Current business models of non-free public hotspots assume that the
HotSpot is operated by a Wireless Internet Service provider, with some
kind of revenue sharing with the venue owner. In other words the
business relationship is not between the end-user and the venue owner,
but instead between the end-user and a third party (the WISP).
This business model is in strong contrast to other goods and services
which are sold at the venue. At a hotel everything from breakfast to
video on demand is sold directly from the hotel to the hotel guest.
This gives the hotel a strong incentive to promote the products and
make sure that the product works. With WiFi today most of the revenue
goes to the WISP which also has the support obligation towards the
end-user.
Wifi access needs to be sold directly by the venue owner to the end-user, and
the venue owner also needs to be the primary responsible for the quality
of the product.
Have a look at personal
telco which has a great review of open source HotSpot software.
Setting up your own HotSpot is really not that hard. The PersonalTelco
PortalSoftware page has a great review of Open Source Software for setting up your own HotSpot.
All you need to set up your own HotSpot is
* An Internet connection
* An old PC ($25 from a garage sale)
* An access point (Available from $100)
The users database can be stored in Radius, MySQL, PAM or LDAP.
Security is just one of the issues why VoIP has not caught on as an end user technology:
Pricing People think that VoIP is cheap compared to normal telephony. Average people spend around USD 200 per year on land line telephony. While VoIP might seam "free" you still have to pay around USD 300 for an ADSL connection.
Device type While it is technically feasible to install a VoIP client on a PC, it is not exactly the ideal device for a telephone. Also - remember that people usually have several phones in the house. To overcome this you would need VoIP "telephones" which look like a normal telephone. These are reletive expensive compared to normal phones, and requires a dedicated power supply.
Incoming calls In order to receive incoming calls you need to have you VoIP device turned on all the time and connected to the Internet.
Availability A normal landline telephone is usually available 99.98 % of the time. If your ADSL reaches 99.7% you should consider yourself lucky. Furthermore normal phones work during power outages. In some countries this is a regulatory requirement for emergency services.
Billing It would be nice if it was possible to make "free" VoIP calls. In most of the world however, it is the calling party who pays for the call. This means that a VoIP call terminated at a Spanish GSM phone will be charged backwards: The spanish GSM operator charges the VoIP "operator" for "terminating" the call, and the VoIP operator subsequently charges the VoIP "customer". The world has more than 1 billion GSM subscribers. In order to be able to call these you need the billing infrastructure in place even for VoIP. This requirement makes VoIP just as expensive to produce as traditional telephony.
Only a land line solution The world is moving voice calls to mobile phones. So far it has not been shown that VoIP is technically or economically feasible on mobile phones?
Quality It is pretty hard to beat the delay characteristics of a normal landline phone! VoIP has severe delay problems on thin access lines such as ADSL. Usually OK for 2Mb/s and up.
After all VoIP is only a matter of changing layer 3 and 4 in the protocol stack. Why would end customers care?
The places where VoIP is used today it is mostly invisible to the end-user: It is used as a cost cutting technology by a large number of long distance carriers. The service however is sold as normal "high quality" telephony. It is also used in a corporate setting for branch-to-branch calls as well as for PABX replacements. VoIP also makes a lot of sense sense as computer-telephony-integration in call centers.
The next majer breakthrough for VoIP will be VoADSL. VoIP all the way to the customer premises. The interface to the customer however will be a normal POTS jack, full customer service and the associated billing!
The GPL also has "advertising clause"
on
XFree86 Alters License
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually the GPL section 1 requires you to: publish on each copy an approriate copyright notice
This applies to both source and binary distribution. While this is not a real a advertising clause it does require you to acknowledge the original author of the program. So even with the GPL you have the problem of many copyright sentences in combined programs.
Voice calls are good, but wouldn't it be even better to also support
Internet connectivity on the network.
Take a look at openggsn which is
developing an open source GPRS core network. Maybe the Vanu people
could use this to also allow Internet communications for their SW
basestation.
Local Fosters; it's shite. VB is likewise shite, however; most of the people I know drink either Boags or Cascade
Never mind the brand. Most of the industrial stuff tastes the same anyway. Real issue is how to effectively order a beer in a crowded bar:
South Australia:A heawy scooner please will cause the bartender to serve you half a liter of West End Super. This however does not work in the rest of Australia where you have to order by Pot (Qld and Vic) or Middie (WA and NSW).
Germany:Ein pils bitte will, after a tapping delay of approximately 5 minutes, get you a local brew from the tab. Due to the latency it is recommended to pipeline the process: Order the next beer when the current beer is delivered. This will guarantee you a new beer every 5 minutes.
