LanLinkup is an insanely ambitious (or is that ambitiously insane) project to get a wireless link from coast to coast of the USA via community wireless groups. The target is a ping by June 2006 (maybe). [from: JB Wifi]

We've got a bunch of new people posting blogs on Ecademy who may not know about this. Take a look at these bookmarklets and registry hacks.

These work like this. When you're looking at an interesting web page and want to post at Ecademy about it, highlight some text to quote (optional), click on the bookmarklet or right click and choose the menu option. A new browser will open at the Ecademy blog entry page with the title filled in, a link to th page you were looking at and the highlighted text entered in italics.

If anyone is using a tool that supports the Blogger API, we also support it. Drop me an email if you want to play with this. The target is http://www.ecademy.com/xmlrpc.php

And you do read RSS, right? Look for the little orange XML GIFs [from: JB Ecademy]

You'd think I'd be bored by this stuff by now.

Jeremy has just posted a great article about doing long range links while staying within UK limits by using reduced transmit power. This made me think that all my ranting about UK power limits (and Steve's pushback) is maybe asking the wrong question.

There's a set of uses for WiFi that are all about getting broadband to areas that can't use normal cable or ADSL methods. This ranges from people just outside the ADSL distance limits (say 1-5km) to people and villages who's exchange hasn't been upgraded and where the nearest broadband bandwidth is 20-30 miles away. In both these cases, you'd probably want to run a point to point link and then distribute the bandwidth locally point to multi-point. The local distribution might not even be wireless where you can string cat5. Now a single person might probably just share an ADSL line with someone in range. But a group of people are likely to have some sort of commercial or non-profit organization involved. This is where it gets tricky.

The need is clearly there. So here comes the question. What sort of regulatory controls and what sort of technology is most appropriate for rural wireless distribution of broadband? Unlicensed WiFi doesn't seem to be a good choice for a number of reasons and ETSI makes it hard anyway. The 3.6Ghz band was tried by Tele2 without a lot of success. The government is also trying and failing to auction rights to use it in 15 regions in the UK clearly aimed at rich, big companies who have turned their back on it. 802.11a at 5Ghz is currently experimental and has problems with standards and radar interference. Other bands may be available but the hardware is seriously expensive.

So now the question is one of regulatory approach. Should the government free up an unlicensed band and let the market work it out with lots of small scale, low cost providers in a market free for all? Or should they limit the usage in a way that only big players with deep pockets can participate? The first is the WiFi model, the second is the 3G model. Or is there perhaps a middle ground here. An interesting option would be to require a license to use high power/high gain 2.4Ghz solutions but to make the license cheap and with minimal bureacracy. That way if there is any interference caused there is a known, licensed carrier to police. But it still allows community groups to build their own kit. And we've already got the Amateur radio controls as an example to work from. In fact simply extending the Amateur radio license to provide a new class of "commercial" amateur would do the trick. (Noting that the current Amateur license is open enough technically except that any commercial use is banned). [from: JB Wifi]

Techdirt Wireless has a brief article about the new Hotspot list run by WiFi Zone.

At some point, do these various lists just start copying off each other?

A brief search for Hotspots in London produces a list that is radically shorter than the one at ZDNet. In particular, it's missing T-Mobile (Starbucks), Megabeam and BT Openzone. Now the WiFi Zone logo has a requirement that the site has at least a T1 for bandwidth and quite a few sites in London are only using ADSL. I wonder if that's the reason for the missing entries, or is it just that the marketing departments of the big three are missing a trick. [from: JB Wifi]

IHT: Lee Dembart: Wonders of Wi-Fi have yet to take hold on Continent : For now, Internet cafés are a safer bet. They're all over - and you don't even have to carry a laptop with you.

An American in Paris (and London) has significant problems using WiFi hotspots and then significant pain trying to pay the high prices. His final comment is telling. There's a whole class of reasons to use hotspots where the competition is an internet cafe. And that's going to be a lot cheaper although not everyone likes being surrounded by back packers. But then not everyone likes Starbucks coffee either! [from: JB Wifi]

Just saw this.

