Anyone who uses the Club forums extensively will have discovered the "Next: My Threads" link that moves to the next most recent thread in all the clubs you belong to. If you post you'll have seen that a new post takes you back to the beginning. Well I've fixed it so that it remembers where you were and the link goes to what would have been the next thread before the post. [from: JB Ecademy]

Good simple paper on securing your home WiFi access point.

We could do with something similar for people who want to share their bandwidth but do it safely. [from: JB Wifi]

The Times Online has copy of today's supplement produced in conjunction with UKOnline on Broadband for Business.

I guess it will be useful to someone, but it looks like a lot of fluff to me. They are at least raising questions about ADSL and recommending SDSL. [from: JB Ecademy]

AP Wire | 03/27/2003 | Anti-War Protesters Take Digital Turn This story has hit the AP wires and is being repeated by news organizations all over the world. It's a quick summary of the use of decentralized technology such as SMS, cellphones, webcams, internet video streaming, blogs and such like to rapidly mobilize people and get the word out. Is this Smart Mobs, digital democracy or digitally mediated anarchism? [from: JB Ecademy]

Fascinating article with lots of links.DailyWireless - Streaming Wireless Cable?

But take a look down the left hand column. That's an amazing collection of WiFi links. [from: JB Wifi]

I'm telling ya - if you don't have a(n) RSS file, I ain't likely to return to your site. M'kay? [from: JB Ecademy]

: End in sight for UK IT tax holiday
A treasury initiative to give small and medium-sized businesses 100 per cent tax relief on IT purchases runs out at the end of the month. There is no sign from Chancellor Gordon Brown that he will extend the gig in the next Budget, accountancy firm Hacker Young warns.

Time to buy. Assuming you've got some cash. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've been thinking about internet VoIP (Voice over IP, Telephoning over the internet). It seems to me there are several barriers to widespread use.

- Something that looks and feels like a phone but is attached to your home network and hence the broadband line. I'm slightly surprised that nobody makes something like this. I don't really want to put on a headset whenever I want to make a phone call or somebody calls me. Cisco have some VoIP handsets but they are priced at corporate rates.

- Simple easy to use software for VoIP from PCs. Are you listening Microsoft? Exactly why did you remove the support for third party voice systems from Messenger v5?

- A solution to NAT gateways/firewalls. I've never been able to make Microsoft's netmeeting or messenger work reliably from behind a NAT gateway. And for IVoIP we've got to be able to individually address devices behind the firewall. This either means a widespread use of IPv6 or workable relay servers that can cope with the bandwidth required

- A global naming/numbering standard. This is a similar problem to IM (instant messaging). We currently have 4 or 5 naming systems in IM with little interoperability between them. The early players in internet IVoIP are each developing their own naming system. I don't have a good solution to this, but we badly need one if IVoIP is to take off.

- A reasonably priced gateway interconnect between POTS (plain old telephone system) and IVoIP. I need to be able to make phone calls to people's existing phones as well as to internet connected phones. But this has to be global and it has to be at an acceptable price. Vonage are beginning to do this in the USA but I've yet to see anyone provide a truly global service. This will take a lot of coordination and peering agreements so maybe someone like Vodafone should kick it off. In theory, it should be possible to go via Internet to a point which is then a local phone call to any phone in the world. In some countries that might mean a POP in every exchange although in the UK we've now got a well established system for local call numbers available anywhere in the UK.

- QOS or Quality of Service. People frequently state that this is a big issue that will need fundamental changes to the internet to support. I don't agree. If VoIP is as good as cellphones I'll use it. And my early experiments with this suggest we've already got there. In any case, I'd rather see us throw more bandwidth at the problem than to introduce priority packets at the network level.

- The Telcos to embrace IVoIP instead of hiding their heads in the sand and hoping it will go away. Oh, right, it's never going to happen then. [from: JB Ecademy]

Is there a UK Cellphone number directory?

If not, why not? [from: JB Ecademy]

It's now roughly a year since BT cut broadband prices. So why is broadband still so expensive and when is the next price cut?

What we have here is a state sponsored duopoly between BT and NTL. It's keeping BT's wholesale price at around £15 which then means that retail is stuck at around £25 to £30.

