actually, the Linksys units come with simple, standard connectors that folks sell antennas to attach to for cheap or expensive, as you prefer. Try the lists.bawug.org archives - they have a lot of posts on companies that sell antennas, connectors, etc. Some requires soldering, but a lot are just order the right part and attach. (The Lucent/Agere cards from Orinoco, for instance, have a cover on the female plug - you remove it and plug an antenna right in. Orinoco sells its own, or you can go third party.)
The issue with 2.4 GHz is licensing. You probably couldn't offer enough power with a device and antenna that complies to FCC Part 15 regulations that would have enough range, support enough users, etc. Still, interesting idea!
Also, Xircom is a member company of WECA, the organization that certifies Wi-Fi equipment. Look at the member list under Intel, which bought Xircom in January. Member companies of WECA are required to ultimately receive certification for their equipment.
The U.S. hasn't even selected the 3G frequencies yet. When it finally rolls out, if it rolls out in its current form, you'll be paying metered rates for it, plus subject to all the limitations that cell phone carriers currently insist on.
By the time 3G would or does roll out, free and for-fee wireless networking using 2.4 GHz (802.11b at 11 Mbps and later this year or early next, 802.11g at 22 Mbps) and 5 GHz (802.11a, later this year, at 54 Mbps) will have filled every reasonable niche.
3G might be better in the sense that it could more easily offer ubiquitous coverage. But it's not going to be better for us or for the average traveller or consumer who needs access on the road.
When I talk to cell and wireless companies, I keep asking: tell me why, if 802.11b has 95% coverage for all the typical places people congregate and travel to and from in a year or so, why do I need to reach 98% with 3G at lower speeds and higher costs? Haven't gotten a straight or good answer yet.
This is uninformed opinion. Wireless generically encompasses all radio spectrum voice and data. This particular type of network, 802.11b, uses just the 2.4 GHz band, which is not available for commercial limitation. It is free and open, and the way in which the laws have been constructed in the US and most of the rest of the world, there is no good way to push non-commercial users off, partly because manufacturers are making billions selling equipment for these frequencies. (They have powerful lobbies, even if we individual users, don't.)
Spectrum rights aren't an issue: 2.4 GHz (along with a couple other bands) are free and unlicensed subject to specific regulations (FCC Part 15) about the kinds of devices and their power output and signal type,
Many employers let a lot of personal stuff slide, but just wait until there are either layoffs or firings. You'll see that old email and Web browsing patterns and content show up at the exit interview. "We're not paying you severence and are firing you with cause because on these 700 occasions you violated a clearly established workplace policy."
A friend recently emailed from his work account that an event at his company wasn't going to take place. That event, a product launch, was private, and he had told me face-to-face about it. However, sending email from his work account! I warned him. I said, those kinds of emails will show up when the company doesn't want to pay unemployment.
That's the facts. Employees should probably be explicitly granted limited privacy rights at work, but it's more about the nature of work in the U.S. and our lives than it is about the law. We can't be expected to both have privacy rights and carry out a job, because we're children, as opposed to the adults in Europe. (Who have lower productivity, enormous unemployment rates, and erratic economies.) I admire Europeans' work ethic, actually, and perhaps we'll one day adopt it.
The big problem here is man-in-the-middle attacks, right? So you have to be sure that when you exchange random keys, there's no way for someone else to insert themselves in the transaction.
The point isn't people reading your email. The point is that POP passwords and simple HTTP based authentication not via SSL are sent in the clear. If someone can sniff your network, grab your password, and crack your network merely by extracting a WEP key, then we're all doomed. Of course, sensible folk are using SSH tunneling (I'm about to get this set up, once I read all the man pges) or SSL-based email (Eudora and MS Outlook both support it, as does sendmail and Exchange), and SSH terminal software and so forth. (The related story isn't that WEP was cracked, but rather that thousands of open, free and for-fee 802.11b networks are being deployed, and those don't even have WEP on them. Sit at Starbucks, transmit your POP password in the clear, and find your mailbox ransacked later, etc., etc.) Anyone could read my email; how boring. But I'd rather that everyone not crack my accounts.
Corporations don't have first amendment rights, except as a few, unfortunate Supreme Court decisions have attempted to institute. Corporations have rights of commercial speech, which a government can typically not limit egregiously, but free speech rights only come out if the company is a media firm or publisher. Spam is advertising at its worst form, and courts and the legislature have proscribed many restraints on advertising, whether phone calls made in the middle of the night or ads on TV.