Hello, everybody who can make it to the North West of the UK, is cordially invited to the launch party of WiFiPOD - celebrating one of the first bars in Liverpool to go WiFi. Wireless Access is going to be free for all - and anyone who hasn't got a wireless enabled laptop can borrow a USB wireless stick behind the bar - free.

Launch night is Thursday, 15th of May 2003, from 7pm
Venue: Pacific Bar & Grill, Pacific Chambers, Temple Street, Liverpool Best regards David Fox [from: JB Wifi]

A recent post to one of the WiFi mailing lists regarding the ETSI power limits which are used in Europe and which we use in the UK.

>I was interested in what the general feeling is about the ETSI power limits (100mW EIRP)-
>
> - are the limits realistic or too restrictive ?

Not realistic as they penalize high directivity antennas despite the fact that they should have less potential for interference due to the reduced area covered. Too restrictive because a 30mW radio with a 5dB antenna makes point to point impossible thus making illegal a whole class of potential uses that are socially desirable.

> - should they be applied universally ?

No. Generally, I think we should just ignore them because they're stupid. That's a personal view and others disagree.

> - how important is it to comply in all cases ?

Not important for amateur (hobby not RA) homebrew experiments. Important for everybody else where there is a clear owner. Especially important for any "For- Profit" uses as failure to comply is a clear risk to the project.

> - does it matter that antennas that will almost certainly be illegal
> in use can be bought so easily ?

No. Antennas that would be illegal can be made using household materials in 30 minutes. So banning equivalent antennas made for sale is pointless. Since they are easily available mail order from other countries, it would be impossible anyway.

> - should there be information supplied with antennas and radio's
> regarding compliance with transmitted power output limits ?

Yes. To protect the vendor.

> - do you think the relevant country authorities actually care what
> you do as far as transmitted power output levels go ?

No. I believe that by making the band open they are effectively saying to the market "you sort it out". This seems to be what happens in practice in that I don't believe anyone is actively looking for law breakers. If you get interference from some other 802.11 operator, find them and negotiate. Nobody else is interested.

I can imagine two scenarios where there could still be a problem. 1) A licensed radio amateur causes interference and is shopped by another RA with a grudge. The first one either complies or loses their license. 2) A small operator goes into business in competition with a major Telco. Perhaps by providing rural broadband or free hotspots in next door cafes to the Telco's installations. The Telco uses it's political weight to get the small operator to close down. I think this one is real but I've never heard of it happening. Yet.

It definitely feels like the major Telcos managed to get a cap on commercial WiFi usage via the ETSI regs to protect their 3G investment and existing businesses.

> - is there a justifiably better scheme ?

Yes. The USA approach makes better allowance for high-gain high-directivity antennas. I think it puts realistic limits in place but still allows significant point to point links to be achieved. It might be necessary to reduce absolute power levels compared with the USA for high density population areas. Since experiments are ongoing in the USA in equivalent areas, and the jury's out, it's too early to say if this is required or not.

On that last point, what do Americans on the list think? Have we seen any situations yet where people in city centres are interfering with others by using amps and gains at the top end of the regs?

One aspect where I think the USA FCC approach is wrong is the requirement to prove end to end compliance for commercial radio, antenna combinations for sale. This has led to expensive proprietary antennas, too many connector standards and cards with no external antenna socket. In the end the customer/market has lost out with no obvious benefit in reduced interference. I think that clear and accurate documentation for commercial radios and antennas showing power, gain and polar plots is desirable but this can be handled via existing commercial law. So if we must have compliance testing it should be on the radio transmit power only, to prevent the CB debacle. Perhaps a 250mW or 500mW cap.
[from: JB Wifi]

If you're in London on Wed early evening,

WiFi Meetup
The Media Club, 131 - 151 Great Titchfield Street, London, on Wednesday, May 14 @ 7:00PM

Assuming I make it I'll be bringing along my home made antennas. [from: JB Wifi]

Today's big news wire article is InformationWeek > Wireless > Verizon Plans Wireless Access Via Pay Phones > May 9, 2003 This has been picked up all over the web. It tells a tale about how Verizon intend to turn their existing phone boxes into WiFi hotspots.

