Back to your regular munchkin programming . . .

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From: Kragen Sitaker (kragen@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Sep 12 2000 - 23:15:50 PDT

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>From Technocrat.net, http://www.technocrat.net/968524370/index_html:

Consume.net are doing some interesting work with wireless networking,
they plan to network the whole of London, with users providing their
own nodes, thus doing away with the conventional ISP/user model.

They propose a number of wireless technologies for interlinking.

>From the comments:
   As I see it, the normal wired connection is equivalent to the
   dinosaurs a few million years ago and the wireless methods are those
   furry little mammals that eventually dominated this planet.
   Eventually there will be few if any wired connections and wireless
   will be the standard for data communications. There may well be an
   issue with available bandwidth if huge numbers of these nodes are
   used. There is only so much bandwidth available in these RF bands.
   Like trying to get any real use from a CB radio a few years back
   with all the high powered SSB and the huge numbers of users.

. . .

   It's not trivial to make a surviveable network out of unreliable
   radio links, or to optimize the routing. I don't think Ricochet does
   anything so bright. Some years ago I wrote a protocol called RSPF
   for IP route computation over packet radio networks. Craig Small's
   implementation is in SUSE Linux. I don't know how well it would work
   on a large scale.

There are a number of links in the article and comments; the ones I
haven't seen before follow:

>From consume.net:

each node has a router which routes (der) and serves as a container
for the mediating software which is router based. It should also
contain a small web server which publicises the legal frame work of
the network and the conditions for usage (npl).

>From http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/grid:

   Grid is a system for routing in wireless ad hoc mobile networks
   being developed by MIT LCS's Parallel and Distributed Operating
   Systems group. Grid combines the GLS distributed location service
   with geographic forwarding to provide a robust and scalable network
   fabric for wireless mobile computers and devices. Grid does not
   require any fixed infrastructure such as base stations.

[Robert Tappan Morris, David Karger, and Frans Kaashoek are among the perpetrators.]

>From http://www.seattlewireless.net/:

   SeattleWireless to end recurrent telco fees. This is a
   not-for-profit venture. It is an effort to conceive, create and
   deploy a complete wireless community network. Much as the Internet
   started by plugging several networks together, it is our goal to
   create a wireless backbone. This can be accomplished using the
   technology that is available today. Do not be fooled by the
   corporate effort to deploy this technology in a lesser fashion.
   Bluetooth and devices like the Apple Airport are primarily designed
   for 'home networking', but wireless networking should not be limited
   to the home. Bluetooth devices do not appear to allow for uses
   outside their scope, but the 802.11 AppleAirport contains the exact
   same wireless card as the Lucent Access Points.

. . .

   Since SeattleWireless would not exist without collaborative effort,
   and a healthy dose of anarchy, the entire site is in PikiPiki. You
   can change anything you want by simply clicking the EditText link at
   the bottom of the page. Try this out in the PikiSandbox.

>From http://www.plaintree.com/feature.htm:

    1. Cost Effective
          * Compared to traditional cabled LAN, the initial investment
            in a FiRLAN system offers a competitive alternative,
            without the large incremental costs associated with cable
            maintenance and relocation.

I found the technocrat.net article from
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/09/12/1242213.shtml, which also has
some comments:

   I work for a company that sell wireless LANs. I the past 9 months,
   over 75 percent of our sales calls have been from ISPs implementing
   wireless LAN technology to deliver internet services to customers.
   Unfortunately, most of them know little about the technology and are
   not interested in engineering a wireless network that delivers a
   constant bandwidth with high reliability.

. . .

   This was tried twice in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s. Once by
   Dewayne Hendricks, who wanted to put a node at every library to
   cover the surrounding area, and once by Tom Jennings, the designer
   of FidoNet, as The Little Garden, an early ISP. Some of us at
   Stanford even looked into this in the late 1980s, but nothing came
   of that.