When I ask these questions I'm frequently told that a major factor in the real costs are the upstream bandwidth charges. So when are those going to come down as well? In that area we've got a cosy little cartel of peering arrangements between a small number of players. Right through this industry we've got companies that have built up massive debt and have internal competing interests that mean they worry about internet usage cutting into their other profitable lines. There's no shortage of fibre or bandwidth but I believe they are doing just enough to stay competitive and maximise return in the short term. We badly need one or more of the major players to bite the bullet and go for volume by dropping the price dramatically. [from: JB Ecademy]

What if you're just outside the 5.5km from your local exchange and can't get ADSL. What are your options? Is ISDN available at a similar price? Is it worth trying to find a friendly near neighbour and (probably illegally) sharing their bandwidth with WiFi? Does Satellite actually work? Will BT roll out their mid band product for people like you?

Tell us what you've found.

[from: JB Ecademy]

From Michael Robertson of Lindows.com via The Doc Searls Weblog is another rant about lack of support for Linux in WiFi hardware. Is Intel's Centrino Techno-Latin for "No Linux"? ... Most worrisome is Intel's lack of Linux support for their new Centrino chipset which they've called their "most important announcement since the Pentium." Intel says that 300 million dollars will go into advertising this new product for mobile computing, but Intel isn't making the small investment to provide Linux drivers. [from: JB Wifi]

Locustworld - Breaking down barriers?

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Locustworld. I'm merely an interested observer.

The more I discover and read about Locustworld, the more interested I become. What they are trying to do is breaking new ground in all sorts of fields. It's also exposing the holes and issues in several technical areas that we currently take for granted.

What are they doing
On the surface, Locustworld appears to be a WiFi hardware manufacturer selling WiFi access points that are capable of forming a self-building and healing mesh. Each box can provide local coverage to WiFi devices. Each box may have a connection to the internet to provide a gateway to the devices it serves. Each box also seeks out other boxes and builds links and routes to them. The end result is a growing mesh of WiFi coverage that has multiple routes to the Internet accessible from any WiFi device within the mesh.

How are they doing it
Locustworld is actually not a hardware manufacturer. At the core is a Linux distribution using a whole set of open source tools. This distribution has been tweaked and trimmed so that it will run with no hard disk and can be booted from a CD or flash memory "disk". This distribution is freely downloadable and the CDs can be used to boot any PC with the right hardware into a MeshAP.

The hardware Locustworld is selling is outsourced and they have two designs based on commodity pieces. The main part is a small ITX motherboard with commercial flash memory and a commercial WiFi card. it's got all the usual keyboard, mouse, monitor, USB ports you'd expect and with no hard disk or fans there are no moving parts.

Administration is possible by connecting a keyboard and monitor but the main route to administration is via a central website. This handles address allocation, software upgrades and setting definition.

So Locustworld isn't actually a hardware manufacturer. From a hardware point of view, they're actually a reseller. So are they a software company? Well all their software is open source and almost all of it comes from elsewhere.

So why is this interesting?
Lets take a few points and dig a little deeper.

Hardware
All the hardware is off the shelf, commercial, commodity hardware. It's just the packaging which is unique. This sets them apart from the other WiFi AP manufacturers who use proprietary hardware all the way through. Even when they buy chipsets from Broadcom or TI, the rest of the hardware is a custom build. The problem with this is that this forces the AP manufacturers to also be software companies. Something I'm sure they would rather not be. The result for the customer is that even though they use the same chipset in almost the same design, you can't run Avaya software on Buffalo hardware. And you have to cope with the inevitable bugs, firmware upgrades and general flakiness because the software development always lags the sales and marketing need to get the hardware to market.

Device Drivers
There are a number of efforts in the Linux community to develop device drivers for WiFi hardware. However "There are no 802.11g or 802.11a cards currently supported by Linux. Avoid buying any kit from Atheros, Broadcom or Texas Instruments. Atheros have even issued a cease and desist order to the open source project for their driver. ..." So we've got a major limitation here where the manufacturers want to retain control and they write for Windows first, for the Mac if you're lucky and Linux last. This doesn't bode well for Linux desktops if you can't get device drivers for the latest WiFi kit. This also points up the limitations in a business model where software is used to keep hardware proprietary. It's understandable, but it's the customer and market who ultimately lose out.

Speed to market
Intel is issuing press releases about mesh networking in the labs but isn't shipping anything. Meshnetworks is spending VC money on marketing but haven't shipped anything (I think. At least that's how it appears). Nokia were working on a mesh networking system but pulled out. Meanwhile by using existing hardware and software a tiny UK company is shipping product.

Automatic Upgrades
I had a discussion about all this and asked why the WiFi manufacturers didn't follow Locustworld's lead and ship commercial hardware with Linux based open software. The response was that end users didn't want to cope with manual upgrades. But how is that different from the current situation where you're locked into firmware and software upgrades from people who don't want to be software manufacturers? The Meshbox system is designed to download upgrades automatically which surely is a better solution?

