TIME.com: Will You Buy WiFi? -- Apr. 21, 2003 In the middle of what is really a fluff piece for Cometa, here's a number to conjure with. IBM sold approximately $1 billion in Wi-Fi services in 2002

Did you ever think you were in the wrong business? [from: JB Wifi]

Corporate blogs make personal connection

This is like a strange dejavu dream from the past. Go back 3 years to the heady days of dot com madness and I was a senior tech in a dot com startup aimed at the B2B space. Part of my job was tracking everything else happening in B2B and the hot source was Netmarketmakers and B2Bonline. Now here we have Rich Karpinski (ex NMM and Jupiter) writing in B2BOnline about the value of blogs in a corporate setting. I really love one of the phrases he quotes from The Doc to describe this; "Free Range PR"! [from: JB Ecademy]

Glenn's got a copy of the first email sent from the Mount Everest base camp hotspot. This has to to be highest hotspot in the world! Note that the WiFi evangelist Dave Hughes was involved. No relation to the David Hughes speaking at our next event! [from: JB Wifi]

Europemedia.net: News - Wi-fi pilot launched at Paris Gare du Nord : It can be accessed using prepaid cards available from an SFR booth at the station. The cheapest card costs 5 euros and provides 20 minutes of access. They're also charging 10 Euros for an hour which is broadly in line with the high prices being charged at other european hotspots. What's especially interesting is that there is a parallel pilot to provide WiFi along the main bus route from the Gare du Nord into central Paris.

With WiFi at Waterloo and the Gare du Nord, can we please have WiFi on the Eurostar train as well? Being able to use a laptop and internet access continuously from london to Paris would be very compelling. [from: JB Wifi]

There's lots of information out there for people trying to home build antennas for the 802.11b 2.4Ghz band. I've even built a few of them myself. But I've been unable to find anything about building antennas for the 802.11a 5 Ghz band. Does anyone have any info about this? Is it just a case of scaling the physical dimensions appropriately?

This doesn't have a lot of relevance in the UK as 802.11a is not fully de-regulated yet, even if the hardware is available. I'm also not sure if there is any hardware with antenna sockets.

Which brings me to the last point. As far as I can see most of the 802.11g access point hardware has removable antennas (certainly D-Link do), but I haven't seen any 802.11g cards that have an antenna socket. Presumably this is because the manufacturers don't want to go through US FCC regulation which treats the card plus antenna as a unit to be tested. [from: JB Wifi]

This evening I built a Cantenna so we had to try it out. It started with a search through Tescos for suitable sized cans. I couldn't find anything until we got to the drinks section. I ended up with a bottle of Famous Grouse whisky that came in a tin can of 85mm and about 350mm long. Wandering round Tescos with a ruler measuring cans felt fairly odd! Anyway, the whisky will make a good present for someone. I'd previously stocked up with a chassis mount N connector from Maplin and a pigtail from wlansource. Measuring everything up, drilling holes and soldering only took about 30 minutes and was pretty easy.

So the next step was to test it. I went up to the top of the house plugged everything in and immediately got a signal out of the window! Using the built in card antenna there was nothing. Plug the can in and I was getting 18db SNR. My last attempts at building a couple of simple diploes had been complete failures so this was quite a result.

So the next step was to drive out round Ware and try and track down the access point. I had my son sitting in the passenger seat holding the laptop and can. That first drive resulted in finding 8 Access points of which 2 were encrypted. I'm fairly sure that the one I'd seen from the upstairs window was actually on a business park about 1Km away. All the APs were using default SSIDs.

Later in the evening I had to take my daughter to a party so we took the laptop and can with us and drove all round Hertford and the backstreets of Ware. This time we logged 30 APs, 8 of which were encrypted. These included some Cisco gear in one large factory, Ware town council, a Honda Garage and a couple of multimedia design shops. Most of the rest seem to be private houses and there was a fairly good match between middle class professional houses and APs. Quite a few had obviously Microsoft names as though someone had used an MS wizard to configure everything. We think but we're not certain that some of the points were actually in schools.

What's interesting about this was the mix of commercial and private. It certainly looks like WiFi is taking off round here. We've got NTL covering most of the area and we personally know half a dozen households with broadband via NTL. It looks like the obvious next step is to WiFi enable the house so that the corporate laptop can be used anywhere.

