| PBS | I, Cringely . April 14, 2005 - A Cup of Bandwidth : By Robert X. Cringely Bob describes connecting to three neighbour's WiFi simultaneously to get fast reliable internet access. In each case he's borrowing a cup of bandwidth! Now to do this he says he's got three patch antennas on a pole on the roof connected to three Linksys WRT54G running Sveasoft firmware and set to client on 3 channels. Then there's a proxy server/router with three ethernet cards linked to those and running on an old Mac G4. Finally there's a local DNS server also running on the mac. I can't help thinking that there's some potential shortcuts here. What you need is an OS like Linux that can support multiple connections to multiple networks with multiple DNS. And a box with 3 USB ports for USB wifi cards and one ethernet connection to the local network. In fact a baby Soekris box or perhaps a MeshBox from Locustworld could do this. Or any old Intel based PC running Knoppix as long as it's got the USB connectors. Hidden in here is what I think is the holy grail USP for local mesh networks. It's not to extend internet connectivity off the edge of the broadband network, but to aggregate internet connections for a whole street. Let's say that my street has 5 houses with a broadband connection from multiple vendors. Another 5 houses have networks but no internet. We should be able to create a local WiFi cloud so that anyone in any of the 10 houses can get a connection. And if one of us needs short term high bandwidth (like a big bittorrent download in the middle of the night) we should be able to get 5 times the normal speed. [from: JB Ecademy] |
[ << Daily Wireless - T-Mobile Brings WiMax to Trains ] [ A VC: del.icio.us >> ]
[ 15-Apr-05 4:55pm ]