Security
Let's say you buy a WiFi AP that has a built in firewall, gateway, NAT, DHCP like the current round of combo boxes. Now let's say that Microsoft come up with a new Messenger that needs specific ports open or a specific MS product like UPnP. Will your AP supplier keep up with this? Let's further say that someone discovers a hole in a common system (like a Linksys router that has an easily broken password for instance), how well will your AP manufacturer deal with this? There's a very strong argument for either using open source software or software from a major manufacturer (like Cisco or MS) for anything that is used as a security gateway. Otherwise, who knows how long a fix will take to appear.

Naming and numbering schemes
Picture the scene. You fire up a MeshAP. So does your neighbour and you link them. You agree an IP numbering system between you. Later, another neighbour starts a MeshAP and uses their own numbering system. You find out about each other and link the nets and suddenly all your numbering has to be done again. So what's being built here is a walled garden part of the internet run by the end users. Unfortunately, the existing IP registries aren't set up to cope with end user addresses. As the Wiana
Faq says,

Current Internet address assignments are based on a hierarchical structure.

The existing Internet registries are not set up to deal with networks where every part of the network is owned and operated by end users.

A large scale ad-hoc wireless network is a different physical medium to the classic Internet

Existing Internet "trust" is achieved out of band, there is no per address authentication.

Significant fees are required to obtain IP address ranges.

"Applications for wireless address space were refused and the structure of these registries does not facilitate addresses for end users. Even with IPv6, allocations are described as "limited"."

Now there's plenty of other current problems with IP addressing and NATed gateways. On one level we really want to have every internet connected device to be uniquely addressable. Particularly for technologies like Voice over IP. This also brings with it huge security and safety issues because we're currently relying on firewalls to protect these end devices. IPv6 was supposed to solve all the naming problem, but the upgrade path is awkward and there's still hardly any support out there from the existing infrastructure. Like DNS, this needs to be decentralised outwards, but is currently mired in political and commercial interests.

Locustworld's solution to all this is to set themselves up as a registry for the 1.*.*.* range mostly because they needed something and there wasn't anything else out there. But this is already causing conflict with other groups who need to see more formal arrangements and are concerned about Locustworld's longevity and status. It's also distinctly sub-optimal as a long term global plan.

Business Plan
How do you bootstrap a hardware company without using large quantities of VC? Simple, don't produce hardware, produce software. Locustworld produced a hardware spec, but they have no hand in the hardware production except as a reseller. Ok. So how do you build a software company that sells free, open source, software? Simple again, you don't sell software, you sell support. So is there anything here at all? Well a tiny company is shipping product and changing the world. If they can make a living from this then do they actually need 1999 style capital?

Broadband provision
Again, picture the situation where numerous private individuals start installing Meshboxes and linking them together. Some, but not all of them will add in a cable or ADSL link to the internet. Right now this is almost certainly breaking the T&Cs of their broadband provider. In the labs, Locustworld have got aggregation working so that a mesh with 3 ADSL lines could provide a burstable rate of 3* ADSL speed to any device in the mesh. From the broadband ISPs point of view they are potentially losing customers and being hit with more bandwidth demand. But look at it another way. They could install MeshBoxes themselves as a last mile or long mile solution and achieve cheaper rollout and provision while also getting coverage outside their current areas.

This particular battle is just starting as the Telcos get increasingly concerned by WiFi usage at the edges of their network. Locustworld makes all the arguments harder. If we now factor in the hotspot providers as well and note that they are frequently the same telcos, we have another problem. To take an example, Meshboxes could be used to extend the Bryant Park free WiFi up through Manhattan and in the process, cover the same area as all the Starbucks and McDonalds hotspots that have recently been announced.

Is this real?
Reading the mailing lists, and observing, there's no doubt that Locustworld have a fascinating product. There's also no doubt that it's not quite ready for primetime yet. I'm concerned that the very small team may get overstretched

I've just seen this on the MeshAP mailing list.

Don't bother looking at any cards unless there is Linux support.

If there isn't, it is because the manufacturer refuses to release the specifications and should be pressured in to doing so.

There are no 802.11g or 802.11a cards currently supported by Linux.
...
Avoid buying any kit from Atheros, Broadcom or Texas Instruments. Atheros have even issued a cease and desist order to the open source project for their driver. ...

Feel free to flame the manufacturers, vendors and chip producers. The more sales they lose as a result of this policy, the better.

Atmel is Linux friendly and has good driver support. Lucent and Prism2 also have good support.