I should add here that we didn't attempt to actually use anyone's connection. this was just research to see the spread of WiFi. But given how easy it was to find APs, you'd be strongly advised to put some basic protection in. Unless of course you choose to deliberately leave it open.

ps. If anyone wants to repeat the cantenna build. It was a Famous Grouse Can with an 84mm internal dimension. This gives a lower cutoff of 2092 Mhz, upper cut off of 2732Mhz which are both well outside the 802.11b band. The guide wavelength is 239mm so the can is over one wavelength long. The 1/4Lg dimension is 59.6mm so the antenna probe goes this distance in from the closed end. The probe length 1/4Lo is 30.7mm. You should make sure there is a good electrical connection between the ground of the chassi socket and the can. A good rub with sandpaper of both surfaces helps here. I also used some (4BA?) small screws to hold the chassis to the can and tightened them up hard. Finally I checked that there was good electrical connection between the ground of the pigtail and the can. And that's it. Incredibl;y easy to build. [from: JB Wifi]

WriteTheWeb - The politician and his weblog is an article about Tom Watson (Labour - West Bromwich East) and his weblog.

This is a sign of things to come, right? Politicians self -publishing and inviting comment. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've just stumbled over a text file I wrote on Sept 14 2001. It all came flooding back. Literally, as I'm having to blink back the tears as I write this.

I'm at home with a TV in the corner of the room and a PC with cable
modem in front of me. I've been unable to do much of anything for the
last days except absorb news. My eyes keep welling
up. My thoughts aren't going round in circles but they're definitely not
clear or nailed down yet. Last night, I was out with some people I know
and some more fully formed thoughts finally came flooding up.

The one I keep coming back to is "We don't have to do this stuff any
more". And by "We", I mean all mankind. Even those of us living in the
middle of generations of vendetta *can* wake up one morning and *just
stop*. It's the same reaction I had to Kuwait, Kosovo, the Falklands and
many others. Maybe it is an impossible delusion that I picked up as a
baby-boomer who ate the tail end of the hippy dream, but there it is.
And then I'm not completely naive. I also know that the world I find
myself living in, is probably not that world.

So can we make the war we've just fought, the last one.

Ever.

Well can we? [from: JB Ecademy]

Wi-Fi misery in Britain: Part II A relatively technical user (Dual boot laptop with XP and linux) takes 40 minutes to connect to a BT Openzone hotspot in a Hitlon next to Islington's Design centre.

This somewhat mirrors my own experiences. T-Mobile worked almost just like that, Benugo's took several tries and would only work with IE. I'm still grappling with a non-intuitive Buffalo client and general strangeness whenever I try and swap access points.

This has to be easier if we're going to get general adoption.

Can anyone here write up their experiences with BT Openzone? [from: JB Wifi]

"Wikis" are an alternative way of building community websites. They're more like reference material and rather different to the Slashdot style that we use on Ecademy. Our Reference books are somewhat like a Wiki, although we restrict updates and Wikis typically have more functionality. The key though is that usually any page in a wiki can be edited and updated by anyone. Anyway here's a comprehensive guide to this little known aproach to CMS. Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars [from: JB Ecademy]

I bet you thought there was nothing new in software, right. Well here's the antidote. Yoz Grahame's Cheerleader: Hot Warez Roundup. [from: JB Ecademy]

Two new fields in the member search filter
- Logged in since date
- Joined since date

This should let you filter better and avoid the sleeping members. [from: JB Ecademy]

Tom Watson - Labour MP - Teens Page

++good: A UK MP gets blogging
++unGood: Are his attempts to be k007, irony or for real?

WARNING: Getting involved in politics may cause premature ageing and a sudden loss of friends.

Yeah,

like,

whatever. [from: JB Ecademy]

vnunet.com Wlans vulnerable to abuse by spammers : Nearly three-quarters of malicious connections to wireless networks are used for sending spam, ... The survey found that almost a quarter of unauthorised connections to the Wlans were intentional, with 71 per cent used to send emails.

I find it extremely frustrating that we get these reports via the technical press with no clear reporting and with no link to the original paper. Someone here has made the leap from 71% used an open access point for email to 3/4 of the users were malicious. I just plain don't believe this. This is the same scare mongering by security consultants trying to drum up business that KPMG indulged in when they called use of bandwidth malicious.

But having had my rant, I've been beating this drum for some time about the potential for an open access point with a link to an open SMTP mail server being used as a spam insertion point. This issue has a number of answers. First you should always disable port 25 on your wireless gateway. You should use SSL encrypted email with authenticated SMTP to avoid exposing ids and passwords. Which means that ISPs and Mail admins should provide SSL support. ISPs should stop providing open SMTP relays that assume that devices connected to their network and using their IP range are known and secure. And finally, this means that there is market for email only ISPs that are an adjunct to wire only broadband and a solution for the roaming use of email. BT Openzone, Openworld and Retail, (among others) please take note. [from: JB Wifi]

Result! The media club have installed a free access point in their bar downstairs. [from: JB Wifi]

The next wifi meetup is The Media Club, 131 - 151 Great Titchfield Street, London, on Wednesday, April 9 @ 7:00PM. Hope to see you all there.