Now go back to 05-Jun-02 when BT asked Ecademy for suggestions on where it should put it's Openzone hotspots. 2 comments down we have

Q: Where does BT already have thousands of POP's available for use in public spaces?
A: Public telephone boxes....

Now I know this got to BT because several email summaries of all the Ecademist comments were sent.

Think about it. A public phone box has a locked case, power and a phone line. A WiFi AP with ADSL modem is about a 10cm cube and under 75 pounds in quantity at trade prices. The hardware is going to cost less than paying the engineer to install it.

So come on BT, why wasn't this press release about you? [from: JB Wifi]

Ben Hammersley.com: Loose Pieces : For example, although this new design looks quite plain, hitting the Save button will trigger my MT installation to query three RSS feeds, ping four ping-sites, and make around 45 or so web services calls to various sites. It is truly getting out of hand.

The bit I particularly like is the automatic paragraph generator that puts the piece in context by querying a bunch of news and weather sites.

eg.
This post was last changed at 01:33 PM May 10, 2003, at a time when the top BBC News headline was Ceremony honours Potters Bar victims, and The Guardian's top headline was Plan gives coalition control of oil . It was 52 degrees and Mostly Cloudy in New York and it was 57 degrees and Mostly Cloudy in London. The Number One single on the UK chart was Tomcraft - Loneliness. Technorati thinks I have 262 blogs linking to me, the latest of which being Pete's Weblog

I have to say that I find most of the business side of web services really boring, but this stuff is fun! The problem is trying to keep up when you don't use a tool where other people have done all the heavy lifting. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've added a new optional parameter to the RSS feeds. The default is that the RSS feed from the XML GIFs at the bottom of the page is the entries for the last 3 days with short descriptions rather than full text. eg
http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=blog&op=feed

You can now:-

Add &full=1 to receive the full text

Add &n=xx for the last xx entries

Add &uid=Your_Ecademy_ID for just your entries eg
http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=blog&op=feed&full=1&n=10&uid=1 would be a feed of my posts with the last 10 entries and with full text.

N is limited to 100. If you need to download your entire output to import it into a website say, you could use http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=blog&op=feed&full=1&n=9999&uid=yyyy but you'll need to talk to me first.

Please use this sparingly as it's potentially a large file. I really don't want to see anyone grabbing 100 entries every 5 minutes. It's generally felt to be bad form to poll RSS more than once an hour so please store the results locally. [from: JB Ecademy]

Joho points at isen.com: Face the Music -- SMART Letter #87 David Isenberg's letters are really entertaining.

Here's one factiod I've gleaned from a well argued article about the music industry.

28% of CDs worldwide are counterfeit

If this is real, and I have no reason to doubt it, why is the industry attacking it's most fantical fan base by going after people who share MP3s instead of after the 28% of revenue they're losing through counterfeits? This is real money being paid for real product that is not going to the record labels, whereas MP3 sharing is zero money for virtual product that mostly wouldn't have been bought anyway. In fact, MP3 sharing looks more and more like free marketing than piracy. [from: JB Ecademy]

big reflector.jpg ( Image)

It's not much good for anything other than detecting wireless networks from a
great distance. It really is a Wifi antenna -- the white 'bar' in the middle is a
6dBi, 2.4GHz omni. I hacked it together in a couple of days out of peg board and
1X2, so it's not designed to stay outside and with most radios it probably is not
legal because the overall gain is probably well above 24dBi. In use, the 'box'
would be set on its side. In the horizontal plane, the beam angle is VERY narrow.
In the vertical plane the beam angle is considerably more broad. [from: JB Wifi]

The videos of our recent WiFi event are now up.