Sweden:En stor stark (a large strong) will give you half a liter of 5% beer. For heavy drinking tax-free party ships to Tallin, Gdansk or Oslo are recommended.
Soviet Union Beer was usually out of stock. Vodka or spirt (99% Ethanol) could be bought from the nearest taxi driver. Also good as a substitute for windshield liquid which was also hard to get hold of. In current times I recomment Nevskoe for the St. Petersburg area, although Baltika is usually easier to get hold of.
For better taste you should try Budweiser Budvar from the Czech Republic (Don't confuse this with the cheap US copy of the same name)
Back in the early nineties I spent some months doing indoor radio propagation measurements in the 2 GHz band. Basicly there are a few rules to observe when designing a wireless link:
1: In free space the signal strength is inversively proportional to the square of the distance. Double the distance and the signal drops by 6 dB. Increase the distance by 10 times and the signal drops by 20 dB.
2: Walls, buildings and trees attenuate the signal. As a rule of thumb a concrete wall attenuates the signal by 20 dB. Transmitting around a corner attenuates the signal by 10 dB. Wooden doors and windows will let the signal pass through with a typical attenuation of 10 dB.
3: Big flat surfaces reflect the signal. This means that you might be able to connect to a friend in the same appartment block by "reflecting" off the building on the other side of the road, even if the direct line between you is obstructed by several concrete walls.
Let us assume that the coverage of your wireless link in free space is 500 meters when using omnidirectional antennas. If you increase the antenna gain by 20 dB the coverage will increase to 5 km. If on the other hand you have to pass through a concrete wall then the original 500 meters will be decreased to 50 m. Add another concrete wall and we are down to 5 meters!
As I understand your apartment complex project the users should be able to use their WLAN cards in all rooms of the flats. To be on the safe side you need line-of-sight between the access point and the facade of each flat. This of cause would require quite a lot of access points.
Alternatively you might be able to use a few access points located at high points even if there is not line of sight to each flat. The signal would then be scattered and reflected of the neighboring buildings. This however would attenuate the signals, and your poor users might have to stand by the windows to get a good connection.
My Siemens mobile charger (ME45) with european-ex-uk plug is actually smaller than the adaptor needed to connect it to the UK sockets.
The trick is to stick something (schrewdriver/ball pen) into to earth hole. This opens the two live "holes" and you are actually able to force a european-ex-uk type plug into the socket.
Saves me the troubble to carry a UK adaptor when traveling. Works for UK, Singapore and other places with UK standards. No triks for down under and US though.
1) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at my own premises for my own purposes: No need to share the source.
2) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at my own premises and allow customers to use the services provided by the code: No need to share the source.
3) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at a server farm: Do I need to share the source? Think not?
4) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at a server farm and allow customers to use the services provided by the code: Do I need to share the source? Think not?
5) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at customer premises and allow customer to use the services provided by the code: Do I need to share the source????
just plug in using a PLC adapter and you're ready to go.
Come on. Power companies have talked about this for years. Everybody has had their trials.
When you work out the business case it turns out that a radio modem is cheaper to produce and install than a PLC modem. Also electricity wires are terribly bad as communication media, with very low channel capacity (just ask Shannon). You can not transmit through transformers, or even between phases in multiphase installations.
by extending optical Ethernet into the carrier network
Ethernet is a local area network technology. The main advantage of Ethernet is the extreme simplicity of deployment with spanning tree protocol (SPP) taking care of proper frame forwarding. SPP is terribly unstable in a WAN environment, it has substandard QoS support and most implementations lack the proper management tools.
There is absolutely no advantage of expanding Ethernet into the backbone. In the backbone you really need a layer 3 protocol such as IP or MPLS. Only reason I can think of is to invent a new technology and calling it Ethernet for marketing purposes.
in some European countries propagating information deemed to be racist is illegal.
I often hear how US citicens have a constitutional right of free speech. This i not so.
On the contrary the legal system in the US poses a number of restrictions on free speech. This includes libel, porn, patent and copyright laws. These laws all in some ways limit your right of free speech. So don't tell me that the US has free speech - because you don't.
Besides I personally think it makes sense for racist propaganda to be illegal. Look at it as a sort of class action libel case. Also rasism is one of the key points governed by the UN Human Rights declaration.
Note that the article only reports the ability to receive at 19
Mb/s. We still need the functionality to actually have a two way
connection.
Transmitting at 19 Mb/s is quite a different task. According to Shannon
(the mother of information theory) the power level required is
proportional to the bitrate. This means that not only will such
bitrates kill your battery - it will most likely also kill your brain.