The Media club has Ethernet internet access. If someone could bring along an access point, we could wifi enable it for the evening. [from: JB Wifi]

Interesting story here DailyWireless - Cable's Wireless ISP Plan about a Californian cable company that is putting Wireless units on the top of utility poles to get cable data access to near by homes. The unit filters out the data traffic on a cable TV system and then re-broadcasts it using either the 802.11a or 802.11b bands. This lets the cable company use existing cable infrastructure to service homes that are not directly wired with broadband. What's not clear from the article is what reception equipment is needed at the house.

A while ago we wondered here if there's potential for stripping and weatherproofing a Wireless Access point with an ADSL or Cable modem and putting them on telephone poles to provide instant and cheap public hotspots. Both BT and NTL are ideally placed to do this providing they have the backend billing mechanism in place. The other location that stands out and which we keep repeating is public phone boxes. These have the advantage of secure metalwork and power as well. this approach is already being taken by a telco in Canada.

Going back to the first approach, I have an example within walking distance of my home where this would make complete sense. The village of Stanstead Abbots is in the Lea valley, 3 miles from the A10 and 6 miles outside the M25. Like a lot of the area there's been a lot of new housing development that is atracting A and B class families as a dormitory town for the City and London. Bizarrely the local exchange is not ADSL enabled although NTL has some coverage. But typically the NTL cable goes past the end of the close and not into the new development. You have the situation where people with money and interest are less than 100m from cable but can't get it. And the capital cost to NTL of extending the cable is relatively huge. A few WiFi repeaters scattered along the existing cable route would provide coverage to several hundred homes. Hmm? If NTL don't do it, it sounds like a business plan to me for a micro-WISP. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if this situation is repeated all round the M25 along the edges of the green belt. [from: JB Wifi]

Boo-Hoo! I stopped in at the Wardour St starbucks on my way to the Ecademy meeting last night. And the T-Mobile service was no longer free. In fact, they're charging £5 for an hours access.

While I was there I saw 4 other people with laptops and talked to one of them. He felt the charges were OK as he could charge them back. So what we have here is exactly what I objected to, which is a business level charge aimed at business customers with an expense account. And it seems to be working When I suggested that it ought to be the same price as an internet cafe, he said he would pay extra for the ability to use his own laptop and not be surrounded by backpackers.

Maybe there is some money in all this after all. [from: JB Wifi]

sidewayZen: LAMP-posts: Bloggers, Portals, and Wireless

Hmm. Community websites with both Internet facing and Community WLAN facing function optimised to support the WLAN while using open source portal software. Interesting. [from: JB Wifi]

I've been meaning to write this up since the Digital Dales event. There was a question from the floor from a BT guy about the issues of legal power rating and antenna design in the UK. Excuse me if I get my facts slightly wrong, and please correct me if that's the case.

In the UK as part of unlicensed use of the 2.4Ghz band we're allowed to use 30mW or transmit power and 100mW of EIRP power. EIRP is a measure of the effective power output of the antenna, so in broad terms this means we are allowed a 5db gain in the antenna itself. Now antennas with 5db gain have a very broad spread which makes this effectively unuseable for long distance links. So to remain legal while using a high gain directional, you need to reduce the amp power. this means that you get the narrow beamwidth and receive gain but without pushing too much power outwards. Compare this with the USA that allows 1W on the amp and 4W EIRP. The justification for the reduced limits is that the UK is more heavily built up and so there's more likelihood of overlap between users. But that ignores a major use of WiFi in long distance rural links.

Now from a practical point of view, it's easy to buy high gain antennas. Even by just wrapping a wire mesh or tinfoil parabola around the back of an APs rubber duck antenna you can get 15db. 10db is easily achieved with a simple cantenna. You can get almost 10db with a home made omni. Then by buying over the net you can get NICs and APs aimed at the US market with 100, 150mW or even 200mW output. So there's nothing really to stop you putting together a high power, highly directional link. Just what you need for getting 5-10km between church spires.

So what if you do break the law? Well I have it on good authority that the RA and the various other regulatory agencies treat the WiFi band as unlicensed and unregulated. There really not interested in dealing with or investigating interference problems. If you cause someone else a problem with interference, well sort it out among yourselves. So the onus is on us to play nicely. That means using reasonably well engineered antennas and not overdriving amps so that they spray out harmonics all over the place. It also means reaching agreement among ourselves about which channels we use. So if Costa and Starbucks have premises right next door and T-Mobile and BT Openzone have overlapping WiFi, whoever does the installation can just arrange channel usage to suit. And of course since Cisco and IBM probably did both, this is just not a problem.

It's tempting to get all political and ask (nay demand) that the power rules are relaxed so that we can compete with broadband providers in rural areas (for instance). But I wonder if the current situation of informed anarchy isn't actually better for everyone. Why shouldn't we police ourselves as long as we don't interfere with services outside the unregulated bands? The problem here is when the links are used for commercial gain by commercial organizations. It's one thing for an individual to play fast and loose with the rules. It's quite another for a Ltd company. [from: JB Wifi]