Tony Fish:

David Hughes

Wei-Hai Chu

George Polk

Lindsey Annison

Q & A
[from: JB Wifi]

I've finally got round to writing up my notes from the recent WiFi event we put on. As an alternative to reading my notes, you can view the videos here.

Tony Fish:
David Hughes
Wei-Hai Chu
George Polk
Lindsey Annison
Q & A

David Hughes, BT Openzone
Wifi is a disuptive technology and the inheritor of the mobile data market. It will dominate the wireless data market because:-

millions of cheap devices

bandwidth

integration and innovation via TCP/IP

One of the key drivers of WiFi adoption is Broadband. In the home it's an alternative to cat5 wiring. The second driver is Bandwidth. When has email or internet usage ever gone down year on year?

The tradeoffs are:-

bandwidth vs ubiquity.

Suitable target devices. laptop, phone, or pda?

cost £1 per Mb or 10p per min? (to which I'd add "or free?").

BT's current rollout schedule is 400 sites by Aug 2003, 4000 by Aug 2005

Where next?

Bluetooth. BT is investigating the possibility of offering it in hotspots, but the consensus is that it's dead as a WLAN technology. It still has a place for replacing wires. But for WLANs they're not seeing demand. The need to offer it at every hotspot means that rollout is too expensive for them.

Voice over IP. Nortel are using VoIP from BT hotspots.

Session persistence, when roamning from one hotspot to another.

On train services. I think this is a major opportunity for business class inter city.

802.11a and/or g. Arguably G is not needed for hotspots until they are heavily loaded as the backhaul bandwidth is considerably less than the WiFi bandwidth. A is not ratified in the UK and EC yet.

White label offerings. I think Hughes was talking about both directions. BT offering Openzone on other people's networks as well as offering alternate providers on their own.

Wei-Hai Chu, Shell
For a corporate perspective Chu spoke about Shell's experiences. He saw three applications for wireless technology.

RFID. Particularly for tracking eqpt at drilling platforms.

Internal knowledge base and management. One example was a catalytic cracking area with 200 experts worldwide. Capturing the knowledge was difficult until they gave them wireless PDAs. then they could fill out the forms while actually working on site.

Shell as WISP? They've been experimenting with providing WiFi at petrol stations in Holland. There's real demand, but they don't know yet what the business model is.

George Polk, IBN
IBN are developing "The Cloud" a very large number of hotspots based around pubs and cafes that use their existing gaming equipment.

They didn't think they could acquire millions of customers but they could create an interesting network. They currently have a large network servicing gaming machines. They manage 108 minutes to be on site with engineers and have second largest coin collection after pay phones and so understand deployment. And they know about running a digital network.

So they've created a brand neutral business where they run the sites but sell the bandwidth wholesale to people who want to run WISPs and hotspots. To support that they have a captive portal that depends on who owns the customer.

They've placed a 21,000 DSL order with BT Wholesale and deployed 782 sites in 6 weeks. Target go live date is 1st July with 3000 sites by year end.

Originally they thought that 300 was ambitious but 10,000 sites came to them saying can we join your network. This includes smaller WISPS asking for help and who want to buy coverage without buying their own installation. The other surprise was enterprise hotspots. One chain has 4500 locations with 450 game machines. Their IT department wants a private network for their own use in every location. IBN said, why not allow public users too. This blurs the edges of corporate IT The big goal is to have 10-15,000 sites by the end of next year.

The business model is a revenue share with service providers. A similar model to Cometa and like them they have support from Intel.

One interesting viewpoint was that Wifi will drive GPRS, and 3G. Once people experience mobile internet access they'll want more of it. To that end you should keep an eye on crossover technology such as Ericssons combined WIFi and gprs card.