Besides the 19 Mb/s was achieved in a lab environment. Having this
technology work with varying radio conditions and handovers in a 200
km/h train is much more difficult.
For the next many years 3G will be a maximum of 144 kb/s when used in
vehicles. For low mobility indoor situations 3G will give you much
higher bitrates - but then wouldn't you rather be using 802.11a?
I often use mozilla on GPRS. Telia charges me 2.5 Euro per MB.
I would turn off this feature before connecting....
PS: 2.5 Euro is actually quite cheap. A two hour "always-on" train ride with web, mail and ssh usually cost me 2 MB worth of bandwidth. That is quite cheap compaired to a GSM dialup connection!
The main problem of free VoIP is that the person you are calling is waiting by her computer to receive your call. She has a normal landline, mobile or even satellite phone. The operator terminating the call will want to get paid for this service. By convention the originating party pays for the call. This means that you will have to pay for the call - even if you are using IP as the networking layer for the first leg of your voice call.
In contrast the cost of Internet traffic is by convention shared between the sender of the data and the receiver (Each pays a MByte charge for sending and receiving data). Residential customers often have flatrate contracts that limit usage of the line (no commercial traffic, no line sharing plus no servers). So even if you have a flatrate Internet account it doesn't mean that traffic is free - it just mean that the traffic cost is shared between you and other customers with similar usage patterns.
In other words - if everybody is using long distance VoIP 24x7, the cost of flatrate access will most likely increase.
Besides the above I am a strong believer of VoIP. Eventially it will provide hifi quality voice calls with multimedia integration and sophisticated call control features. We need however to improve the horrific realtime support of the Internet. Furthermore the failure rate of data networks is two orders of magnitude worse than telephony networks: My phone line always works - even during power failures!
jj
PS: Telephony tarifs are strongly government regulated with artificially low prices for line rental and local calls, and exorbiant prices for long distance calls. The whole idea being that poor people should be able to afford a telephone line. This has been exploited by dial up ISP - in effect causing long distance phone calls to subsidize Internet access.
Slashdot Mirror
Current business models of non-free public hotspots assume that the HotSpot is operated by a Wireless Internet Service provider, with some kind of revenue sharing with the venue owner. In other words the business relationship is not between the end-user and the venue owner, but instead between the end-user and a third party (the WISP).
This business model is in strong contrast to other goods and services which are sold at the venue. At a hotel everything from breakfast to video on demand is sold directly from the hotel to the hotel guest. This gives the hotel a strong incentive to promote the products and make sure that the product works. With WiFi today most of the revenue goes to the WISP which also has the support obligation towards the end-user.
Wifi access needs to be sold directly by the venue owner to the end-user, and the venue owner also needs to be the primary responsible for the quality of the product.
Have a look at personal telco which has a great review of open source HotSpot software.
PersonalTelco has an excellen review on Open Source Wi-Fi software. Could be something for Nepal's farmers!
Setting up your own HotSpot is really not that hard. The PersonalTelco PortalSoftware page has a great review of Open Source Software for setting up your own HotSpot.
All you need to set up your own HotSpot is
* An Internet connection
* An old PC ($25 from a garage sale)
* An access point (Available from $100)
The users database can be stored in Radius, MySQL, PAM or LDAP.
Security is just one of the issues why VoIP has not caught on as an end user technology:
Pricing People think that VoIP is cheap compared to normal telephony. Average people spend around USD 200 per year on land line telephony. While VoIP might seam "free" you still have to pay around USD 300 for an ADSL connection.
Device type While it is technically feasible to install a VoIP client on a PC, it is not exactly the ideal device for a telephone. Also - remember that people usually have several phones in the house. To overcome this you would need VoIP "telephones" which look like a normal telephone. These are reletive expensive compared to normal phones, and requires a dedicated power supply.
Incoming calls In order to receive incoming calls you need to have you VoIP device turned on all the time and connected to the Internet.
Availability A normal landline telephone is usually available 99.98 % of the time. If your ADSL reaches 99.7% you should consider yourself lucky. Furthermore normal phones work during power outages. In some countries this is a regulatory requirement for emergency services.
Billing It would be nice if it was possible to make "free" VoIP calls. In most of the world however, it is the calling party who pays for the call. This means that a VoIP call terminated at a Spanish GSM phone will be charged backwards: The spanish GSM operator charges the VoIP "operator" for "terminating" the call, and the VoIP operator subsequently charges the VoIP "customer". The world has more than 1 billion GSM subscribers. In order to be able to call these you need the billing infrastructure in place even for VoIP. This requirement makes VoIP just as expensive to produce as traditional telephony.