So what we have here is the most innovative uses of WiFi being blocked by the hardware manufacturers. We shouldn't expect the hardware manufacturers to be good at software and it's quite hard to see why they should even want to be in the software business. But deliberately blocking software development and refusing to release specs that allow software development seems fairly stupid.

I had a discussion with Glenn about some of this and suggested that it would make sense for the AP manufacturers to base their AP boxes on commodity PC hardware and then to outsource all the software development to the Open Source movement. He felt that end consumers wouldn't want this as they wouldn't want to have to cope with software upgrades. But frankly the current situation of repeated firmware upgrades to deal with bugs is just as bad. [from: JB Wifi]

Tim Woolford writes. TotalTelecom - Industry Viewpoint : 2003 - Is this 'The Year' for the UK WiFi industry?

In December 2002 I wrote about London WiFi hotspots and highlighted two issues: lack of demand and the need for some form of roaming between hotspot networks.

...

However, of greater importance to the technical and service aspects of hotspot deployment will be the continued development of innovative, realistic and ultimately sustainable revenue models. 2003 could be the year WiFi comes of age in the UK. [from: JB Wifi]

This blog is coming from Harrowgate via a mesh of Locustworld wifi access points linked via a wireless link to a van in the car park with a satellite internet connection. One of the meshAPs is a punters laptop with a USB WiFi nic booted off a locustworld CD.

This is part of a workshop at the Hardcore Wireless conference. [from: JB Wifi]

Today's hotspot mystery shopper saga comes to you from Benugo, 116 St John St, EC2. The deal is that you buy something and they then give you a access code which gives you 30 minutes of free access. So I buy today's special and sit down to try and make it work. DHCP comes straight up. I can ping the gateway but nothing else. I fire up a browser and that's dead as well. After 10 minutes of footling around I try IE6 and of course I'm taken straight to captive login page. So if you use a Mac, I guess you're stuffed. Anyway, the first access code has apparently expired so I get another one, put it in and I'm on. There's a little

Once I'm signed on, there's a little window showing the minutes left.

The adsl speed test reports
Downstream 473 Kbps (59.1 KB/sec) 510 Kbps (inc. overheads)
Upstream 241 Kbps (30.1 KB/sec) 260 Kbps (inc. overheads)

Even though I'm apparently enabled, Phoenix still doesn't work.

They've got some mains sockets so you can get power. And there's small posters on the wall to tell you they have access available. I get the impression that I'm not that unusual, but that nobody would be able to help me get going. Certainly there's nobody else with a laptop here.

And with 8 minutes left I'm now rushing to finish what I'm doing.
[from: JB Wifi]

I think this article at Techdirt Wireless nicely sums up the state of GPRS vs WiFi and the traveller. Here we have a tech savvy, American in London on business with a box full of gadgets trying to get Internet access. In theory, this represents one of the prime markets for paid WiFi hotspots along with 3G. So how does it go.

- First the Hiptop doesn't work with EU GSM as it's a US GSM only device.
- Then the T-Mobile GPRS works with a tri band Sony-Ericsson phone and it's bluetooth connected to the laptop. But at $15 per megabyte!
- Then the hotel room broadband connection didn't work. There's no mention of the price but we know these things tend to be on the expensive side.
- The few Starbucks with WiFi are on the opposite side of town (He doesn't say but presumably he's staying in the west end and the wifi enabled Starbucks are all in the City.)
- So it's down to the EasyInternetCafe. This has a SurfAndSip and appears to have WiFi, but the web page is not obvious. There should have been a pre-paid £5 for 24 hours option but there's no obvious way of paying and nobody in the EasyInternetCafe to ask.
- So then it's the usual 1.5hours for £2 on a terminal which works first time and is as painless as usual.

So here we've got the captive audience, several failures, and the real competition ends up being the nearest Internet cafe. So what this tells me is that there is a market for paid WiFi hotspots. But the price has to be as low as or less than a typical internet cafe because that's where the real competition lies. He also points out that this is a one off situation (that will get repeated) so until there's roaming across hotspot providers any sort of flat-rate monthly subscription doesn't work either.

And frankly all that applies to GPRS and 3G as well. IMHO per-megabyte pricing is just never going to fly. [from: JB Wifi]

What is the Xpertweb Talent Co-op ? [from: JB Ecademy]

The Internet Topic Exchange has just appeared on my radar. A very interesting experiment in using trackback to build channels of blog entries.

Pick a channel on the Exchange, drop the trackback URL into the trackback field on our Ecademy blog form and you can join in too. [from: JB Ecademy]