Lindsey Annison, Edenfaster
Lindsey is co-founder of ABC, a Broadband activist group and MD of Digital Dales a project to bring broadband to rural communities in the North of England.

They've found huge demand for broadband in rural areas as people try to find ways of making a living in the communities. The NW Development agency were offering support for this so they put togther a proposal to "Put X Eqpt on Y hill for Z people" In Nov 2002, they got 150k approved for 2 market towns and villages in between, covering 10,000 people. with minimal advertising they've got 400 people who want to sign up. Beyond the definite inquiries there appears to be massive support from the community.

The model needed to be sustainable and replicable. The grant has gone towards a broadband info centre. This has immediately generated 2 local jobs. Using Wifi the equipment costs are much lower than expected so the grant has gone twice as far as expected. They predict that they will be able to offer 2Mb access for £25 pm. But this ignores the local access. They're building a local "walled garden of Eden" via the security controls where links are at full WIFi speed. All of this is future proofed in the sense that when fibre is run into the network, the last mile is already in place. At the moment they're using WiFi technology for the point to point links but expect to move to 5.8Ghz later. The local distribution is being done using Locustworld Meshboxes.

While all this was going on, Annison received 2000 plus emails on "My exchange isnt going to be enabled what do I do". This led to the creation of ABC as a broadband activist group.

Quite apart from being interesting, this technology has generated all sorts of weird innovations and requests. Perhaps the strangest has been "The Lamb-Cam"!
[from: JB Wifi]

DailyWireless - Wireless Cable Infrastructure :

Cable operators are big fat pigs that threaten our future.
Let's take them out. [from: JB Wifi]

Two articles about Broadband and Wifi around the world.
Questions and Answers for Korea Telecom's Chief
IHT: Paris, the wireless wonder?

Two-thirds of all homes in Korea now have broadband. Typical speeds now are around 10Mbps. The major supplier has their sights set on 100Mbps. They typically have fibre to within 300m of the home and and anticipate fully fibre end to end connections to the home in the near future. They aim to convert their entire telephone system to VoIP by 2005.

Meanwhile Paris is intending to WiFi enable every metro station using existing fibre in the metro system. They're then reselling the bandwidth via people like T-Mobile. The aim is to turn the city into one big WiFi hotspot. They expect the whole project to cost E3m to E10m. Comparing prices with the typical US $10 per hour, a spokesman said "It must be much cheaper... The business model of trying to sell WiFi to people at these huge costs will fail".

Reading about these sort of things we really need to raise our sights in the UK. It's not about BT enabling exchanges in remote areas so we can have 512Kb or WiFi in half a dozen Starbucks any more. It's about getting real bandwidth (>10Mbps) available no matter where you are or what you're doing. We do actually know how to do all this. With 90% of all the fibre laid unlit or under-utilized, the backhaul bandwith actually already exists. It just takes the government and private enterprise to look beyond their current debt-ridden short term-ism and take the plunge.

Something happens when you switch from dial up to always on. Something happens again when you go from 50Kbps to 500 kbps. Does anyone want to speculate about what happens when you go to 5Mbps and 50Mbps? Or when this level of bandwidth is ubiquitous instead of being tied to a few sockets in the wall? Does anyone want to bet that these changes won't result in whole new market areas and some fairly radical social effects? [from: JB Ecademy]

Excellent FAQ on Wardriving. Well worth a read whther you want to play or not.

Has anyone got a good source for the Holux USB GPS in the UK? [from: JB Wifi]

DailyWireless - Long Haul 54G has a really comprehensive look at the US regs for power output and antenna gain. The contrast with the UK and EU is stark. [from: JB Wifi]

Buffalo Tech adds 3 for 11g

A cardbus card, a PCI card and a Bridge-Access point all running 802.11g. The cardbus card and PCI card are notable because they include MMX external antenna sockets. I think this is a first for G cards. [from: JB Wifi]