Only a land line solution The world is moving voice calls to mobile phones. So far it has not been shown that VoIP is technically or economically feasible on mobile phones?
Quality It is pretty hard to beat the delay characteristics of a normal landline phone! VoIP has severe delay problems on thin access lines such as ADSL. Usually OK for 2Mb/s and up.
After all VoIP is only a matter of changing layer 3 and 4 in the protocol stack. Why would end customers care?
The places where VoIP is used today it is mostly invisible to the end-user: It is used as a cost cutting technology by a large number of long distance carriers. The service however is sold as normal "high quality" telephony. It is also used in a corporate setting for branch-to-branch calls as well as for PABX replacements. VoIP also makes a lot of sense sense as computer-telephony-integration in call centers.
The next majer breakthrough for VoIP will be VoADSL. VoIP all the way to the customer premises. The interface to the customer however will be a normal POTS jack, full customer service and the associated billing!
Actually the GPL section 1 requires you to: publish on each copy an approriate copyright notice
This applies to both source and binary distribution. While this is not a real a advertising clause it does require you to acknowledge the original author of the program. So even with the GPL you have the problem of many copyright sentences in combined programs.
Voice calls are good, but wouldn't it be even better to also support Internet connectivity on the network.
Take a look at openggsn which is developing an open source GPRS core network. Maybe the Vanu people could use this to also allow Internet communications for their SW basestation.
Local Fosters; it's shite. VB is likewise shite, however; most of the people I know drink either Boags or Cascade
Never mind the brand. Most of the industrial stuff tastes the same anyway. Real issue is how to effectively order a beer in a crowded bar:
South Australia: A heawy scooner please will cause the bartender to serve you half a liter of West End Super. This however does not work in the rest of Australia where you have to order by Pot (Qld and Vic) or Middie (WA and NSW).
Germany: Ein pils bitte will, after a tapping delay of approximately 5 minutes, get you a local brew from the tab. Due to the latency it is recommended to pipeline the process: Order the next beer when the current beer is delivered. This will guarantee you a new beer every 5 minutes.
Sweden: En stor stark (a large strong) will give you half a liter of 5% beer. For heavy drinking tax-free party ships to Tallin, Gdansk or Oslo are recommended.
Soviet Union Beer was usually out of stock. Vodka or spirt (99% Ethanol) could be bought from the nearest taxi driver. Also good as a substitute for windshield liquid which was also hard to get hold of. In current times I recomment Nevskoe for the St. Petersburg area, although Baltika is usually easier to get hold of.
For better taste you should try Budweiser Budvar from the Czech Republic (Don't confuse this with the cheap US copy of the same name)
Back in the early nineties I spent some months doing indoor radio propagation measurements in the 2 GHz band. Basicly there are a few rules to observe when designing a wireless link:
1: In free space the signal strength is inversively proportional to the square of the distance. Double the distance and the signal drops by 6 dB. Increase the distance by 10 times and the signal drops by 20 dB.
2: Walls, buildings and trees attenuate the signal. As a rule of thumb a concrete wall attenuates the signal by 20 dB. Transmitting around a corner attenuates the signal by 10 dB. Wooden doors and windows will let the signal pass through with a typical attenuation of 10 dB.
3: Big flat surfaces reflect the signal. This means that you might be able to connect to a friend in the same appartment block by "reflecting" off the building on the other side of the road, even if the direct line between you is obstructed by several concrete walls.
Let us assume that the coverage of your wireless link in free space is 500 meters when using omnidirectional antennas. If you increase the antenna gain by 20 dB the coverage will increase to 5 km. If on the other hand you have to pass through a concrete wall then the original 500 meters will be decreased to 50 m. Add another concrete wall and we are down to 5 meters!
As I understand your apartment complex project the users should be able to use their WLAN cards in all rooms of the flats. To be on the safe side you need line-of-sight between the access point and the facade of each flat. This of cause would require quite a lot of access points.
Alternatively you might be able to use a few access points located at high points even if there is not line of sight to each flat. The signal would then be scattered and reflected of the neighboring buildings. This however would attenuate the signals, and your poor users might have to stand by the windows to get a good connection.
I went to Scotland last week, did the power plug trick AND drove on the wrong side of the road AND did some of the distilleries.
:-)
I'm happy to accept the Darwin Award. Going to the UK is such a dangerous venture
I have heard that Ireland is switching sides on the road in 2007. Maybe also the UK one day will discover life outside the of islands.....
My Siemens mobile charger (ME45) with european-ex-uk plug is actually smaller than the adaptor needed to connect it to the UK sockets.
The trick is to stick something (schrewdriver/ball pen) into to earth hole. This opens the two live "holes" and you are actually able to force a european-ex-uk type plug into the socket.
Saves me the troubble to carry a UK adaptor when traveling. Works for UK, Singapore and other places with UK standards. No triks for down under and US though.
1) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at my own premises for my own purposes: No need to share the source.
2) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at my own premises and allow customers to use the services provided by the code: No need to share the source.
3) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at a server farm: Do I need to share the source? Think not?
4) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at a server farm and allow customers to use the services provided by the code: Do I need to share the source? Think not?
5) I modify GPL'ed code, run it at customer premises and allow customer to use the services provided by the code: Do I need to share the source????
just plug in using a PLC adapter and you're ready to go.
Come on. Power companies have talked about this for years. Everybody has had their trials.
When you work out the business case it turns out that a radio modem is cheaper to produce and install than a PLC modem.
Also electricity wires are terribly bad as communication media, with very low channel capacity (just ask Shannon). You can not transmit through transformers, or even between phases in multiphase installations.
by extending optical Ethernet into the carrier network
Ethernet is a local area network technology. The main advantage of Ethernet is the extreme simplicity of deployment with spanning tree protocol (SPP) taking care of proper frame forwarding. SPP is terribly unstable in a WAN environment, it has substandard QoS support and most implementations lack the proper management tools.
There is absolutely no advantage of expanding Ethernet into the backbone. In the backbone you really need a layer 3 protocol such as IP or MPLS. Only reason I can think of is to invent a new technology and calling it Ethernet for marketing purposes.
From the philosophy page:
in some European countries propagating information deemed to be racist is illegal.
I often hear how US citicens have a constitutional right of free speech. This i not so.
On the contrary the legal system in the US poses a number of restrictions on free speech. This includes libel, porn, patent and copyright laws. These laws all in some ways limit your right of free speech. So don't tell me that the US has free speech - because you don't.
Besides I personally think it makes sense for racist propaganda to be illegal. Look at it as a sort of class action libel case. Also rasism is one of the key points governed by the UN Human Rights declaration.
100 kb/s GPRS sounds like a world record. What kind of GPRS phones do you have in Slovakia?
Also how good is the quality as compared to say DVD on a 50 inch high resolution screen?
Note that the article only reports the ability to receive at 19 Mb/s. We still need the functionality to actually have a two way connection.
Transmitting at 19 Mb/s is quite a different task. According to Shannon (the mother of information theory) the power level required is proportional to the bitrate. This means that not only will such bitrates kill your battery - it will most likely also kill your brain.
Besides the 19 Mb/s was achieved in a lab environment. Having this technology work with varying radio conditions and handovers in a 200 km/h train is much more difficult.
For the next many years 3G will be a maximum of 144 kb/s when used in vehicles. For low mobility indoor situations 3G will give you much higher bitrates - but then wouldn't you rather be using 802.11a?
I often use mozilla on GPRS. Telia charges me 2.5 Euro per MB. I would turn off this feature before connecting.... PS: 2.5 Euro is actually quite cheap. A two hour "always-on" train ride with web, mail and ssh usually cost me 2 MB worth of bandwidth. That is quite cheap compaired to a GSM dialup connection!
The main problem of free VoIP is that the person you are calling is waiting by her computer to receive your call. She has a normal landline, mobile or even satellite phone. The operator terminating the call will want to get paid for this service. By convention the originating party pays for the call. This means that you will have to pay for the call - even if you are using IP as the networking layer for the first leg of your voice call.
In contrast the cost of Internet traffic is by convention shared between the sender of the data and the receiver (Each pays a MByte charge for sending and receiving data). Residential customers often have flatrate contracts that limit usage of the line (no commercial traffic, no line sharing plus no servers). So even if you have a flatrate Internet account it doesn't mean that traffic is free - it just mean that the traffic cost is shared between you and other customers with similar usage patterns.
In other words - if everybody is using long distance VoIP 24x7, the cost of flatrate access will most likely increase.
Besides the above I am a strong believer of VoIP. Eventially it will provide hifi quality voice calls with multimedia integration and sophisticated call control features. We need however to improve the horrific realtime support of the Internet. Furthermore the failure rate of data networks is two orders of magnitude worse than telephony networks: My phone line always works - even during power failures!
jj
PS: Telephony tarifs are strongly government regulated with artificially low prices for line rental and local calls, and exorbiant prices for long distance calls. The whole idea being that poor people should be able to afford a telephone line. This has been exploited by dial up ISP - in effect causing long distance phone calls to subsidize Internet access.